What to do with pre-panda gateway pages?
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We used an SEO firm back in the day to create gateway landing pages for our site heavily optimized for certain keywords and phrases. They ranked well for years and then the panda/penguin updates hit and the pages no longer rank at all. The content on the pages is actually useful and decent (http://payloadz.com/info-sell-ebooks.asp). The html is over-optimized on keyword though.
What should be our strategy here? The keywords and phrases are still important for us. Should we move the content to another URL with less HTML optimization, remove the existing optimization on the pages where they are? The backlinks are of poor quality as well.
We have gone through a disavow process and still no affect on these pages after a month.
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You're welcome Shannon. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to help out, even if the news isn't so good to hear.
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Thanks Everette, your candid response is much appreciated.
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If the page you linked to is indicative of the other pages as well, I'd just delete them, let the page 404 so it gets removed from the index, disavow the links, and start over with better content. You say the content is useful, but I read the entire thing and it sounds very much like it was written for the sole purpose of stuffing a bunch of keywords about selling eBooks. It was not very useful at all.
My advice would be to get rid of pages like that completely and if you're going to write about selling eBooks do so without thinking so much about keywords or SEO, and just focus on providing the absolute BEST guide to selling eBooks that you can. This will require a writer who is actually an expert at selling eBooks, which means it will cost more money to produce the content. Think quality over quantity. Scale down your landing page strategy drastically and just be as informative as you can.
Good luck. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but you're not the only one having to deal with it.
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Thanks for the reply Erwan. Unfortunately, a new domain just is not in the cards for us at this time.
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A French e-commerce had the same issue:
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they picked a new domain.
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they used a java-script redirection from the old homepage (no 301), which is not supposed to pass penalty (to be verified) - it helps to redirect people who bookmarked the website/the direct visitors.
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they tried to understand the reason of the penalty and changed their way to build links (no more links on farm websites, diversified anchor etc, more nofollow, no over optimized titles etc).
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they updated the top old links.
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they used SEA and bought ads the first 6 months to keep the same traffic.
One year later, they got an even better traffic than before the penalty.
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