As you probably know, Google is constantly coming up with updates and in the last year or so there have been two nasty ones - Panda and Penguin. Because of those two updates, a lot of people lost a LOT of traffic to their sites.
I wanted to figure out why and more importantly, I wanted to find a solution that worked. I looked at my own sites and talked to friends and industry contacts about what happened with their sites. I also looked at who was actually ranking for the keywords I lost traffic for. Based on what I found, I came up with a theory.
I wanted to conduct an experiment to test my theory and decided to use of one my sites that lost traffic for that experiment. The site had lost quite a bit of revenue over the Panda and Penguin updates. For its best month, the site made $809.67 with Google Adsense. In June of this year (2012), it was down to just $391.72 so it had lost more than 50% of its revenue. I started the experiment on July 1, 2012.
The experiment worked and in July (2012) the site had it's best month ever: $828.31.
I posted my exact solution for our forum members and we have all been having a great discussion about it. You can find that forum thread here.
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I'll see you on the inside,
Court
P.S. - here are some of the questions I answered in the forum thread:
From Shawn:
Court, great case study! Makes me want to ask some questions: - How old was the site? - Was it previously hit by Panda or Penguin? - How much content is on the main site, if this matter and have you added anything to it? - Previous to this test, what did your anchor profile look like? 50% main keyword and 50% related? (I think this was your previous teaching) - How do you handle keeping your squidoo lenses live? Any example lenses that you have created that stay up on squidoo? I am having a 85% success rate and the 15% just seems like a game that I can't figure out. - Did you drip these links or blast them all in one day? - Were there any additional contributing factors, aside from luck, that you would say helped to impact these results? From Shane: 1. Did you write pretty much completely different articles with completely different topics, or were the articles 18 different versions of the same message with enough "uniqueness" to pass as original articles every time you posted them? 2. You are obviously adamant about anchor text variation. Knowing that this works (for now), do you plan on "building" links to skinny school ( this is one of my sites), in other words, do you still recommend any type of linkbuilding, or do you strictly recommend writing great content targeting keywords, with no guest posting or anything of the like, more like Fraser (Fraser is one of our members)? From Michael: Hey Court, Do you think the internal links on your site should also follow the same strategy of variation? Or only the external ones?
From Maple:
Court, thanks so much for this post. It's one of the most useful forum posts I've read in a long long time. A few questions: 1) Besides guest posting on sites both in and outside of PostRunner, what in your opinion are other safe link sources? You mentioned article directories in your experiment but does that mean you suggest we use them for sites we actually care about? Any other safe link sources? 2) I know you said not follow any percentages but roughly how many links should we send to the homepage vs. posts or does that even matter? 3) I lost a 5K site due to Penguin and would love to get it back. The problem of course is its low anchor text diversity and too many KW anchors. In cases like this where the content is decent but the links are the problem, is it worth trying to get it to rank again or should we just cut our losses and start a new site? Our members asked some awesome questions and the discussion got really good! P.S.S. - I'm guessing some of you would like to see a screenshot of my earnings. Here are the shots of both June and July:  | 
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