Questions created by LilyRay
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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!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LilyRay1 -
Help, really struggling with fixing mistakes post-Penguin
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!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0 -
Our site has been penalized and it's proving to be very hard to get our rankings back...
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0 -
Why do we temporarily rank for highly competitive words after writing a related blog post?
I write for a blog that Google probably "likes" at this point because we update so frequently and get a decent amount of traffic. Sometimes this happens and it has always been puzzling to me: Let's use an example. Say I write a blog called "How to eat spaghetti." For the next few days, we will get a ton of traffic for people who type "spaghetti." But when I check us on rank trackers we are nowhere to be found for that term. What is happening here? Sometimes the traffic will all be international and located in some random city in Africa or something. Any thoughts? Super confused by this. We have gotten lots of traffic for extremely competitive words because of this, but it only lasts a couple days.
Reporting & Analytics | | LilyRay0