Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the reply matey - I'm not looking for an easy option It was just what someone has suggested to us.

I'm going to continue removing the links and see what happens on the next refresh.

Has anyone seen there rankings shoot back to what they were before the penalty...

Howdy Guys,

Our main site has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we are just wondering what steps we should now take.

For the past 2 months we have been working through our back link profile removing spammy / un-natural links, we have documented everything in a spreadsheet...

We recently submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they have now responded saying we still have bad links.

I'm just wondering would be it easier just to 301 redirect our site to another TLD we have for our main site?

Or

Do we keep working through our links 1 by 1 and removing them?

Has anyone had any success in 301ing?

Thanks,

Scott

Howdy Guys,

Does anybody still use prweb.com or prnewswire.com?

I'm thinking of signing up but just want someone else's views on the sites?

Thanks,

Scott

But they have asked us to remove the links that are un-natural?

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

So we have just received a message from Google confirming that we have an un-natural link profile.

We are currently in the process of gathering all our links and going through them 1 by 1, at the moment I'm just stuck deciding if we should remove this link.

It's a high profile PR site, its updated every day with quality news??

What do you guys think of this?

Thanks,

Scott

Hello,

At the moment were submitting around 3 - 4 guest posts a week to relevant, high PA and high DA sites and we are seeing some great jumps in our rankings for our microsites.

I would say 1 link on 1 site all the time, the more linking domains the better.

One thing I would say is try to keep a natutal looking link profile, don't over-do your "money keywords" push more brand and even add some naked links www.example.com

That's my penny worth...

Hope it helps.

OK  - We are about to start the process of removing some bad / spammy links.

Looking at OSE and WMT they both have different links? Some are the same but alot are different?

Which tool would you pay more attention too?

Or

Would you merge the 2 documents together?

Thanks,

Scott

Hello,

After deeply assessing our back links we have come to the conclusion that we have too many links that have been devalued and also some spammy looking links....

Our next question is do we remove these bad links and start a fresh or do we just build new white hat links??

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Moosa,

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Yep I think that's what they have done really.

I'm going to remove all the low quality links that we have, the only worrying thing is now if remove alot of these low quality links will we drop even further?

We do also have another good domain that is currently ranking higher than us in the SERPS which has had no SEO completed on it.

Do we 301 our main site to this new domain??

OK where do we start?

Lets go back to June 2011So in June 2011 we left an SEO company that was looking after our account, after a year of being with them and not moving 1 place in the SERPS we decided to cut ties with them and move to a new SEO company...

Over the first 6 months things seemed to be going well, for our main keyword "car warranty" we started to climb up the rankings from #6 - #4 - #2, we also moved up for other keywords. One thing that I did notice when we were with the new SEO Company not much on-site optimisation was completed.Move forward to January 2012So over the Christmas period the usual happened, our rankings stayed the same put traffic dropped which is obviously normal for this specific time of year... But on the 7th of Jan 2012 our rankings dropped from #2 - #10, we contacted the SEO company in question and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.3 Weeks later we were still in the exactly the same position, the good thing was because we run a very good Adwords campaign the traffic to our site didn't drop.The SEO company then came back and said it looks like we have been placed in a 60day filter by Google and once the 60day filter had been reached we should pop back up - 65days came and went and we were still in the exact same position. After us waiting around for months to see if the rankings improved we decided to leave the SEO company and move all our SEO work back in-house.Move forward to February 2012Once we had full control over the account again we made some changes to the on-site optimisation of the site, we improved page titles, descriptions,

tags and also our content was re-written - we then waited for Google to pickup the changes and re-index our site.

YesterdaySo yesterday we checked our rankings - some of our longer tail keywords had improved but our main big traffic keywords had dropped even further - we had gone from #10 to #16, with the update to the algorithm yesterday targeting spammy websites we feared that we had been hit by the new update. We then cleaned up some links that looked spammy and asked for a reconsideration request. Now looking deeper into our backlinks we still have some spammy non-relevant links as well as a few big sitewide links - 1 sitewide link provides 732,667 links to our homepage and our total links indexed by Google is only 759,144.What do you think we should do...Wait for Google to come back to us after the reconsideration request?Remove more and backlinks?Build more high value links?If anyone can provide me with more information it would be great.Thanks,
Scott

Howdy Guys, I've just been listening to the latest edition of whiteboard Friday regarding the over-optimization penalty. I'm just wondering if we should remove alot of make specifc landing pages... For instance we have a landing pages for our top 20 cars... For instance "bmw keyword" or "audi keyword" What do you guys think? remove them and 301 the pages to the homepage? Thanks, Scott

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the reply.

