Hit hard by Panda 3.3 and Penguin. What to do?

[LilyRay]

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!!

[LilyRay]

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

[randfish]

I've not seen penalties transfer via the 301 very often (in fact, I've only heard stories of it but never seen it confirmed with a public example). I'd probably do the 301 - as you said, it's not a great experience otherwise for visitors who bookmarked or get referred to the old domain.

If you're really nervous, you could create a message that shows up on the site and refers visitors to the new location, but that's a lot of extra work, and requires that extra click, which isn't great for UX.

I suppose if you're sure Google is going to pass the penalty, you could use the 301, but robots.txt block the site from being accessed, so Google wouldn't actually see the site being moved over (thus, it would show Google you're doing this purely for UX and not for SEO).

[LilyRay]

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.

[randfish]

I think this is exactly what Google hoped would happen with the Penguin update - SEOs and marketers who invested in gray/black hat links would have such an utterly horrific time trying to dig out that it would scare a broad swath of the industry into more white hat territory. Whether that's actually working is arguable, but it was certainly a goal of the update.

If you are ready to make the move over to the old domain, I wouldn't stop you. However, if you've built up some valuable brand equity, visitor loyalty and marketing prowess outside of SEO on this site, there's a few other possibilities:

• Work hard on UX  and UI. Google hates penalizing beautiful sites that visitors love, and if you do get a manual review, this can help.
• Make the content truly exceptional, too. Ensure that there's nothing that feels like artificial/manipulative/done-just-for-rankings stuff on the site. Again, this makes it more likely that any reconsideration request will work
• Send out as many requests for link removal as possible and include the lists of where/how you acquired links and how you've tried to remove them in your reconsideration request
• Hope and pray

This process might not get you back in, but it could work. Google's requiring a "good faith" effort and some proof of said effort, but there's a possibility your site might get by. For the future, I'd strongly recommend sticking to entirely editorially given/earned links.

Wish you luck!

[AlanBleiweiss]

if you're having to contact webmasters, I would bet at least some of them are getting bombarded by a lot of similar requests.  If it's on sites of the type I am figuring we're having to deal with (low quality sites that were designed with no care, regard or concern for anything other than low-level SEO), they're very unlikely to care about people harmed by the changes.  And just as likely, want to spend their time figuring out a new get rich off nonsense scheme.

[LilyRay]

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.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Play with fire, get burned.  Yes, you already know that.  No, I don't think you personally should have to suffer through untold similar cliche's.

So here's the reality.  Without cleaning up the profile, it's highly unlikely the site will ever recover.  That leaves the only other reasonable option, which is the drastic one.  Abandon the existing domain as far as SEO goes and start fresh with the clean domain.

That's potentially going to be the biggest challenge to get others to agree to, because those who have the guts to play with fire in a known dangerous environment typically have too big an ego to admit there isn't yet another quick and easy fix that instantly reaps big rewards on the scale that should never have been achieved previously in the first place.

However even Matt Cutts said this past week, that in worst case scenarios, people just may need to start with a new site.  When Matt comes out and says that, you can be sure the potential for all hope to be gone on a now burned site to rebound is now lower than it ever was.