No Google Manual Penalty, but lost rankings. New domain move? Any advice appreciated

First off - Thank You for your time and trouble.

I did try the search function, and did find some info, but not exact. And I will try and keep this as far from a review as I can.

I have a site that had no manual google penalty, yet I did have some bad backlinks from a 2011 bad seo strategy. So I am assuming based on my dramatic fall from the google search, that it was all algorithm or some sort of bad link based issue.

I know everyone has a Dr. Phil like story, but my website is my families main website for work, as we do construction. So without placing like it did, it greatly affects potential clients.
So my objective is to get back up to where it once was.

So I started to remove bad backlinks, which I found many site charging up to $20. per link removal. So for those I did a Disavow, I am not rich to pay over and over again.
This has been a month or so now, and no real improvement. Now I know I need quality links to help, but from what I read using the search tool here, is that once you are hit with an issue no matter if you get a manual penalty or not, you may never get back the search placement that you once enjoyed.

So my question is:
What would be the best strategy if the theory of regaining the original search position is impossible?

My thoughts were to:
#1 My original.com site is like 12 pages back in Google instead of page #1
If I were to make a new domain
Say Example.com
And then use the same files, would I be ok? or would I get say a duplicate content penalty? Or if you just change some text and a few titles and such, if I would be ok?

#2 Do I start fresh with a whole new site and let the other site just kind of see what happens in the future?

#3 Can I rename the penalty site, or say delete the home page where all of the bad links are going to and rename it? Like if the new site is Example.com, but just have that old penalty url Original.com point to the new site for the benefit of previous customers? Or would the penalty follow it?

I know I am lost, but that is why I am here and proud to be a member of such a great network of experts. Thank you for any advice that you are willing to give.

Have a Blessed Day
Chris

 

There are a few things that you can consider:

1) Get more site-related content onto your site. Google loves original content - a mixture of long and short posts

2) Get Social - be active on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and have those social buttons on your content as well. Google also indexes all the content you put out on these Social Sites and the more participation you can get from your community, it will help in your site rankings.

3) Learn a bit of onsite and offsite SEO, for e.g. Keywords, Keyword Density, Internal Linking, External Linking

4) Understand your Competitors - they can be the ones that are pushing your rankings down

If these are not really helping much... you may wish to consider getting your old content onto a new site and start afresh (but work even harder).

You can get onto Google Webmaster Tools and put up the option that your old site will be found at the new site and to play safe, you can put up a meta text to noindex and nofollow to each of your content at the old site - this will remove any site/content index for your old site and you can stop worrying about the Duplicate Content Penalty.

There are definitely many other factors affecting or will improve your site so you may want to consider exploring the rest first before moving on to get a new site...

 

Thanks for sharing you wevsute situation! You did link Building according to 2011 SEO strategy & after aware bad links results. You remove links & some Disallow due to help of Google websmaster tool Disavow links. So now :-

1. If you same pages for your new Domain than it will be counted as Duplicate & Google won't appreciate it. So don't use same pages for your new Doamin.

2. There is no need to start whole work with you website ! You have already removed links & disallow too. So no need.

3. Yes I think now you should try for delete home page becuase there is hug penalty.

 

Chris, recovering from a penalty is not impossible. Just like you received an algorithm penalty, you can undo the work you've done in the first place to recover your rankings to where they used to be. It will require some hard work and at the end of the day money if you decide to outsource it. I would recommend outsourcing it because lets' face it you are a construction guy and not an SEO guy.

When you remove enough over-optimized and spammy/toxic links you can start ranking again. My website was hit with a penalty like yours and I got started right away with a company to handle it for me.

The question is whether or not you have established a brand for your business. If so I would keep your domain and get started fixing it right away. The longer you wait the longer it will take to recover.

 

No i didn't agree with you you can recover from penalty what you are going to need is the strategy !!

 

As per my suggestion, Start fresh domain and and try to focus on good quality content and quality back links. Leave the old domain until you new site is promoted well. i think it will take hardly 2 to 3 months for new site. if you know what is wrong with you old domain. you past learning will help you more. When you new site become popular, add 302 redirection of old domain to new domain or you can use Iframe.

