Is my domain scorched earth from Penguin?

[Kellster]

http://pisoftware.com was never a huge leader of traffic, but it ranked top 5 for my money keyphrases, and was bringing consistent quality visitors.  As traction went up, that traffic just became more valuable.  I was happy.

Then Penguin came along, and made me sad.  60% loss in traffic,  I stayed calm.  I disavowed.  I sent emails asking for links to come down.  I atoned for my sins (of the distant, distant past - I know better now) - and waited.  Never a hard penalty, never an email from Google - just rankings that got hammered.  From #3 for my best keyphrase for #25 today.

I write content, and I try and write it better all the time.  I try to make it valuable.  I leverage social media to the extent that I can.  I do outreach.  I'm trying to be patient, but it's hard when the software is awesome, and so few people see it.

I'm considering starting over - or maybe even just creating another domain to use if this one never comes back.  I wonder on the thoughts of experts.  At MozCon I talked to a lot of people in the same boat, and it seems we are all taking similar steps.  So the questions:

1.  Should I start over?  Or stay the course?

2.  What has worked for others - what seems to have been the most valuable in getting back on the rise?

3.  Thoughts on the site as it is now?  I've worked lately on speed, mobile rendering, etc - and it seems responsive and solid to me.

Thanks in advance, you crazy bunch of Mozzers you.

Kelly

[MatthewBarby]

Hey Kelly,

I've worked with a lot of companies within search engine recovery projects over the past year or so.

I've taken a look at your backlink profile and you do actually have a lot of good links in amongst the spammy sidebar links. My advice would be to start looking at getting some of those low quality links removed. Now, if you don't have a good understanding of how to go about this then my advice would be to stay clear of doing it yourself - get a professional to look at it.

Start with removing the low quality links and then move forward to create some new high quality links to balance out your link profile. I'm not going to go into all the details of 'how to build good links' but what I would say is that this site is by no means 'a lost cause'.

In terms of how the site looks, it seems really good. The only one thing that I would say (and this isn't major, just an observation) is that the site would look a lot less like a template-style site if you had a company logo within the header. I know that you have 'SiteBoss' in text but it seems like that is almost just the default text there, so having a subtle logo might just reinforce the brand a little more. Just to confirm though, this has no effect on things like search rankings, etc - I'm just thinking about user perception.

Hope this helps!

Matt