Delayed Penalty...

[Stan_C]

I received the 7/23/12 Unnatural inbound links warning but nothing changed, if anything my traffic and rankings improved well over the next 2 - 3 months.

But last week a couple of the better (maybe slightly over) optimized pages suddenly dropped out of the rankings completely, is it possible that these two events are related but three months apart?

A change I made close to the time of the rankings dropping was completely overhauling the homepage. I realized this would impact the internal "link juice" flow but never expected the kind of drop in rankings I received. I have restored the homepage to its former glory but it hasn't helped get my slightly over optimized pages ranking again.

Any ideas? Suggestions?

Exact date of drop in rankings is 18 - 19 October (site has lost roughly 50% of its organic search traffic)

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi Stan,

I'm pretty sure the messages that were sent out were warnings. It was up to you to clean up your link profile and ask for a reconsideration request from Google. Perhaps you took too long and now you are being penalized for it?

I would recommend fixing your link profile by sending the low quality linking sites a message. Even if you cannot get all the bad links removed, you can disavow them, just remember to request reconsideration after you have attempted to clean up the mess.

[Stan_C]

Hi Bryan,

Thanks yip I have put together the list of the low quality links and contacted most of them. Many I don't even know how we got... they are asking us to pay them to remove the links.

I guess this is the perfect opportunity for me to test the disavow tool... Thanks for the response.

Cheers,
Stan