newborn - 2:47 pm on Jun 13, 2010 (gmt 0)

My business model was building mini-websites with strong content. However we chose topics that we could fill out using 5 to 10 pages.

Many of these were local based and we ranked well for them. We had upwards of almost 100+ web properties and growing. We did use Adsense and other methods of monetizing the websites, we were not MFA sites, we sold our own ebooks, free downloads of guides etc. And updated the site if there were any relevant changes. All the local sites were on the same IP as well because we weren't doing any Spam practices and the content was well written and not Spun.

We invested heavily in that arena.

In May we hired a "reputable" link building team on an outsourcing website that indicated the method they were going to use was article marketing. So we agreed as our link building was quite slow and we were hearing so much about Caffeine.

On June 2 all traffic fell and I mean off a cliff. I was stunned. We did not know what was happening as most of our domains targeted longtail traffic, keywords were even in the domain. So we thought the Google MayDay would help us.

I have checked and all the sites are still in the index, none are de-indexed as they show when I do an exact search, and site:mydomainname they all show up. Though the cache date does not seem to change.

After discussing with the link builders they said they used an automated link building service to distribute the articles. I cried foul and demanded a refund - which the gave me - however nowhere close to the revenue being lost as a result of their actions.

Having read on the forum I have seen others address the June 2 update as an over optimization update and suggested several methods to regain rankings.

I have added these and wanted to hear thoughts on which would be appropriate to conduct:

- Get more authority in bound links and wait 2 weeks to 4 months
- Add more content and get more authority inbound links and wait 2 weeks to 4 months
- Dump those sites, take the content and create new websites
- Send Google a reinclusion request and wait doing nothing

If anyone who has been hit by the June 2 update and has seen a return of normal traffic can they weigh in here...