Rescue a Site Hit by Anchor Text OOP by Moving to EMD?

[Savanadry]

I have a site which has been hit by anchor text over optimisation algo penalty. Well, I think it has, if it hasn't then I would be stunned as the majority of links to the site are the same or very similar and are to just a few relevant pages. Google also rewrites the titles of nearly every page of the site with those keywords either at the end or the beginning of the title I provide.

It is not in the SERP's at all for the keywords, although will appear at number one for related searches. EG. It's number one for 'creating widgets', but not in top 500 for 'making widget' (my OOP keywords).

Most of the links were created pre 2004 by myself mostly contacting other website owners, having a chat and them ending up giving me a link for free (ahh, the good old days when people linked to other sites simply because the visitor would enjoy the content), I usually asked for the same anchor text to be used. I really don't want to lose them as it would be impossible to get links from those sites today.

The only links I bought were some forum sidebar sitewides using that same anchor text (I know, hangs head in shame, seemed like a good idea back then). Taking a quick look it seems most were abandoned a long time ago.

I haven't built any links to the site since around 2006 and people do link to it naturally (sometimes using, but mostly not using those OOP keywords) but all those old links still outweigh the new natural ones.

A link clear up is not going to happen, I know it can take months and I can't spend a lot of time on this site as it's one of my hobby sites and not a money maker. But I do love it and I am prepared to take a few more risks with it than I would with a 'business' site to get it back in the SERP's.

I am considering removing the sections not related to the keywords and moving it to an EMD of the over-optimised anchor text (which luckily I already own as it was a toss up when I started the site which name to use). I will then simply disavow those forum links I bought if the owners don't respond to my removal requests.

Has anyone tried this? Am I crazy? Seems too simple?

[rjonesx]

1. Have you received a manual penalty notice in Google Webmaster Tools? Or does it appear to be fully algorithmic?

2. Have you tried to 301 redirect your way out of the penalty temporarily while doing cleanup? ie: buy the .org version of the domain and 301 redirect it. This can temporarily lift penalties in some cases (getting rarer though)

3. This seems completely reasonable, although I would try the full 301 redirect first.

[Savanadry]

Hi,

1. No, I have received no penalty notices or messages at all. I'm as sure as I can be that it's algo related.

2. Yes, I already tried the 301 redirect to the .co.uk version of the domain, the site bounced back for a week, then disappeared except for a few keywords (same as pre-move). I may have made a mistake by removing the 301's and simply placing a nofollow link to the new TLD as a kneejerk reaction when it fell out of the serp's. It does still rank for some keywords (even after removing the 301 redirects) but I'm assuming that will disappear as google catches up and reindexes the links.

3. Thanks, it just seemed too simple, after all the hoops I've been jumping through for my other sites.

[ZydoSEO]

What does your analytics say?

Did you experience a huge drop in traffic on a particular date? For a particular keyword? To a particular URL? Does that date correspond to some major algo update being published by Google?

Or did traffic just slowly die off over several months?

If I were you, I'd first be nailing down exactly when the issue began occuring and why... before you even think of trying to implement a solution. Correlating it to a particular update if possible will usually give you a good idea of what you need to do to correct it.

[Savanadry]

The big update that hit the site was Panda July 2011, although it was a few days before the official date.

Traffic has remained pretty low since then although has recovered somewhat in long tail phrases - the 'OOP keywords' never recovered (except one quite good phrase which seems to bounce in and out every other panda update).

I know it's ages ago but, like I said, it's a hobby site and my other sites had to come first in the queue for recovery / pre-emptive improvements.