What to do next with my site gamblingsites.co

[VisualSense]

So I have this site gamblingsites.co, which I launched about a year ago (I think.) This used to be internetgamblingsites.net (a domain I bought, but never managed to get in the index, and it appeared to violate the T/Cs after asking in GWMT) and before that the site used to be casinowarehouse.eu.

After moving to gamblingsites.co, the pages were indexed almost instantly. I kept a 301 in place until today as I had some links pointing to internetgamblingsites.net.

Now, until a few weeks ago, everything was fine. The site was ranking top 10 for gambling sites (8-10) and I had some traffic everyday. This site wasn't my top priority, so besides adding new unique content, I didn't do much with it. In each case no shady link building or what-so-ever.

On February first of this year, however, it lost all of its rankings, and I have no idea why. Much worse site appear in the top 50, where a sub page of my site appears somewhere on the 9th SERP for keyword 'gambling sites.'

Last week I started contacting some people and asked them to update my links. I also used my own sites (all on unique hosting accounts) to build some branded links, i.e. 'GamblingSites.co' and similar terms to down tune the exact match. I also decreased the instances of the exact match on the homepage, to avoid over optimization. Finally, I removed the 301 from internetgamblingsites.net, since the better links have been changed (or are about to get changed soon.)

Now, couple of days later... no changes, but it's probably to early to judge. My question to you: "What would you do next, to try to save the site and at least get some traffic to it?"

Thank you for your help,

Giorgio

PS: Feel free to ask for more information.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[VisualSense]

OK, frankly I left some important info out. When I moved the site, I did it properly with all 301's in place. The few pages that did get a new URL structure, were manually 301'ed in the htaccess, where the rest was 301 to the same location on the new domain.

The 301's were not part of the problem. That's for sure. The new domain, gamblingsites.co, got indexed real quickly after moving the site, and after the first toolbar PR update it also got the PR updated accordingly.

Furthermore, the site started to rank decently. Not in the top positions, but still on the first SERP, and more importantly bringing some traffic too. Like I wrote in my previous message, this all stopped on February 1st 2012, and I can't find any reason for it.

In the mean time I have contacted web masters to update the most important links that were pointing to pages on internetgamblingsites.net, to make them point to gamblingsites.co. (Please note that OSE is not showing this yet, since it was only done in the past few weeks.) The past week I also build a couple of links from other (related) sites I own, mainly to mix up the anchor text distribution.

I don't think this site has a penalty or so, at least I didn't get any notices in GWMT.

So, I would like to ask again for some advice how to proceed forward. Or what could have possibly caused the site to vanish for its exact match ranking.

Thanks,

Giorgio

PS: The guide you linked to is about the same way I took care of my move.

[JustinTaylor88]

Google have a good article about moving your site, did you use a single redirect to direct to the new site? As google says doing a page-to-page redirect will help preserve page ranking!

More information about moving your site here
moving your site - webmaster tools help

Hope this helps!