 

Did you drop entirely from the rankings (de-indexed), or did your rankings simply slip (drop from #6 to #39)?

If you only slipped in the rankings, and you didn't receive notice of a manual penalty in Webmaster tools, then it's totally algorithmic and I wouldn't even worry about getting rid of the old links. Simply start building new, quality links and you'll start to climb again.

 

Building new links will only add to the problem. That's like trying to perform open heart surgery with an ax.
Algorithm penalties are a result of over-optimized backlink profiles that include low quality links. Don't mistake that Google's used the disavow data in the recent Penguin algorithm updates. You can bet they have started to account for those low quality domains in the most recent update and will likely roll out more and more updates with these domains accounted for.
Algo recovery requires link cleanup, not spamming more links and getting the site into a bigger hole.

 

tycho - in my experience helping clients recover from algorithmic drops related to Penguin, building new, high-quality links, the right way solves the problem (THIS WILL NOT SOLVE MANUAL ACTION PENALTIES). Let me explain why I think it works so well for algorithmic penalties:

Let's suppose a site is has 100 comment-spam backlinks, 50 of which contain the exact anchor text "Laser Printer." Let's also suppose that all of the backlinks are pointed at the home page of the site. Finally, let's suppose that the site drops from page 1 of Google to page 6 immediately following a Penguin update, but there was no manual action reported in Webmaster Tools.

If the drop coincides with a Penguin update, I would venture a guess that the drop is Penguin-related and probably has to do with one (or both) of the following:

1. The Penguin update devalued comment-spam links by some factor. So if the site was getting X juice from those links before, it's now only getting the devalued amount of juice and the ranking suffered as a result.
2. The Penguin update penalized the over-optimization of the term "Laser Printer." There is simply too high of a ratio of "Laser Printer" links compared to the rest.

What I would do to fix each of them (the same solution fixes both, but let's deal with them individually).

1. If you have a site that is on page 6 and you want it to climb to page 1, you need to build high quality links. If you only have enough link juice (as currently calculated by the algorithm) to be on page 6, the site needs new links. However, instead of just blasting more comment spam, when you focus on high-quality links and get enough of them you climb the rankings. It's just how SEO works. So, if the algorithm thinks you belong on page 6, you have to convince it you belong on page 1. The best way to do this is more high-quality links.
2. If you have a site that is over-optimized for a specific keyword, you've got to fix the ratio and bring it back to normal. Simple math says there are 2 ways to do this ... getting rid of some of the over-optimized links, or diluting the over-optimization by adding new links ... here's what I mean ...

If you have 50 of 100 links for "Laser Printer," 50% of your links target that single keyword. I think we can all agree that this ratio represents over-optimization. While the appropriate level of optimization for a single term is open for debate, let's just say that the ideal ratio is 10% of your links. So, to go from 50% to 10%, you have two choices:

• Remove 45 of your "Laser Printer" links, dropping your total counts to 5 "Laser Printer" links and 55 total links. All of a sudden, your ratio is 10% and the algorithm loves you. Once you are within the acceptable limits, you should bounce back, except you now only have 55 links, and before you had 100 ... if all you do is remove links, you only typically see a partial recovery because your total number of links drops. Remember that having a negative link velocity does not make you seem like a winner in the eyes of the search engines.
• Or, you can build enough non "Laser Printer" links to fix the ratio. If there's nothing wrong with your links in the first place (except for over-optimization) there's no reason to get rid of them. Instead, to go from 50% to 10%, you just need to build 400 high-quality links around anything EXCEPT "Laser Printer." Then, all sorts of good things happen. First, with a ratio of 50/500 (10%) Google doesn't think you're over-optimizing, and second, you've just built 400 high-quality links, you have great link velocity, and you climb back to page 1, usually higher than you were before.

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So, while I'm not saying you shouldn't get rid of bad links (if you're sure they're bad), don't waste a bunch of time trying to fix the past. Clean up the ones that are easy to fix, and then start giving Google what it wants, high quality links. When you do this, the bleeding stops itself and you find yourself back on top.

Now, if you've gotten a manual penalty ... it's a different story. But this was a question about algorithmic penalties, so I've kept my comments focused on those.

 

So you were able to recover?