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Oh that's a good idea. I just tried it (link) and it actually doesn't seem so bad

Thank you Joe. This is insanely helpful.

I have not seen any dramatic drops in ranking but this has me concerned.

I've also noticed that recently very spammy Tweets referencing my site (sitebuilderreport.com) have been published: https://twitter.com/search?q=sitebuilderreport

Also troubling is that a number of the linking sites have porn-related domain names. That seems inherently spammy.

I'm having trouble tracking down the actual links using GWT to check the anchor text. So I'll get back on that.

I was browsing Google Webmaster Tools and discovered there are 117,301 links to my site— mostly from very low-quality, spammy websites. I definitely did not solicit these links. I'm worried they are from a competitor trying to get me penalized by Google.

Should I be worried about this?

spam-websites.png?1505218483

Hi Vladim! I'm not sure I know what you mean- I attached a graph that might help visualize how the rankings have changed over time

Thanks Mike, sorry the post may be a bit unclear. I meant "Hockey Stick" as a metaphor.

The website actually targets keywords such as "website builders", "website builder reviews"

My site, Site Builder Report, was started last year.

Months 1 - 6 saw modest organic traffic growth.
Months 6 - 9 saw explosive organic traffic growth.
Months 9 - 12 have seen a steady decrease in organic traffic.

(I've attached a graph for visualizing this)

The site has not changed much over this time. In fact, in the last 3 months, I've done two things to try to get organic traffic trending upwards again:

1. Increased the amount of long-form articles on the site (from 1 new article every 3 weeks to 1 new article every week)
2. Fixed approxately 150 five hunded (500) errors in Google Webmaster Tools three weeks ago (converted them to 404s)

Neither fix has really been able to change the trend (although perhaps it's too early to tell with the fixing of errors).

Does this downtrend warrant concern? It's having significant business effects- would hiring an SEO consultant be the next step for reversing this trend? Any thoughts?

GeYyuvA

Very helpful- I'm moving forward with this advice!

Thanks Irving. It's only for 8 pages right now- but my client plans on posting more destinations (and thus more not-so-unique-content) in the future.

Re-writing is something I hadn't considered. That may be a more cost-efficient idea. Thanks for the idea!

Hi SEOMozzers,

I'm building a website for a client that provides photo galleries for travel destinations. As of right now, the website is basically a collection of photo galleries.

My client believes Google might like us a bit more if we had more "text" content.

So my client has been sending me content that is provided free by tourism organizations (tourism organizations will often provide free "one-pagers" about their destination for media).

My concern is that if this content is free, it seems likely that other people have already posted it somewhere on the web. I'm worried Google could penalize us for posting content that is already existent.

I know that conventionally, there are ways around this-- you can tell crawlers that this content shouldn't be crawled-- but in my case, we are specifically trying to produce crawl-able content.

Do you think I should advise my client to hire some bloggers to produce the content or am I just being paranoid?

Thanks everyone. This is my first post to the Moz community