SERPs recovery? When can I believe it?

[gfiedel]

Here's a happy story: Some of you folks with sharp memories may remember my questions and worry over the last 3+ months regarding our fall into the abyss on Google after great positions for over a decade (we've always been fine in Bing and Yahoo). And our company name URL was still #1 so no site-wide penalty.

Well......I've been working hard on fixing this in a smart way with all the ingredients I've been learning about. Thank you to SEOMozers for all the help!! There's still plenty to do, especially in the link earning department, but I've come really far from where I was in the Fall.

Anyway. I am here right now to report what may be true to life fantastic news. I was starting to suspect an improvement last week, but it proved to be wrong. Then, I saw another sign yesterday but couldn't trust it. Today, my latest SEOMoz report is showing me the following for the several keywords we lost position down to "not in the top 50" for.

keyword 1: up 44 points to #6keyword 2: no change still at #4
keyword 3: up 46 points to # 4
keyword 4: up 43 points to #7
keyword 5: up 46 points to #4
keyword 6: up 2 points to #2

What I'm wondering is if this is real. ;o). I'm pinching myself. I realize that it could be one of those sliding readjustment things and we'll drop back down, but we are not a new site. It seems that even if that is the case, it still must illustrate something good. Some kind of elimination of possibilities for why the drop occurred in the first place. I did a few things in this past week that may have put it over the tipping point. One of which was signing up for adwords a week ago. I'm happy to give details if anyone is interested.

A few specific questions:

1. What might this be showing me?
2. We have about a 45% number of anchor text footer links in client sites (we're a web dev co) one or two of which are numbering in the hundreds have keywords in them and are continuing to generate more links due to ecomm and large databases. I was gearing up to remove them or get them moved out of the footer so there's only one, but now I'm afraid to touch anything. Most of the footer links are just our company name or "site design". Any suggestions? 3. any other bits of advice for this situation are appreciated. I don't want to blow it now!

Thanks!

[HiveDigitalInc]

Don't be afraid. Go ahead and change them. They should be citations only (ie: the name of your company) and there should only be 1. I think it would be OK for it to be in the footer, just like you would cite a source in a real academic paper.

You may very well see some temporary rankings decreases when you do this, but it is far safer in the long run. Don't let it come back to bite you when the next Penguin rolls out.

[MashBonigala]

I agree with Russ. We made the same mistake last year and left the site wide footer links alone and  later paid the price for it.

Please do remove those side wide footer links right away!

[gfiedel]

Thank you, Russ and Mash. I appreciate your advice.

Do you recommend that we do it in stages so hundreds and hundreds of links don't disappear at the same time?

Our official Google verified company name is: Fat Eyes Web Development. But that clearly includes a keyword phrase "web development". and just putting our shortened company name "Fat Eyes" doesn't tell the user why that link is there- what do you think about that? Is the full name ok? Or the shortened name? Or should we put "site: Fat Eyes"? Or "site design: Fat Eyes" to distinguish what the heck Fat Eyes is?

I am also not quite sure if you are both saying that the link definitely should NOT appear in the footer even if it only says "Fat Eyes" with no other leading unlinked text and no other anchor text.

Thanks again!

Gina

[Everett]

It sounds like a manual penalty may have expired. Did you ever file a reinclusion request and get the default "There are no manual penalties against your site" message?

Either way I'd be wary of building links from client footers, no matter what the anchor text is.

[gfiedel]

Hi Everett,

Thanks for your response. This situation has continued to develop since I posted my question.

Our positions for critical keywords has continued to improve dramatically with yet more improved rankings reported early this week and again yesterday. We're now #1 for 3 keywords, 2 for a couple and 4 for a few more. Increases for additional keywords also.

Positions in Bing and Yahoo have gone up and down by relatively small amounts, mostly down this week but still holding on page 1 for those I care about other than "Gina Fiedel" which dropped 5 for Bing and Yahoo this week down to #14 and up to #6 on Google.

Immediately after I first posted this question, we did change one of the more worrisome site-wide citation links to the name of our company only (removing the keywords from anchor text), but left it in the footer for the time being.  -we didn't do more due to internal issues that aren't worth mentioning here or I'll start venting- although, as time has gone by and we're doing so well, I'm afraid to rock the boat even though I know the advice from Russ and Mash was otherwise and I'm kinda embarrassed we haven't gone after it thoroughly yet. I guess I also felt that spacing the removals might make sense. The positions did drop a tiny bit when we did that but bounced back and as I mentioned, are continuing to improve.
Now to answer your question directly, Everett: We never received any messages in GWT and had no proof of penalty-manual or otherwise, so we did not file a reinclusion request. Our company name continued to rank #1 throughout the whole thing. It was only a couple of keywords that were effected. I now feel it may have been a manual penalty for those keywords (see below).

More info:
Just prior to the bounce back I found and got removed some inbound links that were really spammy with duplicated content in an article supposedly authored by an employee that never existed, a completely fictitiously named and imaginary person. (thank you http://www.linkdetox.com).

I also believe I overused those keywords on our Home page and had obviously re-wrote that right away but further tweaked it just prior to the bounce back.

Probably most importantly is that I started a blog and have been adding thoughtful, quality content and engaging much more on social sites and promoting the blog posts on social sites.

I am happy you chose to respond to my question at this belated time because it's a whopping good reminder of Russ and Mash's (and now yours as well) advice......

Oh! And one more thing! We will not continue putting site-wide footer links on client sites when we launch them. We will NOT be perpetuating that mistake.

Thanks!