Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?

[BradNovi]

I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com.  However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up.

She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine.  Yahoo and Bing still rank well.  I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way.

I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty.

First main question:  From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by?   And, what can be done about it?

(We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content.

Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2.  We really want to try to improve it some day.  She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit.

Second question:  Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing?

We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt.  We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day.  But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month.

So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course.

So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.)

Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com.  She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since.  It is only PR 1.  Would this be an option?

Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course).

Brad & Martha Novacek

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[RyanKent]

Hi Brad,

Penguin and Panda are completely different issues. In brief, Penguin suppresses rankings for sites which have built manipulative links. Panda suppresses rankings for sites with various content issues.

I have not examined your site but based on your description, it seems likely your issue is Penguin. You have talked about building numerous links to the site using perfect match anchor text, which is the primary mechanism Penguin uses for detecting manipulation.

On a general level, you have two options: clean up the backlinks or move to a new site. Cleaning up the backlinks is a lot of work. For a hobby site, your best bet is likely moving to the customcarequilts.com site and shutting down the other site.

There is no reason to use yet another domain related to quilting. Clearly the topics discussed all relate to quilting.

Best Regards

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Brad and Martha,

You've asked a lot of questions which likely why you haven't got a lot of responses.  It could take a few hours to answer all of those questions and really to answer completely someone would need to have a very close look at your site and your analytics.

I have a few thoughts for you though.  The graphic you showed was interesting.  Your drop that starts in March does not coincide with any known algorithm update so it is not due to Penguin or Panda.  You do have a drop that coincides with the Penguin rollout of April 24 but your backlink profile is not really typical of a Penguin hit site.  Sure, you've got your keyword as your top anchor, but according to ahrefs there are only 12 domains linking to you with that phrase.  I would be surprised if you were severely affected by Penguin.  I'm not saying it's impossible, but if it were Penguin it should be something not too hard to recover from.

I think there is likely a site issue.  I only had time to spend a few minutes but I found that these two pages on your site contain content duplicating each other:

http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/

http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/index3.html

http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/index1.html

The second contains odd characters and I'm guessing it is not meant to be in the Google index, but it is.

It's possible that if you clean up the duplication on your own site you may rank much better.