Need Advice: How should we handle this situation?

[shawn81]

Hi Folks,

We have a blog post on one of our sites that ranked very highly for lucrative term for about a period of two months. It had over 2000 Facebook likes, about 20 tweets and the same amount of Google +1's.

The post ended up receiving several high quality natural links, and we also pointed a few authoritative links to it from our network of sites.

After we saw the ranking starting to slip we did a bit of link building (which we shouldn't have done) and ended up making a big mistake. The link building company was only supposed to do 30 links and they ended up doing 600.

Once we figured it out, we immediately submitted a disavow request and told Google about our mistake.

I also thought maybe we then had a manual spam penalty applied so I also submitted a reconsideration request (and also told them about our mistake) but got back a canned reply saying "no manual penalties" were found.

After we did all that, we saw the rankings fall out of the top 50 with the next 10 days.

I'm confident we can throw up a new similar blog post and see close the same rankings we experienced with the original post. But before I do that, I have two questions:

1. Should we 301 the old post to the new post? Could that some how "pass" the bad rankings along to the new post?
2. What should we do about the natural links we received? Should we try and reach out to the sites and get them to change their links to the new post?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[MikeRoberts]

My suggestion: Write new, great, original content... get new, great, natural links. Don't do shoddy linkbuilding that will hurt future great posts.

[jesse-landry]

Mike is right on. You just need to get back to work building links and content. (or the other way around)

You can 301 if you want. Won't be much of a point because yes, it will pass the "bad rankings.." although I'm not sure that's what's going on here. 301 passes link juice, meaning good and bad. It's simply informing the world that "hey, this page lives over here now so carry on." If you want to truly start over, you must do just that.

Yes, reach out to the natural links and inform them. You can do so in a way that is enticing to a webmaster. Don't forget, you're asking them to do work for you. Make it seem worth their while. Be polite and phrase it in a way like "hey just so you know that link is now broken. In order to improve functionality and user experience you may want to change the link to ______."

That way there's a motivator for them.

Hope we've been helpful.

[danatanseo]

I agree with Mike. It sounds like you've probably already learned that lesson the hard way.

One other thing I would suggest is don't take down that blog post that was ranking well. Just leave it alone. Look at it this way, if you produced great content once and achieved a great ranking, you should be able to produce another piece of great content.

If you do decide to remove the old post, I would advise you not to 301 redirect the old link to your new content. Better safe than sorry!

I hope this helps. Please let us know what happens.

The reason I advise you not to take down that old post, is that's entirely possible that your are experiencing a temporary decrease in positioning and that you might see it pop back up in a week or two. I have definitely seen wild volatility like this, even with well-established product pages on ecommerce sites.

[MikeRoberts]

I didn't mean to sound harsh or critical... so please don't take it that way. I've been in the situation of destroying my own stuff thanks to bad advice and bad links before... so I know how hard it can be.

In your case, I don't think the 301 is necessary. Like Dana said, it could just be fluctuations and over the coming weeks, months, etc. that article could wind up getting more link love and ranking better again.

Great, original content will garner new links to your site & articles. Work on creating new content and keeping things fresh so you're a resource to your customers, fans, industry, etc. and the good vibes will flow (hopefully). Anything vaguely unnatural with link building nowadays has the potential to turn around and bite you. So when you have a great article that is doing well and drawing in the readers and the rankings start to slip... give it some time, see if its just natural fluctuations, do some testing, etc. so you can do even better with the next one.