Should I work with current site or start a new site with more keywords?

[tiffany1103]

I have been working with my site for some time.  Sadly, I am moving lower and lower in ranking.  I am wondering if I should just transfer my site to a new URL (this time including keywords).  I don't understand the whole disavow link thing.  I hired someone about 2 years ago, when I lost my ranking due to malicious software.  Well, it turns out that, she submitted my link to weird sites that I don't even know what they are.  It is like sites with thousands of websites just listed.  Things have never been half of what they were and I am really just growing frustrated. I understand that having an a URL for awhile is helpful, but I appear to have lost many of my good linking sites. Any thoughts?

[Lumina]

I would suggest 2 things:

1. Hire someone to do an audit of inbound links for your website, or have someone in-house perform the audit. While it may be beneficial in some regards to move your site to a blank slate, your domain age (how long your site's existed) will be lost - that being a factor in SEO.
2. Never hire anyone without knowing their tactics and requesting to look at prior projects they've worked on for your own edification. From what you've said, it sounds like the person you hired 2 years ago used some black-hat (risky cheat) tactics. It's great to have help, but unless you're informed about whomever's helping you, it will always have the potential to backfire.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Always an awkward one. First of all, don't rush to kill off the domain. I have done a lot of these and everything can be pulled back. That question of 'if' it should or not though, is only something you can answer.

If you want to know a little about what state your links are in, go to Open Site Explorer, enter your URL and look at the Anchor Text that is used to come back to you. Are most of these 'money' phrases? Is your brand used much?

Look at the Linking Domains. Do you have many that are coming from sites with high Domain Authority? Do you have sites that are linking back to you from more than one page?

When you look at the overview of your site, what does it tell you for your stats? Is everything very low?

Of course, this is only a short peek at what's going on. If you are still unsure, drop me a message and I'll be happy to do it for you.

-Andy

[Zippy-Bungle]

It sounds like part of the reason for your question is frustration and uncertainty about what to do next. I often feel exactly the same.

So you may want to read this post which helps you work out where to start and puts the issues with disavowing well down the line

http://savvypanda.com/blog/guide-how-to-use-google-disavow-tool.html

In a nutshell

• Use google webmaster tools to figure out where most of the links are coming from
• Work down the list in order and email the websites to ask them them to remove the links
• Once you hit diminishing returns start using the disavow tool.

This is a good approach as it makes the problem manageable and you can then be systematic about moving forward. If it's like everything else I've ever done - 20% of the sites will be responsible for 80% of the links and at least some of them will be nice and take stuff down. That will give you a nice morale boost when they do it, and then another one when you get some rankings benefits.

And then you will be over the hump and  it will just be another task you have to undertake

Hope that this helps

Denis