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.
Best posts made by LilyRay
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RE: Help, really struggling with fixing mistakes post-Penguin
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RE: Partner Site Hit with Penguin - Links hurt me
Another good example of something Google didn't quite take into consideration with this update.
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Hit hard by Panda 3.3 and Penguin. What to do?
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!!