Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?

[TellThemEverything]

We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why?

More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight.  This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request.

Two weeks later, Google refused, saying..

"We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."

We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites.

Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account?  Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site?

What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them?

Any other tips/tricks?

[TellThemEverything]

Thanks Carson. I deleted all my EZA/isnare/squidoo and closed the accounts. All the spam sites had taken the content published at EZA so I gathered all of them using GWT and majesticseo. After checking all of the backlinks I ended up disavowing 550 domains.

As you say, there were some good links too, and only a handful of pages that the articles linked to, so my next step is to stop them redirecting. I've also contacted all the good linkers and they are updating to the .org too.

We're getting there  Fingers crossed.. just goes to show that even something as justifiable as articles can bite you.

[Carson-Ward]

I'd hate for you to throw the baby out with the bath water - there are some good links you'd want to keep, and starting from scratch is a real pain. This is what I'd do:

1. Look at all the pages you did build artificial links to in OSE. Consider dropping (410/404 instead of 301) pages that are mostly sending artificial links.

2. Pages that you didn't build artificial links to should be fine. Continue to 301 them as you are.

3. Evaluate the pages you did build links to, and try decide which option is easier. An example would be the home page.

4. Remove the bad/article links manually. If you can't, just do your best and then disavow and resubmit.

5. Don't 301 the page (just kill it and 410 or similar), and then try to salvage any of the good links by having them changed to the .org.

There are at most 200 linking domains once you combine links from all your tools - it shouldn't be hard to see fairly quickly whether the site is a spam/article domain or a legitimate site. Also, if your friend's site is relevant there shouldn't be a problem if he links with branded (non-commercial) anchor text.

Most people only have a handfull of pages they build links to - review those and hopefully you can start over fresh with the good links you had.

[TellThemEverything]

Thanks. It's going to be a long weekend

[Chris.Menke]

Looking at the back links for .org, I'd think seriously about just dropping that 301 from the home page of the .com site and any other pages that have bad links going to them.

I'm not sure why OSE shows links that are pointing to the .com site as back links to the .org site. I'd go ahead and delete those accounts, since it seems all those links point to .com anyway.

I'd be working to distance myself from the .com site as much as possible.

[TellThemEverything]

Thanks Chris. The redirect from .com to .org just started in December 2012.  Every page on .com was 301'd to the relevant page on .org - so after 6 months of telling google about this I'm still amazed that the .com still stays in the index.

But then, some of my top backlink domains according to GWT don't link to me any more. Google is super slow in updating it seems.  One was a forum that had a link in my signature that I removed 6 months ago- still shows at #4 backlink domain.

[Chris.Menke]

180 days is the best practice for leaving a 301 in place.  You could remove that redirect and that will leave all those links pointing to the .com unaffiliated with the .org site.

How did you do your 301s?  page by page or did you 301 the whole domain to the .org site?  There are still a few URLs left in the index for that domain