Poor Blog and Website DA and links

[Raptor-crew]

Hi There

We have a mature website and a mature blog with over 500 genuine blogs written on it over 4 years.  In terms of actual "people" value it has to be high. We used to get 1000 visitors per day, we now get 300. We still have 850 subscribers so its of a certain size.

However we have been hit by the Penguin/Panda updates and our DA has dropped to what everyone is telling us is too low for a site like this and we still have a google backlink problem, unyet we only have 190 external links that we think are all OK now.

The problem we have is that we seem to have too many links from the blog to the main website with the same anchor text.  This has occurred with a blogroll style link to the home page which appears on every post/page of the blog, also I think we have too many anchor same anchor text links to product pages (Motorola ES400) and category pages (Tablet PC).

We're going through changing these now so that we have the right mix but the specific questions I wanted to ask were:

1. Will loads of links with the same anchor text affect us if the blog is counted as internal links.  Its on the same "blog" sub-domain as the main website.

2. Will this affect the DA of both sites?

3. Is Wordpress capable of damaging us with all the extra pages it creates automatically.

We've done nothing but genuine content posting here and i'm sure we can get it back but it kind of really demotivates you when 2/3rds of your traffic goes overnight. Many thanks for any help.

[Chris.Menke]

Rugged,

Typically, I wouldn't think that the points you made would have an impact on a site.  A "blog" subdomain with posts relevant to the root domian will be seen by google as about the same as a subdirectory so links with anchor text wouldn't be on the top of my list of possible problems.

On the other hand, If you're talking about your own website, I don't seem see all those 190 external links you're talking about--unless you're only talking about the ones coming from the blog.  Otherwise, you've only got links coming from one other domain.  If that's the case, then your DA wouldn't seem inappropriate and some up and down in DA is typical from one month to another.

[Raptor-crew]

TY Chris so I would say we have way way more internal links than external and I absolutely appreciate the DA comment.  We know we have to get more links from high DA sites but also in a natural way.  We aren't afraid of content at all and give a lot out, we just did it all in 1 place on a sub domain!

So Are you saying that the anchor text from blog.domain.com pointing to www.domain.com is not really at the top of the list but probably worth dealing with. Or are you saying that it's probably not worth combing through the blog to correct?

[Chris.Menke]

You could go about changing some of them but I'd focus on your external links.  I'd also take a look at Cyrus Shepard's recent post on keywords and instead of applying your resulting Step 7 list to your keyword choices (although you could very effectively use it as such), use your resulting concepts as a starting place for your back link research, as any sites that were relevant to the concepts you end up with in that list would be ideal back link candidates. Also, keep in mind that in your niche, a high DA isn't a prerequisite for being a link opportunity, so long as it's a quality site with a few quality back links and no/few spammy links.