My all three money making domains have been hit with a -50 penalty and I'm back to where I was 4 years ago. All of my assets have vanished overnight and I'm REALLY very sad about this.
Here are some facts :
1. All the domains were ranking on Page 1 for many keywords since quite some time now.
2. One domain was penalized in May and two other were penalized today almost at the same time.
3. All three domains were listed in One GWT account.
4. None of these three sites link TO anyone except microsoft and wikipedia.
5. Reconsideration requests have confirmed manual penalties. I've done many on-site changes (like improving user experience, making things more clear on the site, rewriting the content) but nothing is helping. I'm just getting reply that "some pages still violate quality guidelines".
6. I've been building links to these sites via articles, press releases and forum posting. All three sites also have LOTS of blog comment spam links which were created when I started out and It was my fault. At that time, I wasn't sure that these links can hurt but my delusion has vanished. Since last 6 months, I've ONLY got contextual links to the domains but I've been hit very hard.
I had NEVER thought that incoming links can hurt you this much but it looks like they can hurt you a lot! It is my fault and I admit it.
Now I see :
1. NOW Competitors can harm you really easily.
2. Manual penalties were applied for off site link building. It is completely clear to me since ranking drop is SITEWIDE in all 3 cases.
Now what can I do from here? I don't have enough courage left to start out afresh and don't know when this #*$! will happen again. To any of you who had such things happen before, what I can do to get the penalties lifted? How should I go about reconsideration request?
I'm ready to do anything to get the penalties lifted. Please post about any possible solution here.
For the first time in 7 years, Today I'm thinking about leaving the online biz........
