Website taken a hit?

[BobAnderson]

We have recently (yesterday 12^th April) taken a hit for our main keywords it seems that there is no constant fall but it seems to be the most competitive words as anything that ranked purely on content still seems to rank which makes me assume that we have just lost a lot of power from links (are SEO did build quite a few links from article sites he also built a few blog network links which we did not know till we got the webmaster message 3 weeks ago  (24^th may) and we have made him remove them all but some still show which a) he can’t contact or b) were scrapers).

But on the other hand we still have decent on site content and some good links from graphic design blogs (review articles) which would suggest a penalty as some sites with poor links and poor on site content are outranking us for a couple of our good keywords.

I cannot decide if this is a penalty, keyword anchor text penalty (this is wiping more power out than the bad links) or just devaluation of links (but as said before our good links are still much more powerful than the competitors out ranking us and with our content we should easily not have lost many places).

If I was going to come up with an idea it would be like the bad links have taken twice there power away from the site, so our on site content is still good but compared to medium on site and crap links they are out ranking us. (we did use a lot of anchor text with keywords in)

If this is the case if we build gooad quality review links, press releases and make them more natural not go for normal link building – articles ect would this help and has anyone ever dealt with this before and have any idea how to know what is happing and how long it might take to recover.

[Sean_Dawes]

So here is what you need to do. Compile all this data:

• Export opensiteexplorer followed/301'd links to your root domain excluding internal site linking
• Get a list of any links you or contracted seo acquired and their respective landing pages into excel
• get a list of all your targeted keywords and their rankings over any dates you have (ex. I run weekly updates so I have a column for every week).
• Categorize all your keywords and landing pages on your site

Pivot out your rankings to see if a landing page type or keyword type dropped.  If so, follow the trail and see if it correlates to any specific links you acquired or any specific anchor text you acquired.

Look at your link profile and see if you are too heavy in any specific areas or if you have any links that may be deemed shady.

[kchandler]

Shaun - Also, keep in mind over-optimization. There where over 50+ Google algorithm updates in March alone & a handful of them where related to spammy on-page content and freshness. So if you have a lot of keyword stuffing or haven't added new content in a while, this could play a role in the drop.

Which leads me to the question, did you see a drop across all organic or just Google?

Hope this helps, cheers!

Kyle Chandler

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Shaun -  Sounds like things are getting interesting.

First of all, think about what happened. The same guy that got you linked up to all the blog networks you are having fix the problem. Most of these guys are like robots ( but not Roger ) ...they just create as many links as they can so they can send you a report in excel showing you what they accomplished. Now you are trusting the same guy to identify the links and take them down. YOU NEED TO GET IN AND MAKE SURE.

There is an article I just read last night in the seomoz community, that will help you out.....first thing you need to do is a mini-audit to make sure you have identified any bad links. Read the article below. Dont get bogged down in trying to do anything. Look for some of the low hanging fruit....

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings

At the same time you should be building some solid natural links with anchor text. Absolutely now is the time.....if timing is important, then you should outsource some of it to reputable SEO people that will do solid natural link building. They can be doing it at the same time you are doing natural link building.   You would always rather do it yourself if you have the time, but if things are busy and you need immediate results, you should reach out to SEO folks in the US and make some short term gains.

Good luck. Get your keywords back up to the top.