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I'm also wondering if anybody has had any experience with askives.com. There are a few sites like that and they must be pretty common among people forced to use the disavow tool... Is there a list anywhere of known sites whos links are viewed as spammy by Google?

Thanks!

Thanks for the insight everyone!

I was also thinking about the possibility of canonicalizing them to pages on the ecommerce site, but am afraid that might have the same detrimental effect as redirecting them.

@Nakul and Todd: The content is not horrible, but they are basically set up as blog rolls. I don't think anyone particularly "likes" the content nor do they share it. For the most part, they are product reviews and announcements from our manufacturers, and I have stopped adding content to the sites because it seemed like a waste, when I could be generating new and better content for the actual e-commerce site and our real blog. That said, there is a tremendous amount of content on these sites from the last 4 years. It was apparently working very well for the company, but not after panda and penguin. Some of the domains are exact matches for our head keywords (that we lost rankings for), others are exact matches for product titles or model numbers. I don't think there was ever an unnatural links warning from Google, but I've seen sites not get a message in GWT but still clearly be penalized for it.

@Moosa: Both. Failed in terms of not generating conversions (or possibly generating a few here and there), but relative to the likely negative effect, I'm just not sure how to handle this. They are our sites, so dissavowing them wouldn't do much good. I could go through and manually remove links and canonicalize them, but I'm wondering if it's better to just take the sites down...

Hi John,

There are a few things you might consider. Keyword stuffing is relative to the total amount of words on the page, so unfortunately there is no way around it but to generate more quality and unique content that are ideally on the page. You could start with the most important pages to you and see if it helps. The easiest way to add more content to the page, without writing more content, is to set list view as your default. Quality and unique short descriptions would be read by search engines on the category page. You can also try and optimise CMS or blog page(s) for the keywords, but that would take putting in the time and resources to making it really unique and value added. Other ideas would be to put tabs for content on the category page.

So the short answer is yes, it is probably seen as keyword stuffing, relative to the amount of content on the page. I know it's not exactly what you wanted to hear, but I hope there are a few helpful ideas in there for you.

While they are great domain names, I suspect my 7 microsites are considered spammy and resulted in a filter on my main e-commerce site for the important keywords we now have a filter blocking from showing up in search. Should I consider it a sunk cost and redirect them all to my main e-commerce site, or is there any reason why that would make things worse? I've fixed just about everything I can thinking of in response to Panda and Penguin, before which we were on the first page for everything. That includes adding hundreds of pages of unique and relevant content, in the form of buyers guides and on e-commerce category pages -- resolving issues of thin content. Then I hid URL parameters in Ajax, sped up the site significantly, started generating new links... nothing... I have tons of new keywords for other categories, but I still clearly have that filter on those few important head keywords. The anchor text on the microsites leading to the main site are typically not exact match, so I don't think that's the issue. It has to be that the sites themselves are considered spammy. My bosses are not going to like the idea because they paid for those awesome domains, but would the best idea be to redirect them to the e-commerce site?

Hi John,

There are a few things you might consider. Keyword stuffing is relative to the total amount of words on the page, so unfortunately there is no way around it but to generate more quality and unique content that are ideally on the page. You could start with the most important pages to you and see if it helps. The easiest way to add more content to the page, without writing more content, is to set list view as your default. Quality and unique short descriptions would be read by search engines on the category page. You can also try and optimise CMS or blog page(s) for the keywords, but that would take putting in the time and resources to making it really unique and value added. Other ideas would be to put tabs for content on the category page.

So the short answer is yes, it is probably seen as keyword stuffing, relative to the amount of content on the page. I know it's not exactly what you wanted to hear, but I hope there are a few helpful ideas in there for you.