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First of all, I would say you made the wise choice by removing the 301 from internetgamblingsites.net, especially if it had a shady backlink profile, as I've seen evidence of Google passing penalties through 301s. That said, I'm not sure how long it would take to recover after removing these links. I'd give it a couple weeks to a couple of months to be sure. Google may have to recrawl and reindex all those old pages that contained the bad links before it gives you credit for removing them. Here's another possibility: A few weeks ago Google deindexed several large link networks. Even if you didn't use link networks like BMR for your backlink profile, it could still affect you as a secondary effect if the folk who linked to you were hit. It's sorta like you once had rich friends, but now they are poor because they built shady backlinks, and now they can't pass any link juice to you. In the gambling niche, this is common these days. Regardless, seems like your one the right track. I'd let the dust settle for awhile before making any judgement. One way or another you'll need to work to build up more high quality links. And diversify your anchor text, as it appears like a very highly optimized profile: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?page=1&site=www.gamblingsites.co&sort=domains_linking_page&source=phrase&target=domain Best of luck with your SEO.

The reason I know for a fact its Panda, is that the site lost its rankings (and thus about 60% of its traffic) end of February 2011. Since then I managed to get slightly better rankings by adding loads of content and rewriting some categories (with thin pages, and not too many sub pages) from the bottom up, however, I never realized I had the content I currently located, which is terrible in terms of quality, and has duplicates all over the web. Like I said, this content dates back to 2006 when I didn't have a clue about SEO. It's not that the content will be rewritten, based on what's there. I just told my writer to write about topic X and topic Y and make it very informative, so I will go from bad to really good pages. Moving the new pages to new locations and getting rid of the others "infected" pages seems the best in my opinion, despite the age of these pages and the occasional link to them. o70cn.jpg

You can always use a private question credit to ask your question of SEOmoz Staff and Associates and include your URL. Those questions are not indexed or visible to anyone who is not a staff or associate, and we're all under NDA regarding the content of those questions.

Was a bit sarcastic with my answer but yeah the site is added to WMT and nothing funky to discover that explains the penalty.

Are you absolutely sure?  There was a wave of Panda that hit non-US sites on the week of April 11th (or thereabouts).  Does that coincide with your drop?

You mention adding and rewriting content, but are you adding it to existing pages or to new pages. Adding new pages may actually make Panda problems worse, even if they have original content. At some point, you're going to need to reduce your indexed pages (maybe dramatically) and canonicalize the new content to the old, thin content. Just adding content is probably a bad idea. If the crawlers aren't getting into your deeper content, you may have to focus on some deep link-building, either external/inbound or internally by featuring certain pages (and possibly rotating until they get re-cached). You've got to give Google a push to re-crawl and simply adding content to a page they think is low-value probably won't be enough. Injecting solid links at various levels of the site architecture could help. The tough part of this is that the update cycle for Panda-related problems is out of sync with the main index. What might traditionally take days or a couple of weeks to fix could take many weeks with Panda. They seem to be apply a separate data adjustment or possibly a machine-learning algorithm, and it's not part of the main algorithm. So, it's possibly you're on the right track, but simply getting pages re-cached isn't going to automatically reverse a Panda problem.