Algorithmic penalty - move to a new domain?

Thank you for your reply nicoloas, very thorough indeed. I wasn't expecting to hear back from you.

The bad news is link detox tool cannot be relied upon, I tried relying on it when I had a penalty and the fact is their tool is of very low quality. They do very basic link checks to determine if a link is "good or bad". They also don't use all of the backlink checkers so you only get a small view of your actual backlinks. For the price they charge its a very bad value.

What I would recommend you do is the following, check your links with the following services:

• Moz
• MajesticSEO
• Ahrefs
• Google Webmaster Tools

The next thing you need to do is combine all of the URLs, remove duplicates and then check to make sure the links are even live on the website anymore. You can use a tool like scrapebox to do this.



Once you have a list of links that are actually there I would then run some more checks through scrapebox to begin vetting your list. Check the pagerank of each for the page and domain, check the anchor text of links, check to see if the links are nofollow and dofollow, check the alexa score (just to see traffic of domain). There's actually more checks you can do to but that's a good start.


Then sort the list based on all of those variables and then start looking at what links are of any real value. I would start with removing all directory links, that means article directory, link directory and any other kind of directory listing.



Be aggressive with your link removals and make sure you follow up after a couple of weeks with another removal request until they finally comply.