Recovering from dodgy back links

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Ingrid Cliff: Hi guys. My 12+ year old site was run over by both Penguin & Panda (algorithmic not manual penalty) due to early era article marketing, dodgy Clickbank affiliates linking back to my site and thin content in the early days. I have spent hundreds of hours doing everything by the book to review & fix problems but to no result (and yes I know Penguin is coming ... so is the next series of Sherlock some stage this century). I am now looking to build a whole new site on a new domain. I was advised by my SEO to migrate the quality content over to the new site and redirect individual pages without toxic links from the old site to the new site but not do a site wide redirect. Pages with toxic links (home page and a few others), would not be redirected or copied but have a splash page saying we've moved and have a nofollow link to the new rewritten pages on the site. I know that 301ing the whole site passes problems. What do you think? Would this strategy of 301ing selected pages still pass problems? Is it better to abandon 200+ pages of good solid content and start from zero? ;
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  grace jolliffe: HI I don't have any answers I'm afraid but I am curious - how did you know your site had been hit by an algorithmic and not manual penalty and what do they mean?
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  Ingrid Cliff: Hi Grace. A manual penalty is when you get a lovely little note from Google telling you that you have been penalised and your traffic drops off a cliff. An algorithmic penalty is when your traffic tanks at the same time that Google runs out updates such as Penguin, Panda & Hummingbird, except there is no note via email from Google in your Webmaster Tools (Still can't get used to the new name). You can't take those tankings at face value though - you still need to do a bit of digging around to confirm what happened.  ;For example, fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/ is great as a starting point to match your traffic to the updates. You then can keep digging with a whole raft of other tools from different providers to make sure that what you are seeing is Google changing its algorithm and not just a strange and horrible coincidence.  ;
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  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:45:15 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/recovering_from_dodgy_back_links +Ingrid Cliff
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.
   ; ;
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  grace jolliffe: +Ingrid Cliff
   ;Thanks so much for your ; reply ; and helpful links.
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  Ingrid Cliff: Just found a great article by Tim Capper that explains it more clearly (before going into how to attempt to recover. Been there. Done that. Unpicked thousands of bad links.) http://onlineownership.com/google-unnatural-links-penalty-audit-removal-recovery/