Trying to escape from Google algorithm ranking drop

[Direct_Ram]

in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates).

• since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings.
• We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages.
• we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80).
• we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions.
• we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content.
• we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords.
• We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower.

1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at.

2. we are even considering going to a new domain and 301'ing all pages to this domain in an attempt to shake off the algorithm filter (penalties). has anyone done this? how long can we expect to get at least the same ranking for the new domain if 301 all urls to it? do you think its worth it? we know the risk of doing this, and so wanted to seek some advice.

3.  we have on the other hand considered the fact that we have disavowed so many links (70%) that this could be a cause of the page two problem, however we are link building according to moz metric standards and majestic standards with no benefit.. do you think we should increase link building?

Advice is appreciated!

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There!

Sounds like you're doing a lot of things by-the-books and "right" "on paper" but it's really tough to know if you're on the right track for sure without seeing the site or an example of some of the links being build, or content, etc.

I say this because "40 links a month" for example sounds like a nice number, but also sounds suspect because that's a pretty sizable amount of links, which makes me wonder about the quality of them.

What I'd be curious about is - what are the things outside of SEO or SEO tactics/fixes have been done? I'm thinking in regards to social, audience building, brand building, design upgrades, content, adding value etc? Also, what type of site is this and how big is it?

The other thing that's tough to know is how well the technical things were implemented. For example, switching to https among other things can create a lot of redirect chains. I would try to undo redirect chains and only do page->page redirects (instead of having chains of page->page->page->page etc).

And right, it's tough to know if your disavow is helping or hurting without knowing a lot of the specifics.

If it was me, I'd make sure you're focusing enough on others things besides just directly on SEO. That doesn't mean you'd ignore SEO when doing social, content, audience building etc - just that you're taking a more holistic view. I think Google definitely favors recovering sites that prove they are building something people want.

[Direct_Ram]

This has been a long struggle which has caused a massive traffic drop. Do you think we should switch to a new domain with 301 redirects?

[MoosaHemani]

If you ask me you are doing everything right and you have to keep doing it. I remember when I was doing the same for one of my client, the rankings did improve but didn’t really hit the first page for many of the real money making keywords.

I think when your website went through Google penalty it took more than usual to gain the trust of Google. If I would be at your place, I would have looked in to the past data and see how every penguin and panda update affect my traffic and rankings.

If the ranking and traffic went positive (significantly) then you should continue what you are doing and wait for the penguin and panda update to release. This way they will look in to your efforts again and give you back the rankings that you deserve.

Also, my advice is to get a link from highest authority websites (if possible) that Google really trust, this should also help big time.

Adding my two cents!