Site dropped after I removed spammy KW-stuffed section from homepage
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An SEO newbie. I took a sabbatical from my site for 10 months for personal reasons & I'm now coming back to it for the first time and facing a number of issues that I'd appreciate some advice on.
1) In the past week, my rankings for my main keywords have suddenly plummeted from ~#7 - #8 to about #25. The only thing I've done in that time is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and clean up a spammy-looking keyword-stuffed section at the foot of my homepage. (It read: Red keyword | blue keyword | green keyword | yellow keyword ... 20 times). I've kept the links (to internal pages of my site) but removed keywords.
I've no social presence whatsoever. No Twitter, Facebook, Digg, G+, Google Places, nothing -- but I can't imagine this is behind the sudden drop.
2) Last year my rankings start to fall in late April. But for the first two months or so the drop was only from #1 to #2 - #3. I put it down to Penguin as my backlink profile is not ideal.
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About 5 years ago some SEO got me a mass of sitewide blog footer links with exact-match anchors -- some of which still remain. (Some domains have 750-plus links pointing back to my site).
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I've a sitewide banner (2,500 pages) on a site with a related theme to mine.
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I've loads of links from article directory sites (from when I knew no better).
* Question: In Google Webmaster Tools I have not (yet?) received an unnatural links warning. Should I still clean up the links with the Link Disavow tool?
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Thanks for the response. However, second question:
I've not received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Should I still clean up links I don't like the look of with Link Disavow? Or should I go with Google and do nothing?
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I doubt signing up for GWT had any impact on your rankings. I would start by adding the footer back, and seeing if that restores your rankings. Maybe it wasn't as spammy as you thought?
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