Homepage bombed from rankings

[MickEdwards]

I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage.  We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6.

The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links.  This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links.

Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible.

At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared.  Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile.  This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it.  An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were.

Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor?  So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?

[MickEdwards]

...just to add, fresh new content is also regularly going on the site.

[cbielich]

Seems with that much damage you might want to retire the domain

[MickEdwards]

I'm not sure that is a viable option.  We have not had a manual penalty and doing all we can to clean up the link profile. It seems to me the 301 redirect was to blame as of course the rubbish it carried was welcomed to the site and in our control.  That has been stripped out now. Should we sit and wait for another algorithmic update - continuing with new content and link development?

[cbielich]

One thing I have learned is having someone else look at my site, check everything over and over.

Look for...

• Spammy title image tags sometimes forgotten
• Repetitive keywords separated by commas somewhere on the site

Also if you were hit with Penguin 1.0 then really study your home page, Matt Cutts pointed out that 1.0 had primarily had to do with the home page. Whatever that meant....

[sbrault74]

I tried salvaging my website. Had I started a new website at the time Penguin 1.0 hit, I'd (still) be profitable today. Each time there was an update, I'd lose 5% to 7% of my traffic so I always thought I'd recover easily... then another 7% and another one and BAM! 30% drop... and then another 30% drop.

Algorythms are not run often enough so you could be waiting 6 months at times to find out if the changes you made to the website will bring it back from the dead. So if it takes 3-4 updates before you finally fix things up, it could easily take 1 to 2 years before you gain back your rankings. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of success stories of websites recovering 100%. It seems those who recover only get about 75% of their traffic back at best in the short term.

If you've been hit that hard, minimize the lost. Do the minimum to keep the website alive while you build a new one.

I've been advised to do that initially but I didn't listen. I should've. It doesn't take that long to rank a new website versus cleaning up an existing one and ranking it again.

Good luck!

[MickEdwards]

The thing is the site is not losing traffic, else I would agree.

Historically the homepage has never ranked well for the main chosen keyword - highest I think is page 2 or 3 previous to migration to Magento when it started to drift.  Overall organic traffic to the site has steadily risen since the beginning of 2011 and the homepage is ranking well for some longtail variations of the keyword.