Position Drop - Anchor Text Penalty

[jj3434]

Hi - About a month ago we dropped out of all out top position ranking and now can be found around page 600 on Google for all those keywords. I feel this is because our SEO company over used or money keywords as anchor text - Could this be correct?

[MarieHaynes]

Sep 28 was the date of the EMD update but I'm wondering if your drop was actually Sep 27.  There was a big Panda update on that day.  The biggest culprit for Panda is content that is duplicated on other sites on the web or pages with thin content.  But, Panda has nothing to do with overuse of keywords.

If you feel that this was because of overuse of keyword anchor text and the drop was not on October 5 then have a look at your webmaster tools to see if you've got an unnatural links penalty.

[jj3434]

No we dropped on the 28th Sept...

[MarieHaynes]

Did your traffic drop happen on October 5?  That was the latest Penguin update.  A quick look at your backlink profile shows that it doesn't look natural at all...you've got 59 domains pointing to you with links containing your main anchor text and the next links all contain keyword anchor text as well:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.help-my-mobility.co.uk

Your tenth most popular anchor is your url.  A natural site profile would have it's url or brand name as the top link.

Unfortunately if this is Penguin recovery will be difficult if not impossible.

[KeriMorgret]

Are you aware of links such as http://palomacosta.objectis.net/Qualidade/Members/phylishastings/fat-japanese-girl that are pointing to your site?

[BlueLinkERP]

I think you can answer your own question by asking yourself this:

"Were you aggressively seeking links in ways that Google may deem inappropriate? Were you collected vast amounts of links with the same anchor texts in an unnatural way?"

If the answer to these questions is yes, then you may very well have been penalized.

After all, Google has warned against using this practice many times.

[jj3434]

www.help-my-mobility.co.uk

[irvingw]

Share the URL and we can take a look.

[jj3434]

Hi

It seems strange all the pages are now roughly sitting in the same positions - wondered if there is a penalty drop which has be applied....

[MarkScully]

Without knowing what your site is and doing analysis, it's hard for us to say.

It could be a factor. It could also be due to other algorithm changes.

If you've dropped in position that much, doubtful it's due to competitors being aggressive in their strategies.