10 year old site penalized - what steps to take?

[Thez]

Since monday we've lost 95% of our traffic on our main site from Google. This drop is big, as I'm talking 5-digit number of daily visitors. All our top searches previously found on page 1 are now on page 10 or so. However this is not a ban, page rank and number of indexed pages has not changed. Site has been online 10 years now.

Things I'm doing before mailing for reconsideration:

I did some research and found out that paid links on our main page is bad. We have a large number of affiliate links, which is bad. As a first solution I thought that putting rel="nofollow" to all of these. Is this enough to satisfy Google ?

I noticed we have a number of duplicate meta descriptions and titles from Google sitemaps, these will be handled. Is this really an issue ?

We have popup code from Valeclick on all our pages. I highly doubt this is a reason for penalty, but as I'm not fully aware of the latest things that's going on in the SEO world, I thought I'd ask you people anyway.

I'm also going through all our content with a fine-tooth comb to check for broken links and such.

What do you think of these ? What else could I do ?

Any help is appreciated :)

[tedster]

I did some research and found out that paid links on our main page is bad.

Yes, Google will often penalize for paid links that pass PageRank these days. You're right, that is the biggest factor you mentioned. Using the rel="nofollow" attribute will fix that, but I have no idea how long it takes Google to remove a link selling penalty these days.

We have a large number of affiliate links, which is bad. As a first solution I thought that putting rel="nofollow" to all of these. Is this enough to satisfy Google ?

There's nothing wrong with affiliate links as long as your site offers a significant amount of unique content, and not the same copy that other affiliates of the same business use.

Duplicate meta descriptions may cause some pages to be filtered, but they won't cause a ten page drop in ranking. You would do well to fix them, but that's not part of your current big problem.

Pop-up ads are also not a big deal (unless they are passing PageRank to another domain.)

Checking your outgoing links is a good thing, but don't just look for broken or 404 links - those also would not cause a 10 page drop. However, do check for links to websites that may have changed their nature and are now part of "bad neighborhoods". It's a good idea to do a search for any domain name that you're not sure of. If the site doesn't rank #1 for an "example.com" search, then dig deeper into what they're up to and consider dropping the link altogether.

And more than that - don't just check your outbound links by looking at your visible pages. Check your outbound links with a utility like Xenu Link Sleuth that will give you a list of all your outbound by pulling them from your source code. That way you will catch it if your server's been hacked somehow and some of your pages are now being used as a "parasite host" for hidden links, and especially hidden links to bad neighborhoods, malware and so on.

[Thez]

Many thanks, I'm more optimistic now. We've had the paid links for quite some time, hope Google catches the change quick :\

Keep the suggestions coming :)

[Thez]

I forgot to mention, we have a lot of links on news and review articles where people can add them to Delicious, Digg, Facebook and such. I assume these shouldn't hurt rankings ? Or should I play safe and add rel="nofollow" to these too ?

[Vimes]

Hi,

Check this thread out and make sure none of these apply

Canonical URL Issues [webmasterworld.com]

Sounds like filtering to me and it could be due to duplicate content.

Vimes.