You 'never, ever' give your own content away? You have several posts on YouMoz... I'm confused.

Sounds like you have a LOT of cleaning up to do if you want to rank organically. You know this it seems. Honestly, I'd focus on paid search and do organic on the side. You've got a site that is converting and has been converting for a while - why not try out a stable source of traffic and see what sort of return you can get that way?

One of my websites had 12 backlinks when it was hit by Penguin. I didn't spend more than 5 minutes trying to fix it.... just sold it and moved on (told the buyer about the penalty of course). That is another option for you to consider....

big broad terms are expensive and usually have a higher Cost Per Conversion. Long-tails are more specific, cheaper and lead to more conversions. If you're using broad match, consider using a broad match modifier.

Exactly. Penguin isn't about improving search results. It's about punishing webmasters using spammy tactics. Panda is about improving search results.

To further confirm your feelings I completly agree with this answer. Wait until the penalty comes and then be proactive. In the meantime build high quality links.

Well that's your problem. If you can't get them all taken down use the Disavow tool. Show Google that you tried your hardest to get them taken down manually though.

Hi Ramon,

This is a very difficult question to answer. Before I even try to answer it I'd like to point out the following:

The first Panda filter came out on Feb 25, 2011. On Feb 24, 2012 Search Engine Round Table published a survey asking how many webmasters recovered from the filter one year later. The survey can be found here. As you can see, not many were able to recover from the filter even one year later. This is by no means a conclusive study, but it's really the best we have.

To answer your questions:

1. In my opinion, it's beyond fixing if you lose rankings and you did NOT receive a warning from Google. If you received a warning consider yourself lucky. Follow Google's instructions and use a service like linkdelete.com to get the bad backlinks removed (or just do it yourself).

2. Open Site Explorer works great for identifying bad backlinks. Go through the list of exact match keyword anchor texts and you'll be off to a good start.

Finally, I'd like to plug my post on this subject:

How-To Recover From Google Penalties & Filters

It's a long one, but I include several pictures and examples to make this process easier for folks in your situation.

Good luck!

For one of my clients, a keyword with 28 exact local searches has brought in 2x as many conversions as any other keyword being targeted on the site. It's all about context really.

You're lucky you got a manual penalty and not an algorithmic one. When you get a manual penalty you get to use the disavow tool, say your sorry, and come back. Don't hesitate to use the disavow tool since you got the manual letter.

Do you have the translations on language specific TLDs or as a subfolder or a subdomain on your current site? Is the translation being done by a widget or was the content hand-translated by a professional translator?

Could be an issue with Panda. Could not be. Hard to tell. If the article was published on the authority BEFORE the others you should be ok. Just think of news aggregation websites like Yahoo News and look at how they do it work. Publishing the same article in multiple locations isn't really best practice - whatever that means.

sure or e-mail me davec@evolvecreativegroup.com

Some people swear by setting up the blog on a separate domain to give it its own identity, but any SEO would likely say to have it on your own domain.

One of the reasons you create content is to attract links to your site so you can rank higher for your 'money' keywords - ex. 'buy isle surf boards'. If the content is being created on a different domain, those links will point to the other domain and not your site.

The best solution is www.islesurfboards.com/blog

The second best solution is blog.islesurfboards.com

The separate domain strategy does have merit, but only for brands who are willing to invest SIGNIFICANT (100k +) cash into the blog.

Did you claim the subdomain as a new language in webmaster tools?