Penguin 2.0
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In February I had an Seo audit done on my site. I got advice that my link profile at the time was very strong and natural. They gave me some advice that I could improve my anchor text of my links with a much more friendly keyword anchor text. Example I have game site and instead of using the name of my site I was told to change this to Strategy war games or Online war game etc. I went through my google link profile and messaged several webmasters and had my anchors changed to this. I also changed a lot of my links to this more keyword rich anchors.
May 22nd I had a drop in rankings of about 10 spots across the board and google traffic came to a trickle. I can only assume these two go hand in hand. Should I go back and change my links to my website name and stay away from that keyword rich anchor texts ? Can I fix this ? I am almost 100% positive this is a Penguin penalty since I looked at my analytics and it is obvious after May 22nd something changed.
Can I fix this ?
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Thanks for the answer. I seem to be only being penalized for these anchor text I am using in my searches. Some of my other searches I am still number 1 or 2-3. They seem to be targeting the keywords I used the most in anchor text. I only dropped about 10 spots in these searches .
I will try to go back through my link profile and fix the changes I made and hope this fixes the issue. Thanks for the answer.I hope it doesn't hurt me to change them again but I am going to go back to what I had them as with just my url or site name.
Live and learn.
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per this amazing tool by moz, I can see that you do seem to have a bit of anchor text issue here, these numbers that you see are better to be far lower in count towards the top, otherwise google could potentially see them as spam especially if they are all created overnight or in a very short time span, in a shall we say, less than organic type of trend and activity with regards to your websites typical rate of backlink generation, etc.
Google is one heck of a spy agency when it comes to your digital identity and knows probably more than you do about your site. and it can easily spot "manipulation" (suddenly 70+ links change to 3 particular kw groups from diverse and different types before) you want to have a lot of 1-1 numbers and a few top used ones, but not to the extent that you have here that is all i can say. I would say you have made your baclink anchor text appear unnatural to google.
Your brand name is also important to be identified to google so that your name cannot be considered spammed in anchor text. export your results to CSV and SORT them in excel or google spreadsheets and see how often your brand is used in your anchor text, I think it is way too much vs. the rest of your anchor text profile. so are your top non-branded anchor text. I would say that you need to start hitting 1 - 1s by bottom of page one... I would try to build new links or change current ones and turn them more varied and organic
crunch your numbers, get your % of words in a nice visual format. see this and this for more reading and analysis.
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Didn't want to come off as spamming
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Feel comfortable sharing your website URL?
It's tough to advise without seeing the link profile. From the sounds of it, it is anchor text related and whatever you do will take a bit of time to regain those ranking spots.
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