Rankings Gone? Have I been effected by the Panda/Penguin Update(s)?
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Our site www.alphameasure.com has been online since 2005 and currently has a page rank of 4.
The site has always ranked on page one or two of Google for our primary keywords (Employee Satisfaction Survey, Employee Engagement Survey, Employee Surveys).
I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but now our site is nowhere to be found. I'm thinking our ranking dropped somewhere in mid to late January?
We did use an SEO company in the spring of 2012 that went on a link building campaign for us. They added about 450 inbound links over a three month period. Other than that - nothing has really change on the site.
We're getting ready to release a new version of our software that was being re-written during all of 2012, so the timing of losing our rankings is just awful.
Any help or ideas is greatly appreciated?
Thanks in advance,
Josh -
You have too much unnatural anchor text. It is a penalty without question. You must submit a reconsideration request to Google (so they confirm the penalty) then you must start clearing the spammy links.
This will take some time to fix. I recently cleared 3 massive Google penalties on clients sites (worse than yours). It takes time but it is definitely worth doing it properly. Do no try any tricks to get round it, they will only come back to bite you in the posterior.
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Probably the link building if long tail variations are still ranking but the main keyword phrases you listed are now suppressed. the link building company probably is responsible for the penalty.
http://www.submitasiteforfree.com/business/business-opportunities/alphameasure.com.html
anchor: Employee Satisfaction Survey
http://www.dir1.co.uk/business/business-services/alphameasure.com.html
anchor: Employee Engagement Survey
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Check your Google Webmaster Tools for any messages. Try some exact match search terms to see if your site comes up.
3 month period and 450 links from 450 different domains? That is a pretty big deal, depending on how these links were built this could be the reason why.
I've had a previous site I was working on and getting the penalty removed and they only had about 50-100 bad links.
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