Hello fellow mozzers. I am interested in getting the communities opinion on how to fix an extremely bad link profile, or whether it would be easier to start over on a new domain.
This is for an e-commerce site that sells wedding rings. Prior to coming to our agency, the client had been using a different service that was doing some serious black hat linkbuilding on a truly staggering scale.
Of the roughly 53,000 links that show up in OSE, 16,500 of them have the anchor text "wedding rings", 1,300 "wedding ring sets", etc. For contrast, there are only two "visit website", and just one domain name anchor text. So it is about the farthest from natural you can get.
Anyway, the site traffic was doing great until the end of February, when it took a massive hit and lost over half the day to day traffic volume, and steadily declined until April 24th (Penguin), when it took another huge hit and lost almost 70% of traffic from Google. Note that the traffic from Yahoo/Bing stayed the same.
So the question is, is it worth trying to clean up this mess of a backlink profile or would it be smarter to start fresh with a new domain?