Last 3 years we created backlinks with 3 main anchors for our website.
Domain name example is www.jackusedcars.com , keywords: bmw , audi , mercedes. We have chosen some big keywords as our main keywords.
And some more small search volume words: buy used cars, used cars sell off. 90% of backlinks are with main keywords.
OSE:
BMW 2,505 162,638
audi 1,111 209,542
mercedes 735 64,649
used cars 382 28,368
car sale 136 8,517
toyota 108 13,106
buy used car 34 820
car sell off 28 710
usedcars.com 26 45
sold cars 23 472
Website title example is: BMW Shop, buy Audi and Mercedes used cars
90% of backlinks are to index page. (Now we have Linking Root Domains 5,158; Total Links: 512k) all backlinks are related, we never used any auto spam tool etc.
in 2011, November 16-30th "audi" keyword traffic dropped, around -80%. Other keywords were ok.
We haven't been kicked by penguin in august 24. Graph was the same. Since November, our index page traffic dropped by 70%...
1st question: We got penalized for overoptimizing with "AUDI" keyword? Or its just another reason it stopped driving traffic?
I know that for such linkbuilding we could get kicked by penguin on next update. So now we are de-optimizing the website, changing our old backlinks to different anchors and different urls (car pages - with car name anchors). We are quite good in the search results with product pages now. 1st page always - serp depends on the competition. For example "Used BMW 530 car for sale".
We are creating new backlinks like this:
10% to index with different anchors - not the old big ones
20% to http://italian.jackusedcars.com with italian anchors
20% to http://www.jackusedcars.com/search/bmw530 with "buy bmw530", "bmw530 sale" and so on
50% to product names http://www.jackusedcars.com/BMW-530-i-x-2009-full-options.html with product name anchor
We still want to get our traffic back with popular keywords. We have them written in title and keyword density on-page is 0.99% (previously was 1.37%).
Every month we lose around 10% of traffic to index page. We were with these keywords in top3, and now only 1 keyword is somewhere in top10, others are not even in top50.
2nd question: Should we remove "BMW, AUDI, Mercedes" from title? (they are still driving us around 20% traffic + 20% with bmw sub-keywords) We could lose almost 50% of total traffic. Only sub-pages will drive traffic with non-popular keywords.
We have plans of making page www.jackusedcars.com/bmw and optimize it with "BMW" keyword. Could it go through?
Some old backlinks would be changed to this page.
Our best conversion is with these main keywords, so we really need to get them back.
All comments are welcome. Graph attached.
visitors_yearly.jpg