Recovering from an Automatic penalty

[theLotter]

My website dropped from ~15 to 500 + for our main keywords in target markets (but are still doing okay in other countries and for other keywords)

I cleaned my site up and contacted Google who told me no manual spam actions were taken on my site.   The only thing I can think is that we suffered from an automatic penalty (the drop corresponded with a small panda update).

If that is in fact what happened, how do we recover?

Also feel free to contribute other ideas about what may have occurred.

[theLotter]

any kind of time estimate for when we should be re-crawled?

[Adam.Whittles]

In that case, I would say that you should follow eyepaq's advice above. It's pretty much spot on for the problem you have.

[theLotter]

Penalty date - July 28

Past SEO - usual exact match stuff and a little link buying

Clean up - remove/change links, but internal and external and de-optimize on penalized so keyword is under-optimized and no way could be interpreted as keyword stuffing.

Told Google - sent excel with all the cleanup we did

We are in the gaming industry and it seems like most of our links are coming from affiliates.  I told Google this as well since we should not be penalized if our affiliates are doing scammy things.

[Adam.Whittles]

There are still a lot of questions you have to answer before any specific advice can be given. Without answering these questions, it is impossible to say whether you have been penalised for one thing or another (such as an 'algo anchor text penalty').

For example, when exactly did the drop occur? What is the URL of your site? What SEO have you undertaken in the past? What did you do to 'clean up' your site? What else did Google tell you (if anything)?

With this kind of information, it would be easier to pin-point exactly what has happened to your site.

[eyepaq]

Based on your description it looks like an algo anchor text penalty.

That means your main term is overused in on page optimisation and/or used as anchor text way to much.

If this is the case you should start de-optimizing for this term and change or remove any "bad" links that is using this term as anchor text.

First of all you should identify if your link profile is un balanced - that means again, if you have as ratio a lot of in coming links using this term as anchor text.

Is  this term also part of your domain name ? You can't really do much about this (the domain thing that is) but at least you can de-optimize teh site so the term is not all over the place.

Google likes to be told what toi rank for and for what term but not in a very loud voice - if you know what I mean.

Once you've cleaned / edited some bad links that used this term as anchor text and you've tunned down a noch the on-page optimisation for the term (internal links/anchors, h1, url format, titles and even content / text within your site) and based on the size of your site (as number of pages vs crawling numbers) you will then have to wait for the site to be re-crawled and you will recover. However you will probably not go back to the initial position (around 15) as some factors that were coming into play for your 15 position will no longer be in place / counting towards your rankings.

As soon as you recover you will need to build a plan for this term in order to improve rankings but don't go again over borad with the optimisation... eg: build good links to the page /that is ranking for this term but without the term as anchor text, channel your internal PR towards this page but again without heavy optimisation around the term.

Hope it helps.