Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed

[mlm12]

Hi,
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page.

We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust.  We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH!

I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below...  I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory).

We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains),  - this makes up 80% of our links.

As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this.

We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if  possible, hence my questions.

We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them.

1. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow?

2. For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too?  Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing?

3. For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do?

4. For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed).

5. How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you?  We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure).  When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do.

6. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress  (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this).

7. What would you do if this was you?  Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)?  Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect?

Thanks for your input and advice.  We appreciate it.

[mlm12]

Hi Chris,
Thanks - BTW - I don't have 200 links in my footer - I have 200 pages on my site, with about 20 navigational links in the footer.

[Chris.Menke]

#3. Yes, that's what I would do.

#5. I mean a link that is/was helping you algorithmicaly to a certain extent due to the authority that external page was able to accumulate.

#6. 200 links in your footer?  I wouldn't put that in the non-crazy ridiculous category.  You really only need footer links to help visitor navigation.  A lot of people put them there to help with SEO but in most cases they're not really effective at that.  I'd suggest getting rid of most of those.

[mlm12]

Hi Chris,
Thanks for your response.

So for #3, you wouldn't mess with malicious sites - just go straight to a disavow?

For #5  - I'm glad it's not "that easy" then for people to tank one another.  Can you clarify when you said "It's the links that cross a certain threshold of strength AND fit the mold of inorganic that trip the filter."  I don't quite follow what you mean.  Is this an example of if you haven't been doing any link cleaning for 5 years (like we have) we may have exceeded a certain number and now it will "bite us"?

For #6 -  you say "Don't worry about anchor text within your own site, as long as it's not crazy ridiculous".  Right now, we have 200+ pages on our site - which makes 200+ footer anchor text links - I can't imagine this could be an issue as we don't have a big site - do you agree? We did use a KWP in our footer really because it's descriptive of what our page was about and helping people understand - but i have since changed it to be safe.

Our biggest traffic drop was right on Sept 27/28 - we moved to 1/2 of the traffic we had prior to that - and I understand that was a Panda update. We do have some definite quality issues. I thought if you lined up your traffic drop to a Panda update that's how you could tell?

Thanks

[Chris.Menke]

MLM,

1. Per Google, just disavowing links isn't enough to make your reconsideration request successful, G also wants to see a good faith effort to get your toxic links removed whenever possible.

2. If a site no longer exists and the pages that contain links  to your site not longer exist, it may take some time for them to disappear from the crawl indexes but  you won't have to do anything about them--the links are non-existent.

3.For purposes of your reinclusion request, you should make note of  the fact that the sites were marked as malicious and include those links in your disavow link file.

4. If you have reason to believe that the links on those foreign sites are inorganic you can still attempt to contact the webmaster with your removal request, and if no response, add them to your disavow link file.

5. Its my conjecture that effective negative SEO is likely to be as expensive as link building for your own site, which means that someone going out and buying a bunch of low quality links and pointing them at your site is not going to do anything.  It's  the links that cross a certain threshold of strength AND fit the mold of inorganic that trip the filter.  Once tripped, however, the owner is stuck with cleaning up the whole mess.

6. Don't worry about anchor text within your own site, as long as it's not crazy ridiculous.

If it was my site, I'd be focusing on whether it was panda or not.  A site with a penquin penalty may be salvageable but one with a panda penalty may not be. As far as your toxic links, don't forget you can move your linked-to content to new URLs and leave the old ones to 404--it's an option if you don't have bad ones pointing to your home page.  301ing to a new domain is generally considered to eventually redirect your penalty to the new domain as well, so I wouldn't go that route.