I have a website that determines the best products by aggregating user reviews from product ratings taken from several other sites and combining them to get an overall percentage. It then lists the products by category according to highest rated. This is a site I want to continue to develop and I actually want to make it as useful as possible.
First a brief history:
March 2011:
I started the site in March 2011 and at first it was basically product lists in order of highest rated products along with affiliate links to where you can buy them. I did some linkbuilding and within two weeks, I was ranking on the first page for phrases such as "best protein powder" and got about 100 unique visits per day. Two weeks later I got hit with what I think was either a thin affiliate or possibly a duplicate content penalty (my site had no unique content). My rankings went from first page to between positions 400 - 1000 for all my keywords. My brand name "All User Reviews" ranked 200 - 300.
June 2011:
I decided to add content to the category pages by scraping text reviews and product descriptions from Amazon and collecting video reviews from Youtube and displaying them on my site in a useful way. I now know this scraping was a terrible idea.
July 2011:
My whole site bounced back July 5th and 6th, for all pages. On the 7th, it went right back down. I decided to take out the scraped content. After taking out all of the scraped content, I added unique content to end of each category page and unique product descriptions for each of the top 10 products that are shown by default. I also added functions that allow you to see more products.
September 2011:
Fixed multiple H1 tags issue which I thought could be causing a problem. Google just recrawled my site. No luck.
Throughout this time, I have built a variety of links using article marketing, blog network sites, some lower quality profile links, some forums, etc. Google Reconsideration Request has told me that it is not a manual penalty. It's an algorithmic filter. Matt Cutts says if you change what's wrong with your site with an algorithmic filter, it will fix after a recrawl. I've waited two months for Panda to recrawl it after adding the original content and I still rank past position #600 for all my targeted keywords. My brand name has jumped from page 1 to page 18 repeatedly. Only weird thing is that I rank #4 for "best kw1 kw2 2011". No clue why as all others rank past page 60. Filter is definitely sitewide and not page specific.
The only thing I think it might be is an anchor text over optimization filter for having too many exact anchor text links. Not sure how to fix this or if it would worth trying at this point.
Should I just start over on a new domain? If I do, should I not use a 301 redirect considering it's redirecting from a penalized page?
Thanks in advance for all your help!
[edited by: tedster at 12:06 am (utc) on Sep 21, 2011]
