Google ranking goes down - a lot!

[ashish2005]

Hi, I had a website which ranked in the page 2 and page 3 of google search engine for two popular keywords. I averaged around 15th position for the first keyword and the second keyword ranked me around 25th. Yesterday when I checked my ranking for the first keyword(15th position) my site was around 150 and for the second keyword (25th position) it's around 250. For an unpopular keyword for which I ranked 3-5th I was send to the 3 rd page.

My site received around 1000+ unique visitors from google which is now all gone.

I had a link farm sort of thing going on my site since 6 months now. I used a code on the page which had links to many sites and those many sites linked back to me with that same page. This got me banned in yahoo and I did not really care because yahoo rarely sent me visitors.
Now I have removed the link to this page and deleted this page. This page never did anything to my google rankings since 6 months.

I also copied < some content > and pasted it in my site the day before yesterday. I am removing that as we speak.

Recently, I also did some three way link exchanges. I had a site B which linked to my original site. And the site B linked to other sites which again linked back to my ranking dropped site.

I also posted a link exchange request thread in some other forum but i did not mention my site there. It was however present in the signature link.

My pagerank, number of backlinks, site:query results all remains the same.

What did I do wrong? Why did google send me down in search results. What should I do now? Is there a way to contact google about this.

Please help me and let me know if I should provide any more details.

Thanks
Ashish

[edited by: tedster at 4:13 pm (utc) on May 23, 2008]

[tedster]

You have already mentioned a few guideline violations that might have made trouble for you. If you have any more in mind, then fix them too before you contact Google.

Then use Google Webmaster Tools to send a Reconsideration Request. If you never set up an account before, be sure you check out all the feedback it gives you and fix anything more that is mentioned.

When you feel your site is as clean as it can be, then file the Reconsideration Request, explaining every step you took. You may not get a personal reply - you just see results in the SERPs, or not, after a couple weeks.

[extremegolfer]

Like Tedster said, everything you had done was in violation:-) Now that you removed everything, you may want to wait a couple of weeks prior to filing the recon and see what happens. If you file they may find other fun things you've done with your site:-)