Penalised due to links?

[Quime]

Hi,

Is there a way to tell if a site has been penalised for it's links?

Our site dropped last Friday, and we would like to rule out links, as we plan to move the site to our main site and re-direct the links, unless Google would punish the new url due to this.

Our old site does not show any warnings for the link, and neither does our Google WM account, the only thing we have to go by is a big drop in SERP.

Many thanks.

Quime.

[Quime]

Only on Google, Yahoo and Bing are not effected, no updates were made in particular, especially not to every site, but it happened on the 5th around the time of a Google update. also all 4 lost sites were 3 keyword EMD's with dashes, which we are thinking might have been the cause after doing some research on recent updates? The site not effected was not an EMD and was an authoritative original version.

[kchandler]

What search engines did they drop in?

Did you make any updates to the site at the time of the drop?

[Quime]

Hi there are a few things which are strange that make me unsure of the reasons for the drop regarding the links

Firstly it happened to all our 'foreign' language URLS at the same time. All were on a different URLs with different IPs but shared the same coding and template, however we thought this was fairly normal for many websites who have different language versions.

Secondly we did not receive any warnings from Google on webmasters.

Thirdly the drop happened to all our key words, there is nothing even close to 50 on the SERPS now, but the sites are all still indexed.

The original English website has been left untouched.

[kchandler]

Unless you received a link spam notifications in your Google Webmasters tool i would highly suggest NOT submitting a reconsideration request. Do your homework first.

• Did the drop in rankings happen across all search engines or just Google?
• Are the pages completely removed from the indexes or just ranking out of the top 50?
• You mentioned you recently implemented a redirect. What is the new URL? How did you implement it?
• If you have your site added to a campaign in the pro tool. Navigate to Link Analysis > History. Is there any weird trends in your DA or your external link count? Any huge increases?
• Also check OSE. Enter your domain and click the "anchor text" tab. Then filter by "all pages on this root domain. Any with extremely high volume? Are you branded terms lower than non-branded?

Run through those five steps and you will have a LOT better idea of what is going on with your link profile instead of simply submitting a request that will take a long while to hear back from.

Cheers - Kyle

[CatalystSEM]

The easy way to find out is by submitting a reconsideration request. The more difficult way is to audit your backlink profile and see if you built any shady links that violate their TOS. The EMD update might have caused your traffic to drop because I notice that you have an exact match domain.

Look into your analytics and see if you can identify the specific words that dropped in traffic.