Please help? unique penguin problem with a blogger template

[wcuk]

**Can any one help? The problem: **There is a free blogger template on this site http://btemplates.com/2012/blogger-template-crystalweb/ that has a anchor text link to our site using the keyword "wholesale" in the footer, that is the main course of our site being hit with a penguin penalty.**The story so far:**On the 24th April our website dropped out of the serps for our main keywords, traffic has been down 90% ever since, we are a small family run business that relies on the inter-net and goggle for our site to work. Goggle organic serps is about 30% of our turnover and have already had no choice to let 3 people go, problem now is we are left with Me, my Dad and Mum, Both my Brothers and nephew and my wife and my brothers wife so unless we can turn this around I can see us going bankrupt.**What I have done so far:**After the 24th I have learnt a lot about S.E.O , and managed to remove 99% of all bad/spammy links and have now come to a dead end. I have been promoting what we do as a company and promoting our blog over the last 4 months and also built a great twitter/facebook following with lots of re-tweets and shares which we have made some good sales from. We have re-designed most parts of our website and managed to up the conversion rate by 300% We have worked on all aspects of our website to make sure we have  little/no duplicate content , have worked on ways to speed up the site and fixed most dead links/404 problems.<var id="yiv904548185yui-ie-cursor"></var>**Now onto our main problem:**After a few weeks of removing links I found a blogger page that kept coming up with the same link, after some detective work I found the template was originally designed by http://www.deluxetemplates.com/ after a few emails we found out that someone paid deluxetemplates to add the link to the site, I'm guessing it was a S.E.O. company we used for 2 years, but they did not admit to this and could not help. A guy called Klodian from deluxtemplates was really helpful and helped remove from his site, also he agreed to a cost of $250 to remove all the pictures on his server to force the blogger's to update, this is what the template from deluxtemplates now looks like vozconuncion.blogspot.co.uk .Now this was only helping fix this issue a small bit as a different site called btemplates also used the template and added it to there website as a free download and hosted the template pictures on there servers. I have emailed a few times, I have sent them twitter messages and also added messages to lots of there templates on there site in the hope they can help, I have also contacted the owner directly on his goggle+1 page but no reply. This template is being downloaded once or twice a day, with no way to get hold of the blogger's using it. As a last resort I offered the owner $1000 to help me remove the template but still no luck.Does anyone have any ideas how to resolve? we are willing to pay to resolve this and will do what ever needs to be done.Thank-you for taking the time to read.Karl.

[wcuk]

No, still not fixed really do not know what to do next.

[RijoAbraham]

btemplates.com is a pirated site, if you ask me. No wonder you lose the rank. Must be a penguin hit rather than manual penalty. Is the problem fixed ?

[RyanKent]

Yes Marie, you are spot on with everything.

[MarieHaynes]

OK.  I think I see what you are saying.

My first thought when I read this post was that if I was evil, I could have a template designed, put a keyword anchor text in the footer that pointed at my competitor and then spread that template all across the internet.

But let me see if I understand you.  Are you saying:

1. That would only work if you had other signs of bad linking in your profile.

2. A reputable website, as soon as they saw referral visits coming from strange footer links would act on this right away.  So, if this got to the point where there were hundreds or thousands of these links across the web then the website owner was in some sense "in on the game" and aware of the links and therefore has some sort of responsibility to own up to.

Does that make sense?  If so, then this would mean that a website that was otherwise  pretty clean really should not be able to be hit with negative SEO.

But if that's the case, doesn't it mean you could easily hit a competitor with negative SEO if they already had some shady stuff going on?

(To the OP, sorry to hijack your thread...I hope it's ok.  This is an interesting discussion.)

[RyanKent]

**This sort of gives fuel to the fire for people who are worried about negative SEO. **

I share your desire to want to help Karl, but I disagree with the idea of any negative SEO worries at all.

In Karl's case, as with every other case I have seen, he hired a SEO company which seemed to have engaged in manipulative link building. Karl has taken all the proper steps and is trying to do damage control.

If an otherwise good site (i.e. one which has not engaged in building manipulative links) had a template created which builds manipulative links to the site, it should not draw a penalty. A diligent site owner or SEO would watch the links to their site at least monthly and follow up on any attempts at negative SEO.

[MarieHaynes]

Wow!  What a frustrating problem!

This sort of gives fuel to the fire for people who are worried about negative SEO.  It looks like all you'd need to do to take down a website is to put a keyword anchor texted link in the footer of a free template and spread it around the web.

Sorry I don't have anything more to add to what has been suggested.  I really hope you get this fixed!  It's so unfair!

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the kind words Karl.

Some additional steps you can take:

• WHOIS information is required to be kept current. You can registered a complaint here: http://wdprs.internic.net/. The domain registrar then attempts to contact the domain owner to update the info. If they cannot, I think a process is initiated to reclaim the domain name. If successful, the site would go offline and solve your problem. The process takes time. The details are outside the scope of my expertise and I only have general knowledge of this process.

• The site has an active facebook and twitter account. You can post to both their twitter and facebook account sharing your interest to contact them. The site's social activities show daily activity until late June. It appears the site and social accounts have been left unattended for the past 2 months.

• The site's about page says the owner is Francisco Oliveros (http://btemplates.com/about/). It shows his personal twitter and blog info. I can see you already found his G+ account :). His personal twitter account had activity last week.

I recommend trying these approaches for now.

[wcuk]

Hi, Yes I did try, "number is not reconsided" I phoned 005255516489 is this correct from the UK?

Thanks

Karl.

[Maximise]

Have you tried the telephone number listed in Whois?

Vicente, Francisco   fco.vicente.oc@gmail.com
      NA
      20 de Noviembre
      Mexico, Mexico 12365
      Mexico
      +52.55516489

[wcuk]

Hi Discover Africa, I did file a reconsideration request, but got this answer...We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.We have been outreaching and gaining some good links using our brand name and website URL, I have given Interviews to trade blogs etc, but the only way I can assume we will get our website clear of the penguin penalty is to bring down the anchor text link % but with the template giving site wide links to our site everyday its impossible to keep up with it.Does anyone have any direct contact with btemplates?ThanksKarl.

[AndreVanKets]

I suggest you state your case in a Google Reconsideration request.

Submit all the URL's you removed and detail all the steps you took to fix up the link profile and on page errors.

Once you've done that, don't spend you time worrying. Start outreaching and get some authoritative links back to your website with your brand name. Just keep at it until you start recovering.

Good luck!

[wcuk]

Hi Ryan, the link points to our home page, www.wholesaleclearance.co.uk I wish I could have 404 'ed the page. Good idea though, any others? apart from moving domain names? Our domain still gets about 2500 unique visits a day, was about 12,000 a day.The penguin penalty seems to affect any keyword phrase using Wholesale, apart from our brand names and URL.By the way Ryan I have been following the questions and answers for the last 4 months and must thank you for every answer you have given, your a very talented S.E.O expert that has already helped me at least 10 times by reading your answers :)Kind RegardsKarl.

[RyanKent]

Hi Karl,

What page does the "wholesale" link point to on your site? Is it possible to change the URL so the link breaks?