Experience Re: Over Optimization Penalties

[wokka]

I'm looking for some help with what I think is an OOP.

One of the tactics the seo company working on the site for the past eight months has been building targeted anchor text links with article marketing.

On 19th February, all of my main keywords that are directly related to my niche dropped from page 1 to page 2 or lower.

The long tail's are still showing on page one - I don't think it's the Panda because the site is an 8 year old ecomm and the long tail pages showing on page one have little or no content.

The home page and main category pages that were showing for the higher searched keywords has relevant and unique articles on them.

All pages are still indexed and the penalty seems to have only dropped the keywords down 10 places or so. Searching for the main category page exact page titles are only showing results on page two or three.

I've put in a reconsideration request for what I thought may be causing the problem and just received a standard reply.

My question is - do I start again with another site (in the same market) which I have as a backup - or is this sort of penalty recoverable from and if so, is there any time frame that google imposes these types of penalties?

If I had an idea that it was going to last 30, 60, 90 days or indefinitely then I could plan a lot better for the future.

I only have one main income site which supports our family and the loss of traffic is really hurting the business and us. I know... all our eggs in one basket.. not clever, but going to change this, if I can survive the next few months!

Thanks in advance.

[linkbuildr]

Were the re-using articles? Perhaps a chunk of the article links just lost their quality because a drop in 10 places is pretty normal.

[wokka]

No - The articles were all high quality originals.

Can anyone give me any advice on whether I should just start a fresh or continue to persevere with this site and never do article syndication again on any site, hoping that the oop will fade? Or is an oop permanent?

[goodroi]

You have a single income generating website and you are only making money from that site because another company is managing the SEO? I would feel very uncomfortable if I was in that situation. Hopefully, I am misunderstanding the situation. If that is the situation then you should rethink your business model. My biggest concern isn't that you have one site but that you are not in charge of your SEO efforts.

I have been playing with Google for well over 10 years and if there is one thing I have learned, its that there are few certainties. You can follow guidelines and general procedures and if you are smart enough can do ok. Google secret's formula is constantly changing. They have hundreds of different penalties, filters and ranking factors that can be impacting your site. Only a Google employee would know what specifically is impacting your rankings and what needs to happen for it to resolve itself. Sometimes it is a time based penalty and other times poor rankings are because you need to change something on your site.

As for fixing the website, why do you think it is OOP? Article marketing was a smart SEO tactic years ago. Today it is not usually the best SEO tactic since. I hope your SEO company was reaching out to relevant websites and offering them free, relevant content and not just posting the articles to generic article directories that generate little value. Assuming it is OOP, what have you done to fix what is causing the OOP?

[tangor]

Google secret's formula is constantly changing. They have hundreds of different penalties, filters and ranking factors that can be impacting your site.

I'm in agreement with goodroi on many of the possibilities. I'd query the SEO company managing and ask what, if anything, they have done since the first of the year (January). Reverse those changes, if done. The web does move slow, even under G's fast crawl capability, so some time might pass. Meanwhile, do consider diversification for bringing in traffic. Even G is doing that for itself. [webmasterworld.com...]

[wokka]

Thanks for your reply goodroi - Yes, I definitely need to change my business model!

I WAS very busy running the business and don't have the knowledge /time to deal with the SEO side of things, so outsourced it to a trusted company. However, I have no clue if they have then outsourced the job to A N Other who has done something stupid.

There was a sudden spike of new links (700+ according to majesticseo) a couple of days before the problems began. The seo company have said that isn't something they would have done, because they are only building links in a natural manner. But, they would say that now, wouldn't they!

I 'think' its some sort of OOP because all the keywords that the SEO company were targeting have been demoted to page 2 or below. The long tail KW's are still appearing on page 1. It's as if any keywords that have brought the site more than 10+ visitors/day have been pushed down to page 2.

Also, when I search for the exact title of one of the main category pages - google isn't returning my page until page 2 or 3.

Honestly, I'm not sure if it's oop or some other filter, but it would be good to know if the problem is only going to exist for a set time. I'm currently in panic mode and don't know the best way forward.

[Planet13]

There was a sudden spike of new links (700+ according to majesticseo) a couple of days before the problems began.

I think you need to figure out where those links came from, and how you go them.

The seo company have said that isn't something they would have done, because they are only building links in a natural manner.

What do they mean by "natural manner"?

There is only ONE WAY to build links naturally; have GREAT content and let people link to it of their own accord.

You can juice it up a little bit by having a newsletter that goes out to subscribers and informs them of your great content. Or by having facebook / twitter postings that informs people of your great content. But aside from that, everything else is "unnatural" (even link begging, which I do a lot of).