How to re-rank an established website with new content

[ChimplyWebGroup]

I can't help but feel this is a somewhat untapped resource with a distinct lack of information.
There is a massive amount of information around on how to rank a new website, or techniques in order to increase SEO effectiveness, but to rank a whole new set of pages or indeed to 're-build' a site that may have suffered an algorithmic penalty is a harder nut to crack in terms of information and resources.

To start I'll provide my situation;

SuperTED is an entertainment directory SEO project.
It seems likely we may have suffered an algorithmic penalty at some point around Penguin 2.0 (May 22nd) as traffic dropped steadily since then, but wasn't too aggressive really. Then to coincide with the newest Panda 27 (According to Moz) in late September this year we decided it was time to re-assess tactics to keep in line with Google's guidelines over the two years. We've slowly built a natural link-profile over this time but it's likely thin content was also an issue. So beginning of September up to end of October we took these steps;

• Contacted webmasters (and unfortunately there was some 'paid' link-building before I arrived) to remove links
• 'Disavowed' the rest of the unnatural links that we couldn't have removed manually.
• Worked on pagespeed as per Google guidelines until we received high-scores in the majority of 'speed testing' tools (e.g WebPageTest)
• Redesigned the entire site with speed, simplicity and accessibility in mind.
• Htaccessed 'fancy' URLs to remove file extensions and simplify the link structure.
• Completely removed two or three pages that were quite clearly just trying to 'trick' Google. Think a large page of links that simply said 'Entertainers in London', 'Entertainers in Scotland', etc. 404'ed, asked for URL removal via WMT, thinking of 410'ing?
• Added new content and pages that seem to follow Google's guidelines as far as I can tell, e.g;
  Main Category Page Sub-category Pages
• Started to build new links to our now 'content-driven' pages naturally by asking our members to link to us via their personal profiles. We offered a reward system internally for this so we've seen a fairly good turnout.
• Many other 'possible' ranking factors; such as adding Schema data, optimising for mobile devices as best we can, added a blog and began to blog original content, utilise and expand our social media reach, custom 404 pages, removed duplicate content, utilised Moz and much more. It's been a fairly exhaustive process but we were happy to do so to be within Google guidelines.

Unfortunately, some of those link-wheel pages mentioned previously were the only pages driving organic traffic, so once we were rid of these traffic has dropped to not even 10% of what it was previously. Equally with the changes (htaccess) to the link structure and the creation of brand new pages, we've lost many of the pages that previously held Page Authority.
We've 301'ed those pages that have been 'replaced' with much better content and a different URL structure - http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands to simply http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands, for example.

Therefore, with the loss of the 'spammy' pages and the creation of brand new 'content-driven' pages, we've probably lost up to 75% of the old website, including those that were driving any traffic at all (even with potential thin-content algorithmic penalties). Because of the loss of entire pages, the changes of URLs and the rest discussed above, it's likely the site looks very new and probably very updated in a short period of time.

What I need to work out is a campaign to drive traffic to the 'new' site.
We're naturally building links through our own customerbase, so they will likely be seen as quality, natural link-building.
Perhaps the sudden occurrence of a large amount of 404's and 'lost' pages are affecting us?
Perhaps we're yet to really be indexed properly, but it has been almost a month since most of the changes are made and we'd often be re-indexed 3 or 4 times a week previous to the changes.
Our events page is the only one without the new design left to update, could this be affecting us? It potentially may look like two sites in one.
Perhaps we need to wait until the next Google 'link' update to feel the benefits of our link audit.
Perhaps simply getting rid of many of the 'spammy' links has done us no favours - I should point out we've never been issued with a manual penalty. Was I perhaps too hasty in following the rules?

Would appreciate some professional opinion or from anyone who may have experience with a similar process before.

It does seem fairly odd that following guidelines and general white-hat SEO advice could cripple a domain, especially one with age (10 years+ the domain has been established) and relatively good domain authority within the industry.

Many, many thanks in advance.

Ryan.

[max.favilli]

Many, for pure backlinks check the most comprehensive are ahrefs.com and https://majestic.com

[ChimplyWebGroup]

Something does seem wrong, that's what I thought.

The 20,000 links was from our development site, it should never have been indexed. It was taken down (the site) the same week so we should hope any penalty shouldn't stay for long.

8th September seems fishy also, we've certainly not done that ourselves. Is there any way to check these links? Any tool?

Thanks in advance.

[max.favilli]

I think you need an in deep analysis.

There's something definitely very wrong. I can see only 13 keywords, with a backlink profile of more than 500 linking root domains. Your traffic seems to have been in constant decline for a while but in May something happen which sort of killed it completely.

Also looks like you gained around 15/20 thousands links between Oct 9 and 15, that's smelling.

On the 8th of Sep you got 150 root linking domain in one day, wow, that's smelling even more.

[ChimplyWebGroup]

Hi Max,

Thanks for the response.

There was no manual penalty at any point, and there still aren't any showing in WMT.

We're probably only ranking for perhaps 5-10 keywords, and most of them have no competition or are branded. There are a few local long-tail keywords we get traffic from still, such as 'Children's Entertainer in Wembley' and others similar.

This is why I thought of coming to the experts at Moz, it seems fairly strange that BEFORE the algorithm penalty (if indeed there was one) we were ranking fairly well for our industry keywords (think Children's Entertainers, Dancers, Clowns, etc etc) and were probably ranking for over 100 keywords easily.

Since disavowing, link auditing, and removing clearly spammy content + **then **adding new rich content, we're still only ranking for pretty much no keywords after about a month.

As far as I can guess, we've either not been indexed/ranked yet (which seems odd as we used to be indexed fairly regularly) or there's something else going on.

Thanks again for the response.

[max.favilli]

Is google WMT showing any manual penalty? And as far as I can see from a quick look you seem to be indexed for a very very limited number of keywords, how many keywords are originating traffic if you look at WMT?