Overnight Drop In Rankings

[Palmbourne]

Over the last size eight weeks we have been doing all of our own SEO with the help of reading this forum and asking questions, prior to this we had an SEO company from India who were only doing articles and promoting them.

We have been using various keywords by writing them into our own blogs, to check how we have been doing I have monitored two main keywords, when we started, our choice keyword was on page three, on Monday it had moved up to number one on page two, today it is now back on page three, have we been hit by the Penquin update, if so would I have received a warning in WMT, a lot of my other keywords across the site have moved down although some have moved up, we are retailers not SEO experts so it is a big blow to move down when everyone has worked hard, looking at some pages I do have some pages that look as though they have been keyword stuffed, I have altered some of them to see if anything changes, I have also look at some of the links but how do I know if I am doing the right thing?

[Njave_MCP]

Please explore the links your hired help created for you. If it's too spammy, too many direct name anchor text or any other issue that isn't with Google's guidelines, then you have a problem. There are reputable experts on the forums here and thus the general rule is to hire someone who knows what's he doing and not promising results in a two months time. Bear in mind, some of my websites saw improvements you are talking about after two-three years of hard work, but that also meant their rankings are still there after each and every algorithm change.

[KarlBantleman]

Hi John,

If they were doing articles and promoting them then this is why your website has been hit. Article websites took a major hit in the update prior to Christmas and the Penguin 2.0 update last night has more than likely reaffirmed any penalty you were going to receive unfortunately. Do a backlink analysis in OSE and find all the article websites with links on and get them taken   down (if you can, obviously if you have login details then this will be easier). If you can't then use the disavow tool.

Don't forget that any onsite changes that you make, you will have to wait for Google to come back and cache the website before you see any effect. Concentrate on creating great content and look to create relationships with those in your industry and concentrate on your outreach. 5 links on relevant, topical blogs are worth a million times more than 10000 links on article websites.

[Linda-Vassily]

This might not be anything you are doing; Google is having a little stormy weather right now. You can take a look at Google's volatility here: http://mozcast.com/

[cbielich]

It's called Penguin 2.0

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[PhilGraham-SlateInboundMarketi]

"An SEO Company from India doing articles"

That is a BIG warning sign. My guess is that you've got a bunch of low quality spammy links pointing to your site.

Another thing to check on is your anchor text distribution as well. Make sure it's not over 10-20% for your main keyword.