Completely at a loss with Google - Looking for help

[ArthurNYC]

I own a website called starreviews dot com ... what was a pretty large reviews website with over 100 categories. We were doing over 3500 daily visitors all natural traffic and over $40K a month in commission with no expense. We had crap and duplicate content but it was all unique to us which has been cleaned up. We were doing limited link buying and from a pretty "reputable" company (whatever that means) but that stopped at Panda.

1. Panda hit and we basically abandoned the site. We updated the site when a vendor emailed us but removed 1000's of crappy articles.
2. Site slowly declined to about 500 visitors a day.
3. We cut site to 20 categories last Dec.
4. Penguin came along and it actually seems as though traffic was picking up.
5. Received un-natural links notice (not the sitewide one, just specific pages) (we have done NO seo of any kind in over a year and a half). We have a ton of scraper sites that use our content which I submitted for reconsideration.
6. Daily traffic is declining.

I am NOT an SEO guy, StarReviews is a legacy site that was leftover from a deal that I did.

It is almost unimaginable to me how we can get penalized for unnatural links when we haven't even touched the site in a year and a half. The site went from 3500 a day to 300 ... what more can Google do? We are doing PPC and that is successful but limited.

I am looking for some guidance. In the end I have no interest in learning SEO or focusing on it full time but this is a massive site and would be a shame to abandon.

Any suggestions?

Arthur

[SteveGerencser]

If you have the site set up with GWT then pull your link profile and take a look at it. But, if as you say it is heavily scraped then that is most likely where the 'bad' links are coming from.

Thanks Google!

[ArthurNYC]

Yea Steve, that is the standard canned response for Penguin issues. Obviously this site has issues far beyond that but needs someone who is really knowledgeable in SEO to really work it.

[ftw12]

You need a real SEO to do an assessment of your site and see where you stand and how to move forward. Between the purchased links and duplicate content, you're probably facing major issues. The year and a half is not really relevant, google is updating their formulas and what worked in the past does not work now.

[jhannawin]

Given that traffic has decreased seven fold the income has probably done the same. However, that puts you ~$5K per month for a site that has 'no expenses'. I doubt whether you will ever get it back to the profitability you had, so take your energy and channel it into something new and ride that cash cow until it keels over and dies. Once you know that is what you are doing you'll feel a whole bunch better about it.