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Thank you both for your expertise!  Marie your article is a marvelous resource.  We will continue to dig into the GA but will also seriously consider pursuing the landing page suggestion with a nofollow link out.  Since we are rewriting content as well as redesigning, it seems that will produce the best chance to heal the site.

2 years ago we took over a client who had a hacked site and also had signed up with a black hat SEO team that set up 50 spammy directory links back to the site. Since then we have cleaned up the hacks, had the site reviewed by Google and readded to the Search Index, and disavowed all the directory links through GWT. Over the last 2 years, we've encouraged the client to create new content and have developed a small but engaged social following. The website is www.fishtalesoutfitting.com/.

The site's domain authority is 30, but it struggles to rank higher than 20 for even uncompetitive long tail keywords. Other sites with much lower domain authorities outrank the site for our primary keywords.

We are now overhauling the site design and content. We are considering creating an entirely new URL for the primary domain. We would then use 301 redirects from the old url to the new.   We'd welcome insight into why the current site may still be getting penalized, as well as thoughts on our strategy or other recommendations to recover from the events of 2 years ago. Thank you.

My site's MozRank dropped abruptly from 3.5 to 3 from September to October.  MozRank had been steadily climbing until then and there were no changes made to the site in that time period.  What may have happened?