Slowly recovering from algorithm penalty

[Direct_Ram]

Hi ,

over the years a website we took over was hit by an algorithm penalty (a combination of penguin and panda).

We managed to bring rankings back (after 6 months) from page 5/6 to page 2 after we used the google disavow tool.

now for the past 9 months we have been stuck on page 2..

is there anything you think can be done to bring it back to page 1?

• we are building quality links now and moved away from low quality links other link builders were making. We are managing the process much closer and ensuring we maintain good standards of links.
• also making the pages flatter and merging short page content to larger content pages
• now we are looking at site structure and creating structured internal link flow

is there anything we should be aware of and any recommendations to get back on page 1..

this is a tailor-made travel related website with a small selection of destinations

[Alick300]

Hi,

I can't answer you anything very confidently that If you do follow set up strategy then your site will come up from page 2

page 1 . There is a very recent post on this published by Neil Patel on search engine Journal, he suggested some good

strategy that can help you in this situation.

A Tactical Guide to Making Old Pages Rank in Google Again  @ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/tactical-guide-making-old-pages-rank-google/124575/

[EricaMcGillivray]

It'd be super helpful if you could share your site URL, then our community can get even more specific with answers.

[Direct_Ram]

hi, if anyone would be amazing enough to want the url to help us i can repost it for you.

thanks

[MarieHaynes]

This is a question that's tough to answer without spending a couple of hours digging in to the site.  But, I had some thoughts.

we are building quality links now

That makes me uneasy.  If you are building links then there is a good chance you're still doing things that are against the quality guidelines.  There are a few self made links that can be acceptable such as valid industry directories.  But, in most cases any link that you can build on your own is not a natural one.

Here are some new links that I see according to ahrefs:

http://www.expatfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/p=94262/ - a link from a forum profile. Not natural.

http://medranks.com/travel/packages/page-1.html?s=A - Ouch. Hopefully this is an old, disavowed link that ahrefs picked up.

http://www.huludirectory.com/computers_and_internet/discussion_forums/reference/acronyms_and_abbreviations/shopping/major_retailers/ - same as above.

http://biztechskopje.com/home_and_garden/computers_and_internet/recreation_and_sports/travel/flights/?p=3 - same

Now it's possible that those are old links that you have disavowed, but my first concern would be how you are going about getting links to the site now.  Again, if you're building them yourself rather than doing things to attract them then you're probably doing more harm than good.

[Direct_Ram]

Yes these are bad links we have disavowed .. our disavow was very thorough.. In fact we suspect maybe too thorough for short terms gains but more a long term strategy that has currently redduced our domain authority but cleaned up our link profile immensely

[MarieHaynes]

OK, that's good.  Sometimes ahrefs reports old links as new ones.

Can you give some examples of the types of new links you are building?

[Direct_Ram]

hi

we are aiming at travel related websites which their own link profile is for travel sector.

Our online marketing is a combination of travel directories, some business directories, some link exchanges, guest blogs where appropriate, press releases and UK based PR in national publications.

All are checked for their neighbourhood, trust flow and relevance where they are not national household brands

thanks

[MarieHaynes]

These are tough to comment on without actually seeing some of the links.  These might all be ok, but I could see any of these having the potential to be unnatural links.  I wish I could offer more but I do think it's possible that current link building activities are bringing you down.

Another thing that I see commonly is that sites can still be slightly suppressed by Penguin if they have not done a thorough enough disavow.  Again though, that's tough to comment on without digging in quite a bit deeper.

It's also possible the site has other things holding it down such as Panda.

And then another possibility could be that this is just where Google wants to rank the site.  Travel is a very competitive niche.  It used to be that anyone could be top 10 for any subject if you could get enough links, but these days Google wants to show websites that users want to see and I would imagine that there are a lot of big brand travel websites that you are competing with.

[Direct_Ram]

hi thanks for the reply

I also believe panda may have hit the site.. do you think just removing this kind of content is good enough to rank the site better.. we have gone to the extent of removing pages we found high duplicate ratios.. hoping that will help.. also we are merging page content to make them larger, more in-depth rather than multiple pages for small subtopics..

cheers

Ram