Penguine 2.0 Confusion

[fraserhannah]

I am getting seriously confused over our rankings and am hoping someone can give me a bit of clarity.

When Penguin 2.0 hit last week we saw a drop of between 2 – 6 places on seven out of a set of around a dozen key phrases I monitor. We had been in the number 1 / 2 position for the majority of them over the last year – 18 months, and this drop has reduced our traffic by around 30 – 35%.

I have looked at our back link profile - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.wombatwebdesign.com%2F, and I don’t think it is that bad. Being a web design company the vast majority, 80% of the links are from the footer of client sites. We have a small, 5% number of links from comments; a similar amount of dead links and the rest are made up of the usual, profile, directory and article links.

I was wondering if the way we link from client sites could be an issue, we link twice, once with the anchor text (Web Design Cumbria) and the second link is our company branding (Wombat Web Design, with the title tag – Web Design Cumbria). Could this be causing a problem?

If anyone could point me in the right direction I would be most grateful.

Thanks

Fraser

[fraserhannah]

I am even more confused, we removed 90% of the anchor text links and we have just dropped again. Does anyone have any ideas what we are doing wrong?

Thanks

Fraser

[JesusD]

I know! 24 hours does not seem about right with SEO and marketing!.

I would also look at this resource on how to balance anchor text. http://moz.com/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization.

Good luck!!

[fraserhannah]

Thanks for your help, I have had a look at our linking anchor text and it is some what keyword-rich. We are going to remove the majority of the keyword-rich links and just leave them with our branding to see if that makes a difference. I have always been careful with our link building, so I am fairly confident that not the issue, if things don't pick up I will look to either turn some of them to no-follow or have them only on the home page.

Content is defiantly the way to go, if only there were more hours in the day!

Thanks again.

Fraser

[Atomicx]

Footer links like that can end up hurting you. I have a web design and client site like you, but I do not put my link on all client sites. Nor do I use anchor text heavy links. Try building out some more links through guest blogging or promotional opportunities. This can help to balance out your link profile to seem less spammy

[TakeshiYoung]

The links from your clients' sites could definitely be a problem, especially if you are using keyword-rich anchor text. Consider just using your brand name for the footer links, as that is relatively safe. Or consider just getting one or two links from your client sites from their homepage or "about" page.

[Highland]

I would nofollow your links.They're probably dragging you down because they're not natural.
This video is on topic from Matt Cutts himself http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuhSmwsL7s

[JesusD]

Did you look at your anchor text profiles for each word you´ve been degraded?. Ive seen that Penguin has good taste for overoptimization, especially on anchor text and low quality links.

I found this posts very helpful to overturned some Penguin attacks last year: Google Penguin AntiSpam. Another resource on strategies to combat the little penguin is right here.

You could also wait it out, maybe its not penguin, it just some SERP fluctuation. Good luck, hope the best!