Has there been a Google change in the last 24 hours?

[Sarbs]

We have come in this morning to find our site (paydayuk.co.uk) has suddenly disappeared from their SERPs, we have consistently been ranking in the top 5 for a wide range of search terms but now do not even appear for our brand name of Payday UK where we have been first for many months.

Our site is still indexed and we have made no changes for a while as any SEO work is waiting on completion of a CMS system. Looking in https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!categories/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking and there seem to be a lot of people having the same issues but as of yet no answers. I'd also like to add we don’t use black hat techniques so we really don’t understand why we have been penalised.

Can anyone help please?

[Sarbs]

Ok, we have been looking more into this, and we now believe we have been given a -50 point penalty by Google, yet we still have no idea why in order to apply for a reinclusion request.

Would appreciate it if anyone with greater experience of SEO can see why this may be, again as far as we can see, we have not done anything against Googles guidelines.

[loopyal]

Whatever you do, do not apply for a reinclusion until you discover the reason and fix the problem.

Did Webmaster Tools tell you there was a penalty?

[SEOclient12]

Apparently there's currently a bit of Manual review of anchor texts going on and your link profile seems quite spammy. Could have something to do with.

[Sarbs]

Thanks for your help both.

We have not heard anything from Webmaster tools no. We are investigating several lines and for one of them have just reviewed our link profile. we seem to have picked up alot of spammy links over the last month your correct. we are currently trying to asses the scale of this to see if we have been a victim of google bowling.

[ThomasHgenhaven]

Yes, it seems like Google has penalized a bunch of sites with unnatural link profiles.

Patrick Altoft has written a good post on it yesterday: http://www.branded3.com/seo/the-new-google-link-algorithm/

And both Alan and SEOclient12 are right: Do not send reconsideration request before cleaning up.

Best of luck.

Thomas