Penguin Recovery Experiment - old page status codes?

[timwilliams]

It seems for me that penguin was page/keyword specific and that ranking loss was mostly due to inbound links with keyword anchor text. New pages/content seem to rank fairly quickly and old pages that had no link building done for them still rank well.

The page for my experiment is example.com/widgets
example.com is an exact match keyword domain for our primary keyword and "example widget" is a quality secondary keyword. example.com/widgets ranked #1 for example widget prior to penguin. Now ranks #28. It had inorganic links pointing to it with heavy keyword anchor text.

Copying example.com/widgets folder to example.com/widget
Updated all ON SITE links to point to the new folder.
Not creating any inbound links.

What to do with the old pages?
1. 404
2. 301 to the new folder
3. other

[timwilliams]

Ok, I went with the 404 to avoid duplicate content.

new folder added 6/8/12
on site links changed 6/8/12
404 the old folder 6/9/16

6/8/12 example widget #28 >/widgets (old folder)
6/9/12 example widget #33 >/widgets (old folder)

[aristotle]

When you make a major change to a site, the Google rankings usually drop initially, to give the algorithm time to analyze the change. This will usually happen regardless of whether the site was already penalized.

[zehrila]

Sounds more like Over optimization penalty, can you tell when your traffic dropped?

[timwilliams]

update:

6/12/12 example widget #32 >/some-other-page.htm (page from the site, not old folder, not new folder)

new folder not indexed for anything yet.

once the old folder was removed from the site google found a different page on the site to show. The page google substituted ranks in near the same place as the old folder. ? Could the penguin penalty be by keyword/site instead of keyword/page ?

[timwilliams]

6/15/12 New folder showing up for "example widgets" (plural version of targeted keyword) #28

"example widget" #29 >example.com/some-other-page.htm (page from the site, not old folder, not new folder)

[timwilliams]

New folder showing pr 3 (domain pr is 4)

one inbound link to new folder is showing up from the home page of a pr 3 domain. link uses "example widget" as the anchor text.