Penality issues

[PeterM22]

Hi there,

I'm working on site that has been badly hit by penguin. The reasons are clear, exact match blog network links and tons of spammy exact match links such as comment spam, low quality directories, the usual junk.

The spammy links were mainly to 2 pages, they were targetting keyword 1 and keyword 2.

I'd like to remove these two pages from google, as they dont even rank in google now and create one high quality page that targets both the keywords, as they are similar.

The dilemma I have is these spammy pages still get traffic from bing and yahoo and it's profitable traffic. Is there a safe way to remove the pages from google and leave them for bing and yahoo?

Peter

[Maximise]

What about using this Irving? Have you tried it before?

[Maximise]

The problem with Google is that it's difficult to know whether it is a page level penalty or an anchor text filter that you are triggering from the exact match anchor text abuse. You could try creating a new page for those keywords but there is the chance that they still stop any page from ranking well for that term because of the anchor text (this has happened to me before). Let's hope Google follows Bings lead and comes up with a link removal tool!

Worth a try though.

[irvingw]

I don't think there is any way around that, the pages need to 404 or Google will reindex them due to all of the links pointing to the pages, even if you do set up robots.txt to allow bing and disallow googlebot to crawl those pages that only works when the crawlers come in from the homepage.

[annasusmiles]

My personal opinion is that Bing and Yahoo don't value those links at all. They may not penalizing you for it, but they probably aren't boosting your ranking either.