Client participated in Link farm.

[vectormedia]

Our client participated in link exchange activity between 2008-2009. The service they used was http://link2me.com/

Its an obvious link farm scheme and their drop in traffic/rankings correlates to panda release early this year.

The site does have tons of unique content, their are no technical SEO issues. They DO have great inbound links from some very authoritative sites (ie: peta.org)

They do not rank even for unique strings taken directly from their content. Rankings for some very n long tail terms are virtually non existant.

So the question were trying to figure out is, did the domain get hit with a penalty bc of past link farm participation, if so how can we correct?

-- killing the account with link2me has already been done

Could the domain NOT be penalized, and since all those external links were penalized did our site lose authority?

[smokin_ace]

Dear Lee,

According to the link farm I can't really agree with you that they became useless and doesn't drive any result. Of course you need to know which link farms to use and how to use. Following this we can't exclude the presence of any penalties on the domain name which effect on growth of the particular keywords. Usual it takes from 6 month to 2 years for penalties to be removed in some case you need to contact with Google Support regarding this.

About domain authority, you can measure it only if you remember which number it has before changes (according for ex. to SEOmoz bar) and which number is now.

Also I need to say that if you are using link farms still you should do really stupid things there to get a penalty from Google. My feelings that it might be some problems with on-page optimization or the keyword competitions are high and links which you got for them are not enough. Try to measure competition and develop a strategy and be tolerant because after adjustments you can't see immediate effect.

Thanks,

Russel

[RobertFisher]

Lee,

With a client like this where you are reticent to share the domain, the answers will be a bit less authoritative. But, if you think you were hit with a penalty, you should go through each page to insure no further issues exists ( I would check those long tail KW pages to see if there is duplicate content, and that there is no hidden code, etc.) If you have tons of useless links in the footer I would take them out, etc.

Once that is all done and SEO is tight, submit to Google for reconsideration. But, be sure you have a clean site: It would be painful to submit and then get shot down.

If it is a big issue and you need to be circumspect due to the site being a client site, I would use a private question to SEOmoz for assist. This way you can choose if it is kept private or is seen two weeks later. If you have used your private question, you get another one each month.

Hope this helps,

[KeriMorgret]

A quick clarification. The private questions are private, and always stay that way. SEOmoz Associates that answer the questions are under NDA and we don't share the details of those questions. Period.

Public questions and responses are now viewable and indexed right away (there had been a two week waiting period for the responses to be public, but that has changed), though only Pro members can ask and answer questions.

I hope this helps! Do feel free to ask this question in private with more details if you would like. You can create a new question and leave this one here for additional community input if you would like.

[RobertFisher]

Thanks for the clarification Keri.

Always helps.