Strategy for recovering from Penguin

[mhkatz]

I have a web site that has been hit hard by the penguin update.  I believe that main cause our problem has been links from low quality blogs and article sites with overly optimized keyword anchor text.  Some questions I have are:

• I have noticed that we still have good ranking on long tail search terms on pages that did not have unnatural links.  This leads me to believe that the penalty is URL specific, i.e. only URL with unnatural linking patterns have been penalized.  Is that correct?

• Are URLs that have been penalized permanently tainted to the point that it is not worth adding content to them and continuing to get quality links to them?

• Should new contact go on new pages that have no history thus no penalty, or is the age of a previously highly ranked page still of great benefit in ranking?

• Is it likely that the penalty will go away over time if there are no more unnatural links coming in?

[kadesmith]

Depends on what type of sites those "not so great sites" are.  If they are viewed as spammy, no they won't help.

[mhkatz]

Would non-optimized links from not so great sites be of any help, or do these need to be quality links?

[kadesmith]

I would start by adding links that are not optimized with keywords to those URL's that you feel are penalized.  Level up the score for natural vs unnatural links.  I wouldn't drop the url's because you probably have some good links out there pointing to those pages.  It'll take some work, but you can recover from what I've been reading.