Minus 50 to minus 20 - What can I do?

[cangoou]

Hello! After 3 month, I got from a -50 Penalty to a -20 Penalty. Any ideas what could cause that and what I could do about it?

[tedster]

Can you clarify these questions?

After three months...

Is the website three months old, or are your rankings problems three months old for a much older website?

I got from a -50 Penalty to a -20 Penalty

Do you mean all your search terms were ranking around 50 and are now ranking around 20? Or are do you mean that all your search terms now rank anywhere between 20 and 50?

[cangoou]

Thanks for your reply. Sorry for beeing to vague:
The website is about 4 years old. For the main keyword, I ranked on position 11 till the end of november, then I got a lot of links from different domains of the same owner in a short time (without asking for it), but I suddenly rankend between 50-60 from dezember till last week. So I guess I got a -50 penalty here.

Since last week I rank on 21-22. From my experience with the keyword and links of competitors, I should now be ranking in the Top10. So my guess it's some kind of -20 penalty. But I have no idea what would cause that because all went fine before december and I think (hope...) that the -50 Penalty from the massive linking has now been removed.

Thats all concerning the main keyword. On keyword-combinations (including the main keyword) or other keywords I have been ranking well without any problems.

[tedster]

It does sound like a gradual removal of a penalty. Have you tried a Reconsideration Request, through WebmasterTools? If you explain it the way you did here, and include the unrequested backlinks for Google, that might help you -- and it can't hurt.

[johnnie]

Be happy - you're going the right way

[cangoou]

Thanks for your replys. Does anybody has any experience with that? Could you say: If you had a -50 for 3 month, the -20 will last for about x month?

[aakk9999]

then I got a lot of links from different domains of the same owner in a short time (without asking for it),

I have a question with regards to acquiring mass of one way links in a short time when they are not asked for.

If Google penalises for this, this means that it would be easy to bring the competitor down. All that you need to do is to "buy" few hundreds of links from unrelated domains and ask them to be pointed to your competitor's site.

Is it really as easy as this? Or something else has to happen in the same time for Google to decide that it is actually a webmaster of the site asking for these links and hence the site should be penalised?

I thought Google said "There is (almost) nothing your competitor can do to damage your ranking". Is this the "almost" bit?

[idolw]

Are you 100% sure position on page 3 is a "ceiling" for your site?
How about buying some decent links to a chosen page and see what happens? If you can take one page up, you definitely can do the same with all of them.

[cangoou]

Well in the last days I went up to 17 step by step - but I'm still sure that with my linking I should rank in the Top10. Perhaps you are right and it's not a -20 but just a kind of decay, but I guess there is no final way to tell what it is?