Need help with g00gle penalty

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Pronin

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Hi everyone!
Can you please help me with identifying and getting rid of the penalty.
My main money site (e-commerce) went under the g00gle penalty on March 11, 2012.
Before that I've been buying diverse types of backlinks using approximately 10 keywords pointing to the homepage and 3 deeper pages.
On Feb 23 I have received a "love letter" to my GWT account saying that I have "unnatural links."
On March 11 the site fell from top 10 for ALL targeted keywords. The initial fall seemed like -50 to -10 but after a while the targeted keywords fell beyond 1000.
The overall traffic did not fall, it actually has even increased (the site has approx 6k pages), but all the "money keywords" were sunk.
All additional links (including high-PR ones) seemed to have an adverse effect.
Until now I have managed to remove the majority of high-PR links, but the effect was the same - zero. For 4 months already the site is not visible for it's main money keywords.
No reconsideration request was sent so far.
Does anyone have an idea (or maybe even a successful experience) what should I do to return to the previous rankings?

Thanks in advance

P.S. I can send an URL via PM for an analysis
 
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Same thing happened to me. I think your best bet is to just wait it out, and work on something new.

I ended up 301'ing the penalized domain to a aged domain. But the penalty caught up like a month later.
 
I'm also thinking about 301'ing to the other domain, but it does not seem like a final solution.
 
If you got a "unnatural link" letter then it's a manual penalty. 301 won't work. It's like leaving a forwarding address for the IRS.

Are the money pages still indexed? Search for them by URL and they show up?

Is the "money" content high quality? Perfect - sentence structure, paragraphs, punctuation, no excessive advertising?

I would guess that the high-PR links aren't the problem, but the spammy links should be pruned first. If you can't delete the crap links, I'd move the money pages to new URLs and let the links 404 or if you can 410. Remove the old page URLs from the sitemap and add the new ones.

Are your other 5,997 pages high PR? Do you have good internal linking?

If yes: do a little pagerank sculpting by adding one internal link from a high PR internal page that is frequently visited to each of the newly renamed high quality landing pages and don't build any inbound links. Make sure the sitemap is pinged or ping the new page URLs - once!

See what happens in a week. If you rebound, don't submit a reconsideration request. If not, submit it and tell them you removed the old pages and let the "unnatural links" die.

Good luck.
 
It looks like your homepage was slapped by Penguin. Evidence shows that Penguin is page specific which is why you are still getting long tail traffic to the majority of your sub pages that you havent linked to (and are healthy).

What you can do is take any sub pages that are supposedly also slapped and move them to new pages with new url/pathway. Leave the old urls dead...as user "cdenet" said. Idea is to try break the link between the pages where the "negative" link juice is flowing to your site.

Imagine each page being a window through which link juice is entering your site. Not only close, but destroy the windows where the old crappy links are being pointed and move the content to new location.

This could solve the problem with some of the money pages, but it is unlikely for the homepage problem to be solved.

What you can do is clone the whole site. And do a 100% 301 redirection..on a page-to-page basis. Just leave the homepage without any redirect. This way you are going to forward only the healthy pages and eventually your new homepage will also suck some of that.

Wish you good luck and do update us on the progress of your work as I find it critically important for all of us to get as much case studies as possible.
 
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This is probably what you do not want to hear but I think your best option is to wait it out, since this is a manual penalty you literally on their radar and will most likely have to play in the "sandbox for a while"
 
Thank you all for the replies!
The site, including the money pages, is still indexed well and the g-bot crawls it every day. The texts on the money pages are top quality without any excessive use of keywords.
I got rid of the majority of high-pr links but spammy links (including those from now-deindexed blogs) are uncontrollable.
As I have 6,320 pages in index I'll try the tip with money-pages URLs change and some PR sculpting.
The homepage, however, leaves some questions... What do you think about the following plan:
1) I change the URL of the homepage. Currently it is mysite.com. I'll change it to mysite.com/home and will put no redirect from the old homepage.
2) To compensate the loss of the link juice, I'll use some service for drip-fed directory submission, and submit the new page to whois sites via indexkings, possibly add some drip-fed social bookmarking services, fb likes, etc.
3) I'll put a link to the new homepage from every page of the site using some keyword from the homepage title.
4) Wait for 10-15 days to see the effect...
Waiting out without any action kills me. Moreover, the time is not on my side. The cash flow almost stopped 4 months ago, with current levels being too low. There are no signs that the penalty has any expiration date.
 
