Unable to find why my site was penalized since 24th April

[rag_gupta]

I'm into the 1 month free trail of pro membership for my niche site http://www.creditcardpaymentgateways.in. The traffic dropped from around 250 to 50 on April, 24th but as of now it has recovered some to 100. This site has original content and not a spammy site.

Out of all the metrics I see in my PRO Dashboard I'm not at all able to figure out the reason of being penalized.

After this penalty I've worked on to reduced the "payment gateway" keyword density from 7-9% to below 5%. Today I notice some rankings upgrade.

Overall Seomoz pro membership is useful for very large sites who have dedicated teams to monitor SEO but for me I'm trying to figure out what to do with all those stats.

[rag_gupta]

Adam thanks for reply. I've a dozen sites. But site is the best I've and I'm not cribbing about traffic drop for my other sites during this Penguin update. I did buy cheap links for $10-20 but I did for some other sites too. Later I quit doing all that SEO since I understood that doing such activity is of no use. That was around 10-12 months back. I don't think backlinks are such a serious concern which will entail a penalty here.

I don't do SEO anymore as I don't have time for my dozen sites. Seomoz is not correctly showing on page optimization like keyword optimization. It is showing many errors in crawl diagnostics. But those are from the PHPBB forum and every PHPBB webmaster would get it which is ignorable but Seomoz is highlighting it in Red. At the same time I've another Mybb forum and is also getting similar errors here but it's traffic has been increasing during past two months.

On-page got a D for home page. Overall there is no serious issue I could see here.

There is one silly critical report I see. Page title is: "Choose Your Payment Gateway in 9 Easy Steps" and On-Page Keyword Usage for: payment gateway india

I see that "payment gateway" indeed is there in title and India should be assumed from TLD .in of website - what's the point of calling it a critical factor!

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[Adam.Whittles]

There are certainly quite a few issues with the SEO of your site and many areas where you could look to improve.

Firstly, you mention that your site has been penalized. Why do you think your site has been penalized? I am not suggesting that your site has or has not been penalized but many people's first reaction is that their site has been penalized when in fact they have just suffered a drop in rankings. Having looked at your site, there are some issues that might have caused a penalty but I couldn't say for sure without more info.

So, have you been tracking your rankings within the PRO Dashboard? Have you noticed considerable drops in rankings for your main keywords? If so then this could indicate a penalty.

Have you setup Google Webmaster Tools? If so then have you received any messages from Google regarding a penalty or other issues? This will give you a clearer picture as to whether you have been penalized and why.

Having looked at your backlink profile, I can see several issues that could potentially have caused some problems. Firstly, your anchors have been massively over optimized with commercial terms. This was a massive factor in the recent Penguin update which Ryan has kindly given you a link to. You also seem to have a lot of spammy links from fairly obvious link farms which could also be causing you problems.

Finally, your on-page optimization could be significantly improved, I won't list all the issues here.

Anyway, I hope that's given you a few ideas to get started on.

Adam.

[RyanKent]

Hi Anurag,

Without spending some time examining your website we cannot determine the cause of your penalty; however, April 24th is the date Google rolled out the Penguin update. Many sites who purchased links (paid SEO companies to "build" links, submitted to hundreds of free directories, submitted to many article directories, spammed comments/forums with links, etc) were penalized.

You can read about Penguin here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html