Ouch - Will I Ever Recover? Looks like a massive penalty/

[courier]

Sorry for the long post, I may be the king of conspiracy theories, but at least this is a good one.

I was #1 for one of the most popular results on the internet in the UK, and just about evry derivation of it for around three years. I am the niche in this field, well that was until now. I am an affiliate, with gross turnover (for the affiliate company)last year of more than £30,000,000. The relationship with the very well known affiliate company has been somewhat tender for around 12 months, likely due to the growth in sales. Four weeks ago I was dropped for every keyword in Google, appears to be a massive penality. Overnight searches went from 20,000 daily to 700 Bing visitors.

So here is the conspiracy,

After a very fragile time with the owners of the program, and some (what I will call) new rules we moved forward. Almost instantly I began seeing them in my logs spidering and manually searching the site. I had contemplated banning them from the site but decided against it. The spidering stopped and the next day I was dropped in Google. I was sick and did not know what to do. I started to become suspicious because of the new rules and the spidering. I had a good look at the site and there was nothing diferent I had done, apart from the new rules.

Well imagine my surprise when the following week I see them in the position I once held, and from way down the results. I submitted a reinclusion request, but while I was in WMT I noted that there was a 95,000 links that were not there before (normally 4,000 and still 4,000 in yahoo). WMT Does not show all the links whach is puzzlinng.

After that to my astonishment, the affiliate company announced to the world they were going to specialise only in my product, which has created a lot of news - tv, internet and news papers.

Was my site moved to the side to allow this with the help of Google?

If this was moved to facilitate this, can I ever get back

Is there any advice where I can go from this point?

What does it mean by so many links in WMT, is this a genuine 95,000 links, or part of a penality?

[vivalasvegas]

30,000,000?!

So where do the 95,000 links come from?

[courier]

30,000,000 - Yes it's not a miss print, gross sales.

The 95,000 links was a concern, it went from 4,000 to 45,000 then to 95,000 in a matter of 2 weeks, according to WMT but still at 4,000 in Yahoo.

[patc]

courier - I'm also an affiliate company, turnover significantly less, but my overheads are low and it's been a good business in a small niche for 10 or so years.

I also saw a plethora of spammy backlinks appear to my site in retrospect when trying to analyse a penalty which appeared in January, the bulk of the links started in November.

I'd reccomend the free reports at Majestic SEO - you can see the backlinks got over time.

However, how you sort it out, I am still trying to decipher. Google don't bother with reconsiderations unless the penalty is a 'manual' (non algorithmic) action.

Does your site still show up for <company name>, and is it indexed properly (do a site:sitename.com search)? If not, you may be ok with a reinclusion request once you have figured it out and taken some action.

Personally my site is indexed fine, PR6, many sitelinks in WMT (a sign of quality I believe) and yet I am in the depths, and convinced this is the result of a tried and tested means of destroying another sites' trust - something we have absolutely no control over.

Seems there is big business in destroying competitors and we may have both been victims of that.

[courier]

Thanks patc, yes I have still page rank - and site:sitename.com I am still appearing. I will look into the Majestic SEO report and see what's there.

[patc]

Your original post is somewhat enigmatic I will add, courier. The 'new rules' you speak of - sounds like you had to do something that really might have upset the apple cart... so perhaps ignore my backlinks conspiracy...

Is it possible you could change the site to 'pre penalty' status, after explaining your problems to the people you're dealing with?

[courier]

I also have thought that these so called "new rules" assisted in the penality. Without going into too much detail, The new rules meant I had to provide further information from my site, provided with the aid from a large and well known company, whose name is on everyones lips. The advertiser has been very evasive and has still to make official contact.

[patc]

Fundamentally though, did any of your recent efforts to please your advertisers amount to changes on your site in any way, i.e. what Google crawls?

[courier]

In short no, the only thing diferent on the site was a piece of code placed, which I suspect was used to trigger their ad on the Google sponsored results when I appeared for a serch term. The advertiser before this had done very little in the way of sponsored results, but began appearing on all serch terms I appeared for.