Can a Site Be Permanantly Damaged By Bad SEO?

Most people got hit because of having over-optimized anchor text.

What's the ratio of optimized anchor text to general/URL/naked anchor text?

You can use Ahrefs.com to get that information.

I hear two conflicting things from people.

Some say its the anchor text ratio -- which I believe and agree with.

But others say its also spammy links.

I assume its both.

But how ware spammy links found and determined? Low DA? Ugh.

Sites are never beyond repair. Domains however are a different story.

Well, It might be because of the spammy links. Find out the all of those links which you think are spammy from Google webmaster tools. List down all spammy links in text document and use the Disavow Tool to get rid of these spammy links.

My site got penalized by Penguin (survived Panda). Lots of content, over 100 pages all written by me. Pointed a lot of bad links to the site through guaranteed page 1 service.

Not hating, I knew it was dangerous, I knew what it was, and it paid off well. Got me visitors, got me great cases.

That said, I hated to see it go. So I started a new site, with different SEO. But I still pointed daily links to my old site, hoping it would drown out the original anchor text links. Didn't do much good after a year or so. Oh well. Visitors still came through long tail keyword searches but volume was down.

On one major competitive keyword not only was I penalized I was delisted. For about a year serpfox showed no ranking for that keyword. A secondary major but less competitive keyword hovered around page 20. Bleh.

Fast forward to Penguin 2.0 and all of a sudden Keyword #1 came back online. Keyword #2 jumped to page 3-7 (it varies day by day, google is still tinkering with it). This is with no SEO on it, Daily drips stopped a long time ago I think.

Curious, I ran a free ahrefs search on it, and there are still 5,000 links. All spammy I'm sure. But get this, just a few months ago there were over 10,000 links. Maybe Marc L can chime in, but perhaps those old sites are abandoned? Or I don't know what but every month backlinks are disappearing so that is a good thing in my case. I'm glad I didn't abandon it, and I was still getting cases from it even when penalized. Just not as much as before but then again, I didn't pay a whole lot in the first place. We're talking a few hundred dollars total.

So if it's a valuable site, why not just stick it out. Stick it on some cheap hosting and see what happens.

Use the Disavow tool, it will work. Get yourself a full Ahrefs report and don't disavow the links with a better Ahrefs mark, those still hold some value. It's a bad thing already to have all those spammy links pointing to your site, but it's equally bad to remove all of them indiscriminately.

Be careful with a disavow tool. It gives Google another reason to look at your backlink portfolio.

I suggest you pick the worst site and do a 301 redirect to a new domain and see what happens. It will cost you a few bucks and an hour or so, but it may be worth it.

Yes, which is getting deindexed from the search engines.

Only way to fix it is by 301 redirecting to a new domain which counters my answer above.

So at the end of the day, the answer is No (but you will have a different domain name)

I guess I meant domains, not sites.