Is my SEO consultant doing blackhat tactic?

[chanel27]

Hi, Can someone tell me what my SEO consultant is doing? I have engaged a SEO company in Singapore for my site: Http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg The thing is for the 1st 2 months, it is ranking well but for the next 4 months it is out of google. I noticed my links are on some strange article site. Is he doing blackhat tactic, I have been paying monthly for many months now with no result. Shall I continue to pay and how can I recover?

[chanel27]

Thank you so much for your help Sandip.

God bless you!

[SoftzSolutions]

It appears that your website has got penalized by Google Penguin update [link penalty]
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-3-15802.html

But as Google Search quality team has already made it clear that there is no manual action taken on your website, I can safely assume that your website has got penalized by algo shuffle.

_So, there is no point in sending reconsideration request to Google. Try to get all the unnatural and spammy links removed. Send link removal request to those crappy websites. If you have log in access of those sites, you can do that as well. If you have removed most of them, you then can use Google Webmaster Tools Disavow Link option.  _

_And about reliable seo company. Whoever is saying that you can top ranking in two months or so for $100, is trying to fleece you. _

[chanel27]

Hi Sandip,

We have sent reconsider mail to Google but they replied:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

My ranking dropped since 6th Oct 2012.
I have emailed my SEO consultant and request to stop the service.

Anyone has got good ethical SEO company to recommend?

[SoftzSolutions]

Well the quality of the links is pathetic and I would not surprise if your website get penalized by Google for unnatural link building. Tell me one thing, don't your existing SEO company send you monthly report of what they are doing? What I fear is that they are building links with exact matched anchor texts and this is under Google's radar for quite sometime.

If not, you should ask them to send all the details immediately. You need to get all these links down.

Check your webmaster tools account and let us know if you get any message there. Also let us know when the ranking drop.

[chanel27]

Yes, i believed so.
I am just afraid i would be wasting my time adding fresh new articles on that website.

I am still paying him every month.

Can anyone advice what i could do next?

[TakeshiYoung]

Those links definitely look like they could be in blackhat territory.  It looks like either paid links or possibly some kind of blog network.  The links are also all exact match anchor text. Do you know when your traffic took a hit?  You may have been hit by the Penguin algorithm.

[danatanseo]

Hi chanel27,

I just checked to see if your site is indexed in Google and it is. The easy way to check this yourself is to go to Google and in the search bar type  site:http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg  When I do that I get 17 results. If your site had been removed from Google there would be zero results for that query.

Now, when I take a look at your link profile in ahrefs.com I see that your link profile is making good progress. I can't see the same kind of historical progress in other tools, but I did check some of the article submission sites that your SEO seems to be using to see if perhaps they had been de-indexed by Google, and they haven't been.

Is your site new? Sometimes, when a new site comes out of the gate, it experiences a bit of an artificial bump in ranking before settiling into a lower position.

I don't see any evidence of black hat SEO here. Although, I would caution you from relying on artificial blogging and submitting to article directories and expecting that to produce results. To some extent, this can still work, but if it's working now, it very may well not be working in a few months. I would have a frank discussion with your SEO consultant and tell them you are concerned about the quality, not the quantity of your backlinks. Also, think about complimentary businesses whom might make good possible link partners for you, make a list of them and give them to your SEO.

From what I can see, your SEO is doing a competent job. Hope that's reassuring!

Dana