tantalus - 1:20 pm on Feb 6, 2013 (gmt 0)

"You obviously don't buy into the the idea that it's juss a penalty"

And theres the rub.

The Issue is whether it is a ranking change/addition or a penalty and I believe fathom is advocating the former, which I personally agree with. If true then all those links that were giving you all those wonderful ranking positions before penguin, are just not working any more. So its pointless disavowing them because google has already done it for you.

To be honest I think the whole penguin/links thing is overstated, but maybe thats because I most probably have more of a oop issue than anything else.

BTW I have recovered 90% of my traffic against this time last year. What did I do? Nothing, for the first few months, and then I just carried on as I was before, though I did widen the net a bit.

Still I am not 100% sure it was Penguin. It walked like a penguin, it talked like a penguin, but maybe it was a duck in disguise.

I do think Google has profoundly changed the way it handles citations and takes a much more holistic approach towards a site. (A bit like pageRank but without the "page" bit)

Interesting that just before penguin, masses of links were suddenly included in wmt, and now masses of links are disappearing.

"better to start again with a new domain or give up"

It depends whether you buy into the ranking idea, if you do, then using fathoms numbers you still have a 100 organic links headstart.