So i have the pleasure of being hit by a big G penalization

[imrubbish]

I noticed a pretty drastic drop in rankings 2 weeks ago after shelling out £7500 to a UK seo company for 5 months work.

I went with this company  because they had showed very good results with the number one position company in an equally tough niche.

So my rankings across the board dropped, i think 12 out of my 16 tracked keywords had dropped 10+ places or more.

I immediately questioned what the hell they had been doing and was told that they were writing blog posts (which i knew about) to rank for category specific pages, but the linking method was using snippets of those blog posts to get links (which i did not know about) I was always told at the beginning that they have never given link reports and never will. Had i of known the links that were being built and they literally were the only type of link i would never have gone with them.

Since then i have taken on an established member from the SEOmoz community and we have actioned a plan to go through all links and request removal from all bad sites. (in webmaster tools i have this message)
"Dear site owner or webmaster of imrubbish.co.uk, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.Sincerely,Google Search Quality Team"

superb news! my new SEO guy is dealing with the bad links, but i do think i have content issues, my real question is how do i weed out the bad content and should i just delete them? leave them as they are and create new better posts? make them better?

I must have nearly 100 blog posts and a lot of the early ones were wrote by someone whose English is definitely a second language.

Would appreciate all your thoughts.

Thanks guys

[ChrisDyson]

Find the articles bringing in no traffic first some pf the articles might be bringing in some long tail traffic but gradually switch to the new articles when & where appropriate.

[imrubbish]

that would be the SEO company i just got rid of!

Thank you for such a great reply, so how would you deal with the blog then, delete all 50-60 posts and 301 all old titles to the 3 very high quality posts i have just had written?

Thank you

Jon

[ChrisDyson]

Ok so on further inspection I can see a lot of Anchor text heavy reciprocal links which have no doubt triggered the Webmaster tools message.

Reciprocal links themselves are not inherently bad but can often be implemented (particularly at scale) in ways that are not true to the spirit of trust and authority.

Reciprocal links are viewed negatively if there is an agreement or incentive in place to do so. This type of linking can get you in trouble if it makes up too large of a percentage of your overall backlinks.

In addition to these links you have internal links within poorly written content within the blog posts. Content written with the purpose of containing links is almost never high quality.

[ChrisDyson]

I'm sorry to hear of your bad experience. Without seeing your site I can't comment 100% on the quality of the content. By the sounds of it your former firm were trying to rank 1 page for 1 keyword I assume the pages are 350-600 word garbage posts? Personally I would consolidate the pages by trying to rank one page for several keywords. I would delete them, get a writer to write new content & 301 them to the new pages. If you want me to offer additional advice please feel free to send me a private message or email me via my website.