Site dropped after article submissions

[Naturalhealth15]

I have a site about back pain.  The name is lower back pain relief.  It has a lot of content on how to treat back pain with natural remedies.

I paid for botw.org and yahoo directories as well as submissions from submit edge.  My site was doing well within a few months.  I was floating around at the bottom of page two for "lower back pain relief" and lower back pain.

I found out about Unique article wizard.  I started using that to write and submit articles.  Now, my website is not ranking anywhere.

I submitted a request for reconsideration to Google.  They said no manual action had been taken.

The question:

How long does this penalty last?

Is that website toast now?

I think it was penalized for using the anchor text too much or adding too many links at once.  It has been penalized for about 6 weeks now.

[hireawizseo]

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html was a good share thx I laughed at the spun content. Pay day loan links with work out content... ROFL ...

[MarieHaynes]

Have you seen this WBF?  In it, Rand does not recommend article marketing (i.e. ezine articles) at all:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/article-marketing-mostly-a-scam-whiteboard-friday

IHMO, most links that you can create completely on your own, are not going to be terribly helpful.  The reason why links help a site is because the search engines treat them as a vote for your site.  But, if you create links by yourself, it really isn't a vote, is it?

[Naturalhealth15]

OK.  So you are saying my site will come back?  I have hesitated to spend any more time on it since it might be dead.

I have learned my lesson.  I think that a year ago, it would have been ok.

Do you recommend ezine articles?  I also plan to do a lot of guest blogging..  I'm so afraid to do any link building at all now.  I have sites on a variety of health issues and am afraid to build links now!

I have my blog guest and blogger link up as the main sites where you can submit your articles for links.  Do you recommend naked links like:

http://www.sitename.com?

I think that looks most natural, as that is how I link to other sites.

Thanks.

[myclicks-163603]

Google introduced an update about a month ago for overdoing anchor text links. We have had a few web sites that were penalized exactly for the same reason. They've recently introduced another update that is really hitting spinned articles tactics: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Your web site is down in the rankings and it will recover. You just have to compensate the number of links that you have lost with other sources of links like - links from normal article directories, blog posts, etc. Make your next strategy look more natural and difersify the anchor text portfolio by including your "domain name", "visit domainname.com", "click here", "www.Domainname.com", etc. etc. I know it is not an easy thing to replicate those links in terms of volume but I guess you have to deal with it.