Stopped ranking. Suspect links with keyword in blog posts and blog username. What to do? Disvow?

[lcourse]

One of our staff thought it was a good idea to comment in 30 blogs in our niche using "keyword" as username in blog post linked to our website and additionally adding links to our website in the posts.

We now got caught by panda or penguin (google confirmed no manual penalty was taken) and not ranking anymore for this keyword. No notification in webmaster tools neither.

We have links from around 90 root domains of which 30 are from these blog posts. What would you suggest to do?

Just building more legitimate links so that share of bad links goes down?
Using google disvow tool? We would then loose potential to get later legitimate links from these sites?

Any ideas/suggestions?

[KyleJack]

Hi,

Building more "legitimate" links will help; but rather than disavow, make an effort to remove these links manually. Get the user account information and go back to these websites. Then either delete the accounts or remove the link. It'll be laborious (personally I would get the same person who made these links to clean them up) but it will be the cleanest way forward.

Firstly, however, make sure that these are the links that are causing this "penalty". If they are nofollow links you may want to keep looking at other potential causes.

Thanks,

K

[lcourse]

thanks Kyle.

looking more closely. traffic drop for keyword happened at a date coinciding with a panda update.

In this case you would not make any effort to remove the blog links preventively in order that this may not trigger any future penguin update?

[KyleJack]

Sorry, I wasn't too clear above.

I would certainly remove those links whether or not they were the cause of the drop that you have experienced. As you quite rightly say, they may cause you more trouble later on. However, I would still be vigilante about what else may have affected the site, especially if these are (like most blog comment links) nofollow links.

I hope that has cleared it up.

K