We have seen a significant drop in rankings other the past few months, we have dropped from 3rd to 13th... I'm just trying to figure out what has happened and how we can get over this drop.

One thing that I have noticed when looking at our link profile our old SEO agency has signed us up for alot of Link Directoires - when I've been running this sites through Netpeak checker I can see that alot of the sites have been de-indexed via Google.

I personally feel that we just need to improve our link profile and we should see a rise in the SERPS.

If you could shed any light on this it would be great Peter.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

I've noticed that Google is starting to de-value site-wide links...

Our previous SEO agency sourced us a site wide link on a big website and at the moment within Google Webmaster Tools its showing 749,726 links from this 1 source.

Do you think this is too many?

Could this be being flagged by Google?

Here is the site: http://tinyurl.com/7bttw3b

Cheers,

Scott

Thanks for the reply mate - yep that's what I think it is! The strange thing is our biggest competitor WD have got amazing links from high authority domains but still can't get top!

Thanks for your response.

Looking at the copyscape there are a few copies of our homepage out on the internet, we have alot of car dealers that will just pinch content off our site and re-use it.

At the moment looking at linkscape there are around 3 copies.

Thanks for the reply.

Yep  I agree, but the annoying thing is - running and OSE on some of our competitors shows that they don't really have any better links if anything they are worse...

Our page rank hasn't dropped its still at 4.

Ok guys where do I start...

Lets go back 12months, so were in April 2011 and ranking 6th for our main keyword 'car warranty' things were going well, we didn't really move up or down the SERP and for our other keywords we were ranking well.

We decided to use an SEO agency to try and boost our rankings as we were getting ready to launch a national TV advert. It started off really well, we were moving up the rankings nicely and within 9 months we were 3rd for 'car warranty' we were happy!!

On the 7th of Jan 2012 we dropped to 10th in the SERP for our main keyword and we were gutted we contacted the agency straight away trying to find out what had happened - we got news back that a site that they were using for links (around 20) had crashed for the Christmas break and the links had been deindexed by Google, we were told give it 2 weeks and we should see them again... 2 months later we were still at 10th and they had changed there mind and decided it was a 60day filter.

We waited again until the filter had been removed and we still didn't move anywhere, with this in mind we have now left the agency and moved back to in-house.

So back to today - we are now shifting between 10th and 11th on the SERPS which Is causing us some pain.

I'm trying to work out what the hell has happened to our site, have we been penalized? Have we over optimized or is it just purely down to our link profile...

Here are some stats:

Domain Authority: 49
Homepage Authority: 59
MozTrust: 4.43
MozRank:  4.51

So looking at our campaign within SEOMoz our site does seem to be OK - we have a few little issues but nothing that is causing a problem to our SEO. Our hompage and landing pages all of a report card of A so I can't see it being an over optimization penalty.

Looking at our external links our anchor text is spread quite nicely between some of our keywords and our brand name.

I don't personally think we have been penalized and we don't have any messages within Google Webmaster tools, i wish we did that way I would know where to star!! haha I personally think its just our link profile - looking at our links through OSE they don't look too bad, yes there are some low quality link directories but there are only a few.

I think if we improve this and get some strong links back we should see an improvement but Its driving me mad at the moment and I just can't seem to put my finger on it, if anyone has got any ideas or could shed any light on our issue it would be great.

Sorry for the long message but I just had to explain our past and where we are up to...

Thanks!

Hey man, thanks for the response.

I'd say its quite competitive and yes there are some new people that have suddenly popped up on the first page.

The annoying thing is a lot of the websites that are ranking on the first page have very bad links a lot of them are blog comments and other rubbish.

We have changed some of the content but only to make it more SEO friendly...

Hi Guys,

Were wondering what to do about our main domain name, we were ranking quite high for our main keyword and before Christmas our site dropped to 10th and we have been there for a while - last week our site dropped again onto the second page.

The worrying thing is now our main domain name is now ranking 1 place above another domain name that we don't really use but its an exact match domain name for our target keyword. This exact match domain has hardly any links pointing to it and it currently has a 22 domain authority.

We are wondering if we 301 our main site to this exact match domain would it rank higher than the top of the 2nd page where we are now for our main domain.

Cheers.