Website has been penalized?

[bigtimeseo]

Hey guys,

We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010.

Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that.

Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly.

Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central.

We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly.

Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz.

The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links.

Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!

[caseyhen]

The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much?

I agree with you.  That's a very small number and unlikely to be the problem.

The duplicate content issue is fixed.

Excellent!

I have removed the link exchange script.

Good....

Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords?

Yes, you'll want to keep a number of links out there with your keyword anchor text, as that still has a high effect on ranking for a particular term.  But you'll want to present a link profile that has a more natural "mix" of keywords and your domain to avoid getting flagged as spammy.

[bigtimeseo]

The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much?

The duplicate content issue is fixed.

I have removed the link exchange script.

Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords?

[caseyhen]

Sure looks like either a penalty or a massive discounting of links to me.  You're not banned, but you're way back in the results given your link profile.  I took a quick look at your robots.txt and it looks fine.

If Google is still seeing 13,000 pages as duplicate content, this could be the issue as well, as Google's internal "quality score" on your site is not going to be pretty.  But giving the number of inbound links you have, I'm much more inclined to think that Google has identified your link exchange script and discounted all links related to that.

There's some discussion out there also on whether you can get dinged for over-optimizing your anchor text.  See this article.   While that case study is a pretty small number of sites, if Tim's findings are accurate, you're definitely at risk.  Both your internal and external links to your home page are virtually 99% "watch movies online" and "watch free movies online".

So here's what I would do:

#1 solve the duplicate content issue

#2 see what you can do to change the link exchange process to make it less recognizable to Google

#3 go vary your anchor text, adding new links and changing a few old ones like this profile link to use www.freemoviedb.com as the anchor text.