Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?

[shaneod]

Hello there SEOMOZ'ers,

Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened?

My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered.

I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered.

I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed.

I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten.

I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened.

If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland!

Thanks,

Shane

[shaneod]

Sounds a risky strategy Toyz! Good luck with it!

[ToysEtcDownunder]

Hi All,

I hope this works what I have done is. I looked at my webmastertools account and identified those pages that have obviously too may links about 5 pages have some 1500 links pointing to them. I have made hard 404s. I changed the page urls. I asked google to remove them from the index and I disallowed them in my robots.txt. I am hoping that this will then mean that those incoming links are no longer an issue. I resubmitted my site for inclusion and am waiting on an answer.Apparently this process takes some time

What this means of course is that those pages now have no incoming links so I have to start my seo for them all over again. Very carefully this time.

Of course I am in trouble if there are too many spammy links pointing to my homepage. So I am writing to webmasters of not so good neighbourhood sites and asking them to remove links to my site from theirs.

My google organic traffic is about 1/6 what it was so I have carefully increased adwords spend and am doing heaps more email marketting to keep sales up. BTW have also fired my SEO firm

[shaneod]

If I was to resubmit my site for review am i any more likely to get feedback from Google as to the problem?

[shaneod]

Thanks Blocker - it must be a penalty alright because it is such a sharp and sudden decrease in traffic.

Where do I go from here?

[blocker0408]

To make the whole google thing even more confusing, many sites are getting hit with no message. So, if you don't have the message, you may well still have been penalised.

Absolute carnage and the serps have gone back to the stone age. Google has well and truly lost it.

[shaneod]

So if you have a Google Penalty you should get a message in web-master tools? I don't have a message in there, in fact the only real problem I can see in web-master tools now is a lot of my pages have the same meta description which I'll work on now but that is unlikely to be the full issue, is it?

[giordanoshop]

and what ve you done I ve the same problem: penalty for innatural link.

I don't know what can I do bacause of  I ve not do much more of this link.

I ve no paied link no take part to farm and so on.

Sorry for my english but I m an Italian girl please Help me.

[ToysEtcDownunder]

Hi Shane,

Same thing just happened to me. I have ranked well for many of my keywords for years. On April 13 my site received a google penalty for to many unnatural links. The message appeared in my webmastertools account.

Regards Colin