Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You guys are amazing. Thanks for the quick and thorough feedback!

Thanks, Ryan. I just needed some reassurance and they wanted a second opinion.

My fear is that their ranking on that keyword was hyper inflated because of the insane amount of comment spam (2 yrs worth) and now that the spam is either dissipating or being penalized, the normal duplicate content penalties are kicking in.

Aarrgghhh...cleanup is always harder than starting from scratch.

Dear Mozzers,

I've been working on a friend's website that is fighting for pretty competitive keywords (+90,000 gms) and has been relying almost exclusively on $1800/mo of comment spam to rank on the first page.

Now that I've taken over SEO my first priorities were to:

• eliminate duplicate content
• improve site structure
• optimize internal links
• build legitimate do-follows
• add some keyword density
• fix titles and H tags

Essentially just the basics, right?

But since cancelling the comment spam, rankings for their primary keyword have consistently dropped over the last 3 months. I'm using the same strategies that I've used successfully on at least 6 similar websites.

At the moment their homepage is still almost entirely duplicate content -- which is obviously a huge problem, but it seems a little odd that they could have been held up exclusively by that comment spam for so long, doesn't it?

Even stranger, their authority and trust scores are now higher than any of the competition.

Needless to say, my friends are getting pretty antsy and I'm starting to second guess myself. Do you think I should continue to push them to improve content, eliminate penalties, and build legitimate links -- or should I give in and suggest buying links as a short term solution?

Advice is really appreciated!