Struck By a Google Penalty – Starting Afresh Vs. Trying to Fix

In the World Wide Web, receiving a Google Penalty is the equivalent of getting robbed of everything, except in this case, you don’t have anybody to point the finger at (which makes it worse). The better off you were before the penalty, the more hurtful it’s going to be, because one fine morning, you wake up and find out that your rankings has taken a nosedive from the first page to a hundredth, and you know that soon your traffic and the earnings will be following suite. Once you are done with the cussing and swearing, you find yourself facing the question of what should be your next step.

The obvious answer to this question will be to identify the reasons behind the penalty and making amends to get your ranks back, but that is easier said than done. To start with, it’s hard to identify the exact reason which has triggered the penalty. Secondly, sometimes the required changes are not feasible for more than one reason.

So, you have got to decide between starting another website from scratch, or trying to fix the problem, following is a comparison for both of these options.

The Damage:

The first thing to look at is the extent of damage. The updates like Panda or Penguin have affected many websites but not all of them have received the same thrashing, while some have lost as much as 80% of their traffic, others were allowed to go with just a slap on the wrist. If your website is one of those extreme cases, you should probably consider starting afresh (mainly because you will be starting from the scratch in any case). If the penalty was not that bad, and the drop in your traffic or rankings is negligible, you should simply continue to work on the same website after making the required changes.

Feasibility:

Starting afresh might not be a possibility in all cases. For example, when you have got a large community of users; or you have spent a lot of time on a project and you cannot simply dump the website and start afresh. On the other hand, if you were having a website or blog for marketing affiliate products, it’s a lot easier to get another domain and starting afresh instead of wasting your time and energies on a lost cause.

Cost and ROI:

In case you were undone by the Panda update, chances are that you were having too many pages with little or no unique content, so the first thing you need to do is to add unique content to all of your pages. Now, adding a blog and coming up with a couple of posts on weekly basis is not going to cut it, you will have to add some content on all or most of your existing pages, and it can be quite costly, given that you have got a large site on hand. For example if you are dealing with one of those ecommerce websites with hundreds and thousands of product pages.

The worst part is, there is no clear definition of exactly how much of the content is considered enough and quality in the eyes of Google, so even after investing a lot of time and money on content creation, you might not be getting the returns you were expecting. So, the first thing you need to look at is the cost of making the required changes and the ROI before deciding.

Efforts:

Recently, a flurry of updates and algorithm tweaks has left webmasters and SEO professionals with a LOT to do on hands. Some of these tasks are relatively easier, for example getting rid of some unwanted links. If you were buying some back links (or link packages) you can simply stop paying and ask the providers to remove your links. However, if you have built hundreds and thousands of links via techniques like directory submissions in the past, getting rid of all of those links wouldn’t be a possibility.

Similarly, if your website has got lots of pages with thin content, creating quality content for all of these pages might take a lot of time and efforts, but then you never know if all of these efforts will be paying off, so it’s better to start afresh in this case scenario.

Saba is an Internet Marketing expert and writes for an SEO Firm in Chicago.