Just continue building quality links manually, your site will be back on track.
 
"Quality links" must be the most abused term ever. What are those? Can someone define? Are those high-PR links? Blog posts? Wikis? Directories? Articles? Web 2.0s? Bookmarks? Press releases?
To my mind, "quality links" are "links that work." But how can I know beforehand? Those links that must have triggered the "unnatural link" penalty were also working for me before February...
 
Seems like a solid plan. Change the homepage to domain.com/homepage and put the whole site there. The navigation and cross linking should give the new homepage weight and eventually to outweight the old one.

If in theory the penguin is page based this should work. I am currently testing out pretty much the same approach on a site that has been hit.

Please do share the outcome. I don't think the effect will come in 15 days though. I'd give it at least a month for new money pages to be indexed and the new diverse anchor links which you will build to be well indexed and to start flow positive link juice to the new pages.

Good luck

Pronin said:
Thank you all for the replies!
The site, including the money pages, is still indexed well and the g-bot crawls it every day. The texts on the money pages are top quality without any excessive use of keywords.
I got rid of the majority of high-pr links but spammy links (including those from now-deindexed blogs) are uncontrollable.
As I have 6,320 pages in index I'll try the tip with money-pages URLs change and some PR sculpting.
The homepage, however, leaves some questions... What do you think about the following plan:
1) I change the URL of the homepage. Currently it is mysite.com. I'll change it to mysite.com/home and will put no redirect from the old homepage.
2) To compensate the loss of the link juice, I'll use some service for drip-fed directory submission, and submit the new page to whois sites via indexkings, possibly add some drip-fed social bookmarking services, fb likes, etc.
3) I'll put a link to the new homepage from every page of the site using some keyword from the homepage title.
4) Wait for 10-15 days to see the effect...
Waiting out without any action kills me. Moreover, the time is not on my side. The cash flow almost stopped 4 months ago, with current levels being too low. There are no signs that the penalty has any expiration date.
Click to expand...
 
nikolaalx said:
It looks like your homepage was slapped by Penguin
Click to expand...

It's not penguin because of the date of the penalty (penguin was release on April 24/25) plus the fact that you got a message in WMT (penguin is an algorithmic penalty and this is a manual penalty). A manual penalty will time expire eventually. The length of the penalty is based on what you have done wrong. The worse it is, the longer the penalty.

You have 2 options now, wait it out or correct the issues and submit a reconsideration request (basically a polite email saying i'm a naughty boy and i'm sorry but i have done this this and this since to correct it).
 
Any news about our site? is your plan worked?
Pronin said:
Thank you all for the replies!The site, including the money pages, is still indexed well and the g-bot crawls it every day. The texts on the money pages are top quality without any excessive use of keywords.I got rid of the majority of high-pr links but spammy links (including those from now-deindexed blogs) are uncontrollable.As I have 6,320 pages in index I'll try the tip with money-pages URLs change and some PR sculpting.The homepage, however, leaves some questions... What do you think about the following plan:1) I change the URL of the homepage. Currently it is mysite.com. I'll change it to mysite.com/home and will put no redirect from the old homepage.2) To compensate the loss of the link juice, I'll use some service for drip-fed directory submission, and submit the new page to whois sites via indexkings, possibly add some drip-fed social bookmarking services, fb likes, etc.3) I'll put a link to the new homepage from every page of the site using some keyword from the homepage title.4) Wait for 10-15 days to see the effect...Waiting out without any action kills me. Moreover, the time is not on my side. The cash flow almost stopped 4 months ago, with current levels being too low. There are no signs that the penalty has any expiration date.
Click to expand...
 
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