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I think the length of my other question might be turning people away. This question is more direct.

Last year we fell off google rankings fairly quickly (mid-2013), out of the blue. We thought it was Penguin; but after looking at Analytic data of organic google visits; there seems to be no drastic loss of traffic at any time. Our site's loss of traffic is a gradual decline, not immediately noticeable, as in this video (~33:00 minutes in ). If there is no drop in organic google traffic that's noticeable, can I safely assume our drop in rankings wasn't due to an algorithm update?

Background:
We've come to the realization that Google's Penguin update back in 2013 has penalized us and are just now attending to the issue. We had subscribed to a link-building service for years and just recently cancelled their services. Unfortunately those links are still out there. We've submitted a disavow list to Google on January 14, 2014; but there is no way to tell when/if they processed it.

Our homepage used to rank in the top three listings for our main keyword, but now we're somewhere around #31 on page 4. It's not even our homepage that ranks any longer either; its a page specifically created recently that is tailored to our main keyword.

What I've Done So Far Using MOZ, I determined our homepage was using our keyword 53 times in various ways; so I dwindled that down to 27. I built a new page tailored to our main keyword that apparently is ranking in Google as #31 now; not gaining any placement at all though. I've implemented canonical tags in the

<header>of most pages (usually just linked to itself to minimize duplicate pages being detected from URL variables and such). I've worked on Title and meta description length issues.

Duplicate Content?
We sell hotels, so we have a ton of internal links 500+ hotels, linking to/from one another. One page might have 100 hotel links (all internal). Another category page might be duplicating half of those links. For example, we have 200 all-inclusive resorts, so they are listed as links with the hotel name and a short description. On an adults-only page, we have 100 resorts, but 75 of them are the same resorts as on the all-inclusive page; so it may appear like duplicate content. << Not sure how to combat this. ?

Too Many internal Links on Homepage?
Our homepage: navigation bar has 68 links, rest of page has ~74 links. I've read that that's too many and other people say it's fine as long as your page has textual content that is long enough. Any thoughts?

Domain Name Change?
An SEO company that we talked to said they would transform our site into a Wordpress-based site for SEO reasons and that we should change our domain name; thus starting fresh and ridding us of the bad/spammy links that are coming to us. They also said they have several high-quality ranking pages that they would write articles on and link to us.

Considering we don't have many good links to our site to begin with, what are your thoughts on a domain name change? It's drastic and we're not that open to the idea (yet).

Would the SEO's link-building technique be what MOZ is talking about in his video 7 days ago. If so, I think that's a scary route to take; especially when after we stop the SEO's services, they said our links would come off those pages. Won't google see that happen and flag us as using black-hat tactics?

As for Wordpress; we have 500+ hotels.. so that's doable, but a chore in itself. If our CMS code and website can be cleaned up some I think our custom CMS is fine for SEO. Any WP fanatics out there think WP is good for 700+ page sites? *we already have our CMS programmed to pull data from vendors; so that code would need rewritten also to work with WP.

Analytics Data
I reviewed Google Analytics closely looking at the google organic traffic closely from Jan 2012 till now and I don't see any sudden drops; just gradual decreases. Is this normally the case for Penguin-hit sites; or shouldn't there be a sudden drop in organic traffic?

If you've read this far; THANK YOU. Any comments to the above questions are appreciated.

</header>

Janice: Curious how your changing the domain name went a few years ago. Did you experience any negatives to doing so? What about positives? -- Thanks. (yes, i know this was over a year ago)

Really doubt GoDaddy will give you a refund. If you do absolutely nothing with them, I doubt you will be sued just for owning them. I wouldn't bother bringing the issue to the companies attention at all; you may be on their radar then. Personally I'd use them for legitimate purposes like creating fan sites; but would keep advertising and any money-making schemes off the sites for at least several months. Build some social media pages for them and make it like a real fan site. That way it will be less-likely they come after you later on saying you were just trying to make a quick buck. Do not put a phrase on the sites saying "buy this domain name" or anything like that.  Just my 2 cents (* not legal advice)

I might question adding the same keyword with just a number as an ALT tag to the images might be flagged as keyword spamming. If you have a full page (gallery) showing 20-50 dresses to the user all at once, you'd also have 20-50 ALT tags that are basically the same. - So I'd suggest watching out for that issue. Perhaps you can tell when reading from a database, how many dresses will be appearing on screen and then just program it so it shows the ALT tag on only 1/8 of them or 1/4 of them, or whatever works out proportionally.

If you have old wordpress databases sitting around, it would only be a problem if you still have the WP that's connected to them still around also. If so, anyone (or a bot) that visits the old installs would be pulling data from the DB and thus draining a small fraction of resources away from your current install of WP. This shouldn't be a problem, considering you mentioned they are experimental and I assume are not in production. The more pull on the database, the more bogged down your server could become at a given time; usually not an issue unless you get sudden spikes of traffic on your experimental WP installs; which would slow production WP down. Hope that made sense.

Having a discussion with my boss over whether the following page is over-saturated (stuffed) with keywords in the element: http://www.godreamvacations.com/BarceloHotels -- We implemented the description and keyword tag text back in 2010 when the boss gave me the text. Anyone have any good responses to the bosses' response (below)?

"These are the ones (pages) that are actually working wonderfully well on Bing. At the time, I researched the optimal number of characters and tried to really follow all that was suggested by SEO experts. As far as the keywords, I would say you could remove the ones without the “s”, for example, take out “Barcelo Hotel” and leave “Barcelo Hotels” I think this is all relevant to what is found on the page. I don’t know what they would expect us to do differently than this. Do you? What is your MOZ currently saying is the optimal number of characters for a Title?"

Any responses would be appreciated. Am I wrong in saying it's "stuffed" and looks spammy? What would you tell your boss?

I might question adding the same keyword with just a number as an ALT tag to the images might be flagged as keyword spamming. If you have a full page (gallery) showing 20-50 dresses to the user all at once, you'd also have 20-50 ALT tags that are basically the same. - So I'd suggest watching out for that issue. Perhaps you can tell when reading from a database, how many dresses will be appearing on screen and then just program it so it shows the ALT tag on only 1/8 of them or 1/4 of them, or whatever works out proportionally.

If you have old wordpress databases sitting around, it would only be a problem if you still have the WP that's connected to them still around also. If so, anyone (or a bot) that visits the old installs would be pulling data from the DB and thus draining a small fraction of resources away from your current install of WP. This shouldn't be a problem, considering you mentioned they are experimental and I assume are not in production. The more pull on the database, the more bogged down your server could become at a given time; usually not an issue unless you get sudden spikes of traffic on your experimental WP installs; which would slow production WP down. Hope that made sense.

Really doubt GoDaddy will give you a refund. If you do absolutely nothing with them, I doubt you will be sued just for owning them. I wouldn't bother bringing the issue to the companies attention at all; you may be on their radar then. Personally I'd use them for legitimate purposes like creating fan sites; but would keep advertising and any money-making schemes off the sites for at least several months. Build some social media pages for them and make it like a real fan site. That way it will be less-likely they come after you later on saying you were just trying to make a quick buck. Do not put a phrase on the sites saying "buy this domain name" or anything like that.  Just my 2 cents (* not legal advice)