Can anyone give us some advice, please? We run several established guide and directory web sites, plus a few new ones we have launched recently. We try and follow all the guidelines set out by Google and spend most of our time writing articles for the sites and the blogs which run along side the sites.
This morning a site that we launched a couple of months ago suddenly sank in the Google results. The site is a guide and directory targeting a US audience. We had noticed that the Google Webmaster Tools where only showing 21 out of 74 pages in the index, however, the site was doing well with Adsense, so we kind of ignored the indexing issue. This morning the site seemed to sink, no traffic was arriving from Google. Looking at some of phrases that lead visitors to the site from just yesterday from page 1 of the SERPS, showed that our pages were now down to like page 35 in the results.
After looking very closely at the pages we noticed a major error from all our article pages to the directory pages. We have a page for each of the 50 states and these are all linked from each article page, however, what we found was that instead of each state linking to its respective state page, they were in fact all linked to our page for Nevada. For example Alabama, Alaska, Arizona etc were all internal links pointing to the wrong state.
Our question is, can this be seen as try to manipulate Google with anchor text, even though it is a mistake? We have corrected all pages and links, and now I guess all we can do is wait. Does anyone have any ideas?
