To your question: Haven't started using the disavow tool quite yet, no. When we really went through and did our initial clean-up, it was before the tool was released. I need to go back through the audit we did and tag / disavow links that are potentially hurting us.
But it's still difficult: which links are hurting, and which are providing great link juice? You can guess from the anchors given that's the majority of the problem / penalty, but sometimes it might be a better approach to build new links with varied anchor to a page and - once you start ranking again - have it be even stronger as you haven't hashed all your backlinks.
And I agree. I'd love to see more SEO posts here on HN. :-)
I'd suggest since you have already had a nice amount of links built to the site and with only 1 type of anchor text then just build more links at a steady pace to the site itself with varying anchor texts and link types (hxxp://www.website.com, www.website.com, website.com) and ther variations. Vary dofollow and nofollow too. While doing all of this don't forget to build backlinks similar to he ones that you have built previously. Stopping to build links with a certain combination of anchor text will seem to Google as being very very unnatural.
Also, begin building your own blog network- and then build links to the blogs in the blog network. I like to call those sites "Buffer sites" since they will be taking the load of my linkbuilding efforts. Load these sites up with content, full on blogs with regular posts, privacy policy and the works. Have content that is valuable to visitors and hen funnel the visitors on to your main site. You would then be able to have a bunch of blogs that bring in traffic to the main site itself since the blogs would've been jam-packed with content and would funnel the users into your ecommerce site. This would have a couple of benefits: When you rank the blogs you get them up for your keywords, and since the blogs link to your ecommerce store the store climbs up there too. So basically using this by doing 1 set of linkbuilding you can dominate the whole of page 1 for your keywords.
Would be awesome if we could connect. You seem to be a very interesting person to talk to :>
To your question: Haven't started using the disavow tool quite yet, no. When we really went through and did our initial clean-up, it was before the tool was released. I need to go back through the audit we did and tag / disavow links that are potentially hurting us.
But it's still difficult: which links are hurting, and which are providing great link juice? You can guess from the anchors given that's the majority of the problem / penalty, but sometimes it might be a better approach to build new links with varied anchor to a page and - once you start ranking again - have it be even stronger as you haven't hashed all your backlinks.
And I agree. I'd love to see more SEO posts here on HN. :-)