Redirecting over-optimised pages

[Coolpink]

Hi

One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site.

I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks.

My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty?

Thanks

[MarieHaynes]

Hey there...got your pm.  I can understand you not wanting to share your url in public.

Take a look at your site in open site explorer and click on "anchor text".  You'll see that your most common anchor text is your keyword, and it's definitely not a brand.  You've got 191 links using that keyword as anchor text.  Your next most common is your url and for that you've got 16 links.

That's definitely Penguin material unfortunately.

It may seem unfair, but the Google guidelines tell us not to make links for the purpose of increasing our position on the SERPS.  It is very unlikely that 191 links with anchor text appeared naturally.

Unfortunately you're going to need to get the majority of those links removed in order to recover and that's likely a tough process.

If you had had an unnatural links warning in your WMT you could try to remove as many as possible and then show Google your attempts to remove the others.  But, because Penguin is algorithmic, the only way to recover is to do some drastic work at getting the keyword anchors removed or possibly changed to your url.

I have found that about 10-15% of webmasters actually respond to my requests to remove links.  That's just not going to work for a site hit by Penguin.  If you can't get the majority of these links removed then you may need to start over with a new domain.

[MarieHaynes]

What you're describing definitely sounds like Penguin - Happened immediately after April 24th plus affects only certain pages and keywords.

No, you would not receive a link warning if this was Penguin because Penguin is algorithmic.

Care to share the url?

Penguin is almost always (as far as we know) about your backlink profile.  What I have found is that most webmasters are not tough enough on themselves when looking at their backlinks.  Your definition of spammy and mine could be different.  If you've got a lot of keyword anchor links from directories, followed blog comments or articles then this could be the issue.

I have also seen problems where Google couldn't recognize your brand from your keyword.  So, if you were trying to rank for "green widgets" and your website name was greenwidgets.com and you built a lot of links using the anchor text "green widgets" Google may look at that at a manipulation factor and not a brand thing.  That's why WPMU got hit by Penguin because they had a bunch of footer links from websites that said "wordpress mu".  It really was their brand but Google saw it as anchor text manipulation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

As far as redirecting goes, if you think this is Penguin I wouldn't redirect any penalized pages to new pages because you're essentially redirecting the whole backlink profile that got you penalized and the new pages will tank as well.

[Coolpink]

@Greg - It was enough to pretty much wipe out all keyphrase traffic. They were still ranking for their brand terms however, which obviously suggests it was not a full site penalty. The new site will be hosted on the same domain, but with some new URLs, hence my question about whether I should redirect them.

[Coolpink]

@Marie - The rankings drop happened on April 25th, definitely Penguin. And yes it only affected a handful of pages and keyphrases. I really can't see anything in the backlink profile that suggests the anchor texts for these pages would be regarded as spammy. About 50% of the keyphrases are brand-based. However maybe there's something I'm missing and perhaps I should cut my losses and just manually edit all the links I've created myself, which I know aren't spammy? (hope that makes sense...)

There are a couple of pages where I'd like to change the URL structure, so I can either start from scratch with these new pages or redirect the old URL there.

Ps Would I have received a bad link warning from Google if it was Penguin?

[MarieHaynes]

Are you sure it is Penguin?  Penguin is usually about a spammy backlink profile and has very little to do with onsite quality.  If it truly is Penguin and you redirect to a new page then you'll just be redirecting the bad links to the new page and passing on the penalty.

Do you know what day your traffic dropped on?  There were Panda updates on either side of the Penguin update.  What you are describing could be a Panda issue.

If it's Panda you'd notice that there was probably a sitewide drop in traffic that started April 29th or 27th.  (Assuming it was near the time of Penguin that was April 25).

Penguin tends to affect one or more keywords as opposed to the whole site.  And those keywords are usually the ones that you have overoptimized (i.e. built up too many anchor texted links with the keywords and anchor.)

If this is Panda, then I don't see the point of making new URLs and redirecting to them.  Why not just change the current URLs?

And finally, in either case, if it's Penguin or Panda you won't recover until there is a Penguin or Panda refresh.

[AndreVanKets]

Hi,

How bad was the effect on rankings?

Is your objective to get both websites ranking?

If not, why not redirect the old site to the new one?

Redirecting the spammy/Dupe content to the clean pages wont be an issue in my opinion. (Bad link neighborhood would be a different story) but I'm not sure if this will help lift the penalty.

Perhaps someone else can comment on that?

Greg