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Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness.

I have come to terms with the fact that I am going to need help on this one. I am trying to make a case to my boss for a "second opinion".

UPDATE As this window was open my boss called me in for our meeting. I explained the circumstance and basically his answer was:

"Give me a timeline of everything that needs to happen. We can't cut anything until we build anything (unfortunately I fear he may have stolen my sentence from my interview when I said "don't burn a bridge before you build a bridge")."

So we will go from there. I do think he is beginning to understand the severity. He made an analogy to the Corleone's going 'legit' in the Godfather but wasn't comfortable doing so until we had a plan to go 'legit.'

Thanks again everybody! You have all been a tremendous help!

Wow....

This has actually turned into a really amazing thread. I can't thank you enough... I'll keep you all posted in some way or another.

Thanks guys!

The problem I am having is that the CEO feels that he brought me on to solve these problems. He is struggling to justify bringing someone else on.

And yes, they are depending on these hits for cashflow. Thanks again for your input.

It is validating for me knowing that I'm not just incapable and that this is a legitimate problem. Seriously.

Good Mozzing,

So, as some of you may know based on my previous post, I am working with an odd situation here. I have taken over an account for a company and the Main domain pretty much falls into the category of everything Google hates. I have suggested to the CEO that the practices they did before me were sorta in the Grayhat realm bordering on Blackhat but I need empirical data before I can make any drastic changes.

In May and June of 2013 Panda, Penguin, and Payday Loan all had updates. Our company has nothing do to with porn, apartment rentals, finances, or anything like that, but the SEO methods used were, as I said, questionable.

In June of 2013 there was a drop from 8,000 sessions to 5,000 sessions from organic traffic. If I switch over to all referring traffic the loss increases to 11,000 to 7,000 sessions. To me that seems pretty substantial. Not only that, but according to the data we have not been able to recover.There was a steady climb for about 5 months before the drop, and then now we are in this middle ground.

I have only been here for about 2 weeks, so the things I have been uncovering are pretty amazing.

Is that enough to assume that we were indeed hit by the updates?

Well, you have a few options....

oDesk is an example of a great resource. It's basically an online marketplace to pitch projects overseas. They have a few systems set in place to make sure the person is actually working as opposed to checking Facebook or answering Moz questions all day.

eLance essentially the same thing as above. Started out more design heavy as I remember it and more US oriented although that may have changed.

Craigslist, Glassdoor, Monster, SimplyHired.com- Search for SEO Consultant, SEO Manager etc.

What you have laid out are pretty simple SEO upkeep, as far as stuff like title tags, redirects, anchor text etc. and MOZ is an amazing program to help you find all of those things, the problem is getting someone to actually utilize MOZ in a way that helps you. Moz in the hands of my father, is a really cool program that looks nice and makes some really nice email reports that he forwards me numerous times a day. Moz in my hands, becomes an actual tool that can be manipulated. And trust me when I say, I am a peon in comparison to most on these boards.

The problem with the SEO industry that I am a part of, as well as the Graphic Design industry, as well as Social Media is that everybody is either The Best, #1, Guarantees Results, or something like that and in turn can't perform, and ends up giving the rest of us a bad name. At the end of the day, you will have to find someone who you trust, or go with an agency.

LinkedIn is a great resource. The power of referrals is pretty amazing. And honestly these forums from what I have observed are pretty amazing too.

I will leave you with this... You pay with bananas, you are gonna get monkeys.

HA! Yea, I think that sorta answered my question.

Thank you both! You are both SEOmnipotent. See what I did there?

Anyway, that's actually, kinda nice... One of the methods I have been doing is looking at the Open Web Explorer.

So we have 145 Root Links, 2,296 total links a DA of 35 which I know is nothing great. At our best we have a link from psychologytoday.com with a DA of 90, and at the other end a bunch of links from plenty of our random websites with a DA of around 20. I have been going through each domain trying to determine where the "hives" are and which ones are just the outliers. Am I on the right track here?

Envato.com is a marketplace for various things. They act as an umbrella for 8 different websites that fall underneath them and each one offers a specific thing. Is there any SEO benefit to doing this?

Wouldn't it have been better off for them build all of these into envato.com. i.e.

envato.com/themeforest as opposed to the current ThemeForest.net

The only thing I can think of really is branding?

Let's assume that they didn't do this because they needed space to house all of the digital data or anything like that.

Yeah, thank you! That was sorta where my head was going as well. Thanks again!

So, as the title says, I am stuck. I recently have been brought on as the SEO guru for a small-mid size company with the task of rebuilding their web presence. Their website is in pretty unfortunate condition. The more research I do, the farther and farther I am going down the rabbit hole of chaos.

Essential the previous CEO was doing all SEO work. He purchased 1500 domains, all keyword specific. Installed wordpress on roughly 1,000 and then began pumping out content. Of the 1,000 roughly 300 of them have about 600-2,000 characters worth of content that is absolute fluff. From there the linking began.

Now the content is different enough that Google doesn't seem to notice that its the SAME FREEKIN THING on each domain, but I am very concerned. The company has their main multi-page domain which has other links and sources of traffic, but in essence the previous owner created a micro link web.

My advice is to cut those links ASAP and remove the previous work. At the same time, I also don't want them to lose rank. So I guess I am asking a whole slew of questions...

1. Am I right in thinking that we have to build a bridge before we burn a bridge?
2. Is it worth fixing up some of those other domains to have original content to try and bolster what we already have?
3. Would it be better to combine everything into one website, or try and have different domains represent different things. For example Envato.com is an umbrella website with 8 separate websites operating under the same roof using different domains.?
4. Where do I begin? I feel like I have started this project numerous times. I know the keywords, I know where the duplicate content is, I know the structure of the main domain, I am getting the structure of the entire link web.

Lastly, any thoughts you all have would be greatly appreciated. I realistically have minimal experience in this realm. I am a a major nub. I understand SEO in theory, sorta. So I'm getting there!