Hey Henry
I have just taken a quick look at your link profile in open site explorer and I think your agency is being wildly optimistic. Simply, adding more links with a wider variety of keywords is simply not going to work. Likewise, if they are using the same historical approaches to add the links then they are likely to dig you an even bigger hole.
There is only one well documented case of recovery I am aware of being the WPMU site and they were fortunate in that they could remove a huge swathe of links in one fell swoop. Looking at your link profile, you don't have any such options.
Some very quick statistics here.
1400 linking domains
- 300 approx are branded (various)
- 100 branded + keyword (various)
- 1000 keywords only (various)
Then, anchor text is only part of the picture, looking at the sites that are linking to you, they are pretty weak in general. Link farms, content farms, article sites - it's a real mess! In fact, I have not found one good to honest link that is not from a spun, barely literate article.
So, what do you do? Well, in my mind, the first thing you should do is clean up the mess and see if you can bounce back. But you have some real work to do here, no doubt about that.
I wish I could give you happier news but when it comes to applying the phrase 'toxic link profile' then your link profile is just that. Lots and lots of, and I hesitate to even use the word, 'articles' with links to your site but they are clearly outsourced webspam articles written by someone who's first language was not english.
It's very hard to advise the exact course of action, but certainly, just 'throwing some more links at it' is not the way to go here. Any work you do should be to clean up but looking at your link profile, I have looked at about 100 links and not found one that was not a 100% total webspam.
The fact of the matter is, your site, and your marketing is exactly the deliberate manipulation of search results which Google has been targeting so it may be that starting again is your best approach. Certainly, if out of that 1400 links, if there are such a small percentage of real, honest links, then that may be your only real choice.
Google has targeted three things of late:
- link farms
- web spam
- artificial links
Unfortunately, your site is (was) propped up by artificial links from web spam on link farms - so to dig your way out of this hole could be tough and may leave you with little actual link equity to make it worthwhile.!
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news so don't shoot the messenger!
Marcus