Is this website being punished by Google?

[CKerr]

Hi,  I just took over the SEO for a friend of mine's website. Is this website being punished by Google?  It has a strong link score, the homepage needs work as far as Key wording goes but it does not appear in Google's top 100 for any keyword.  I am not sure that the last SEO company did some harm.  Can anyone give me some tips on getting my friend back into the mix?

www.wallybuysell.com

[kchandler]

It looks like the site is still indexed in Google if you do a site search with their URL. However their anchor text looks bloated in the way that resembles unnatural links. They had 400 different occurrances of a banner ad link with the image alt text of "wally buy sell edmonton real estate". Many of those backlinks looked to either be spammy or have expired.

Did he have Google Webmasters tools hooked up to his site? If so check for any warnings in regards to penalties.

[CKerr]

Thank you for your response.  There are no warnings in Webmaster of penalties.

What would be my best recourse to fix the Spam link problem?

Also in today's Google,  what is considered a spam link?

Should I just link to his business name, or to a Keyword like Edmonton Real Estate Agent?

Is there anything I can do about the expired link pages?

[kchandler]

Since you didn't receive any penalties this may be tied to an algorithm change, however that is something pretty tough to prove. If you can check their analytics and see if the drop was inline with any updates listed here http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change. Above and beyond that here are some more specific answers to some of your questions:

What would be my best recourse to fix the Spam link problem? I would first define what parts of your link profile is related to spam. A great tool to use for this is called LinkDetox and it is only $40 per site that is totally worth it. From there i would suggest disavowing any sites that are flagged as toxic.

**Also in today's Google,  what is considered a spam link? **
Some red flags would be any website that is not indexed in Google, has a domain moztrust below 2, and if the content is not focused/randomly generated.

Should I just link to his business name, or to a Keyword like Edmonton Real Estate Agent?
Make it as natural as possible. If you are linking back to a portion of the website about home loan questions, use that as anchor text. Or if it is the contact page perhaps use "contact edmonton real estate". Now-a-days you want to keep the end user in mind almost more so than the search engines.

Is there anything I can do about the expired link pages?
Actually this is a good thing - if it was a spam link and it has expired all the hard work has been done for you in the removal

Hope this helps - Kyle

[CKerr]

Thank you so much,  I really appreciate all your help on this.  Great advice and knowledge!