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Thank you Rand. I also think this is the best idea. Really appreciate the help.

Wow, a response from Rand! I'm honored :-D. Thank you for your input.

You're definitely right about Google "scaring" people into White Hat SEO and I think they were very effective in that sense.

I'm actually going to be moving onto a new (strictly white hat) marketing company but I need to come up with a future plan for this current (penalized) site.

If I advise this company to rebuild a website using the old domain, what would you suggest as far as redirecting the current (penalized) domain? I've heard a 301 redirect transfers the penalty to the new site. But I do anticipate that there will be a good number of visitors landing on the penalized site. Should I build a page that doesn't redirect but tells users "Please visit "newdomain.com" to learn more about our company" ? Or should we have both sites live simultaneously and just create all new content so as to avoid the duplicate content issue? Any suggestions?

Thank you all.

Thank you for the advice Alan. Maybe we can hope that over time all those sites get deindexed and so the links disappear on their own, because I'm finding it impossible to contact webmasters / they don't seem happy to help us out.

Hi there.

I work with a company that was originally all white hat, then began to dabble in some pretty serious black hat activities last year (usually paid linking in private blog networks). At the time we saw tremendous results - many of our most highly competitive keywords shot up 20, 30 positions to the top 10. And they didn't seem to budge so long as we kept those (very expensive) links intact.

Alongside all of this, we have had a lot of white hat activity going on (pretty much everything recommended by Google/SEO Moz is ALSO in effect on this domain - lots of consistent/relevant blogging, social media, good content, good on-site SEO, etc), which I attribute to SOME of our success with keyword ranking, but what really made the difference was the paid linking. Let's just say we had two different mindsets behind the SEO strategy of the company, and the "Get rich quick" one worked for a while. Now, it doesn't. (Can you guess if I'm the white hat or the black hat at the company?)

So here's my question. I have made the effort to contact all of the webmasters  of our egregious links and, as everyone else has described, it is effectively useless. Especially given the amazing post by Ryan Kent on this question (http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links) I have sort of given up on the strategy of contacting these webmasters on a case by case basis and asking for the links to be removed, especially if Google is not going to accept anything less than a perfect backlink portfolio. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to clean up these links.

Meanwhile, this company is a big name in a very competitive online market and it really needs to see lead generation from organic SEO. (Please don't give me any told-you-so's here, it was out of my hands.)

MY QUESTION IS:

WHAT SHOULD WE DO? Should we just keep the domain going and focus on only building quailty links from now on? Most of our keywords fall anywhere from position 40 to position 150 right now, so it's not like ALL hope is lost. But as any SEO knows that is basically as good as not being indexed at all.

OTHER OPTION: We have an old domain that is the less-SEO-friendly, but it is the official name of our company . com, and this domain is currently 301'd to our live (SEO-friendly) domain. The companyname.com domain is also older than our SEO friendly domain. Should we manually move our site back over to the old domain since there is no penalty on it? It seems like a lot of sites that are ranking are brand new anyway (except their URL's are loaded with keywords.)

Blah, I know that was a lot, but I'm feeling lost and ANY insight would be helpful.

Thanks as always SEOMoz!!

Another good example of something Google didn't quite take into consideration with this update.

It was partially out of my control. Pressure from higher ups for instantaneous results. I've always supported and wanted to stick to white hat seo.

We had previously implemented a strategy of paying for lots of links and focusing on 3 or 4 keywords as our anchors, which used to REALLY work (I know, I know, bad black hat strategy - I have since learned my lesson). These keywords and others have since plummeted up to 100 spots since Panda 3.3 and Penguin.  So I'm trying to go in and fix all our mistakes cuz our domain is too valuable to us just to start over from scratch.

Yesterday I literally printed a 75 page document of all of our links according to Open Site Explorer. I have been going in and manually changing anchor text wherever I can, and taking down the very egregious links if possible.This has involved calling and emailing webmasters, digging up old accounts and passwords, and otherwise just trying to diversify our anchor text and remove bad links.  I've also gone into our site and edited some internal links (also too weighty on certain keywords) and removed other links entirely.

My rankings have gone DOWN more today. A lot. WTF does Google want?  Is there something I'm doing wrong?  Should we be deleted links from all private networks entirely or just trying to vary the anchor text?  Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Hey Tommy. Thanks for the response.

The black hat stuff was just paid linking in one way or another.

Working very hard on creating content. I don't even know where to begin to get rid of some of the links we built up.

It's pretty hard to ignite a response from Google Plus users given teh fact that the public in general doesn't really like or want to  buy the product that my company sells, if that makes sense.

So I have a question.

We have used nearly every trick in the book to rank our site, including a ton of white hat stuff.... but then also a lot of black hat practices that resulted in us dropping in the rankings by about 30-40 positions. And getting back to where we were (top 10 for most keywords) is proving to be nearly impossible.

We have a ton of great content coming off of the site and we actually offer a quality product. We follow most of the guidelines advocated here on SEOmoz. But the black hat stuff we did has really taken a toll.

And it's gonna be pretty much impossible to go back in time and erase all of the Black Hat stuff we did.

So what should we do? Should we design a completely new website with a new domain? What can be done to help?

I figured it out. Looks like the corresponding image in that blog entry got indexed on Google Images and ranks #3 because that one hot word is in the alt tag. Crazy

It was partially out of my control. Pressure from higher ups for instantaneous results. I've always supported and wanted to stick to white hat seo.

Another good example of something Google didn't quite take into consideration with this update.

Hi there.

I work with a company that was originally all white hat, then began to dabble in some pretty serious black hat activities last year (usually paid linking in private blog networks). At the time we saw tremendous results - many of our most highly competitive keywords shot up 20, 30 positions to the top 10. And they didn't seem to budge so long as we kept those (very expensive) links intact.

Alongside all of this, we have had a lot of white hat activity going on (pretty much everything recommended by Google/SEO Moz is ALSO in effect on this domain - lots of consistent/relevant blogging, social media, good content, good on-site SEO, etc), which I attribute to SOME of our success with keyword ranking, but what really made the difference was the paid linking. Let's just say we had two different mindsets behind the SEO strategy of the company, and the "Get rich quick" one worked for a while. Now, it doesn't. (Can you guess if I'm the white hat or the black hat at the company?)

So here's my question. I have made the effort to contact all of the webmasters  of our egregious links and, as everyone else has described, it is effectively useless. Especially given the amazing post by Ryan Kent on this question (http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links) I have sort of given up on the strategy of contacting these webmasters on a case by case basis and asking for the links to be removed, especially if Google is not going to accept anything less than a perfect backlink portfolio. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to clean up these links.

Meanwhile, this company is a big name in a very competitive online market and it really needs to see lead generation from organic SEO. (Please don't give me any told-you-so's here, it was out of my hands.)

MY QUESTION IS:

WHAT SHOULD WE DO? Should we just keep the domain going and focus on only building quailty links from now on? Most of our keywords fall anywhere from position 40 to position 150 right now, so it's not like ALL hope is lost. But as any SEO knows that is basically as good as not being indexed at all.

OTHER OPTION: We have an old domain that is the less-SEO-friendly, but it is the official name of our company . com, and this domain is currently 301'd to our live (SEO-friendly) domain. The companyname.com domain is also older than our SEO friendly domain. Should we manually move our site back over to the old domain since there is no penalty on it? It seems like a lot of sites that are ranking are brand new anyway (except their URL's are loaded with keywords.)

Blah, I know that was a lot, but I'm feeling lost and ANY insight would be helpful.

Thanks as always SEOMoz!!