Recovery from 4th September 2013 Update: Positive Experiment

[Mentat]

On 4th of September, one of my old subdomains got a -90% penalty out of the blue.

Last month, after a lot of work and no results, I was getting desperate, so... got nothing else to lose!

My site is scrapped like hell since 2001 and only in the last years I've started to block robots, so my content is on many, many, many Whois Protected sites from direct scrapping and from RSS (aggregators).

What I did, step by step:

x.example.net - OLD
y.example.net - NEW

I've moved (301 redirect) all the content created until 2010 from x.example.net to Y.example.net

Results? See the pictures.

New subdomain [i.imgur.com...]
Old subdomain [i.imgur.com...]

As you can see, the old domain had some thinking, but throwing away another part of the old content (410) helped.

It took Google about one month to discover that the content from the new subdomain is pretty old and problematic, now the new y.example.net is crashed.

So... If you already removed the thin content, you have a big disavow tool and you did a lot of nofollow on insite links, than this is the next step.

Cut deep!

Now... I need another miracle for Panda, (-60% traffic slowly since March 2013), but kids, that is a story for another day! ;)

[edited by: brotherhood_of_LAN at 8:50 pm (utc) on May 6, 2014]
[edit reason] changes to example. [/edit]

[goodroi]

Thanks for sharing. Did you use a widespread wildcard matching 301 redirect or individually redirect just the best pages?

[Mentat]

Individual redirects for each moved item.

[MrSavage]

So... If you already removed the thin content, you have a big disavow tool and you did a lot of nofollow on insite links, than this is the next step.

Cut deep!

Sorry I'm a bit confused as to what this means. I would be grateful for clarification.

I really appreciate your post and it does offer hope which is HARD to come by for myself lately. Thank you.

[Mentat]

My english is not native, but what I mean is that if have already done lot of work (nofollow on some thin pages, disavow a lot of links), is time to remove (delete 410) some old, maybe duplicate/thin content.

The problem is that usually the content that need to be removed is pretty big :(

[MrSavage]

Thank you very much for the clarification. Your post has had a big influence on me. Perhaps it's the clear data from the image, I'm not sure. I can say though that it's one post that has given me a real reason to look again at a site or two of mine that has died off. I have a reason to do as you've done and see what happens. I too am at a stage that I have nothing to lose by doing it. Your post has been one of the best/useful that I've read here in months if not a year or more. Thank you.