Would 37,000 footer links from one site be the cause for our ranking drops?

[Webrevolve]

Hey guys,

After this week's Penguin update, I've noticed that one of our clients has seen a dip in rankings.

Because of this, I've had a good link at the client's back link profile in comparison to competitors and noticed that over 37,000 footer links have been generated from one website - providing us with an unhealthy balance of anchor terms.

Do you guys believe this may be the cause for our ranking drops?

Would it be wise to try and contact the webmaster in question to remove the footer links?

Thanks,

Matt

[TomRayner]

Hey there

That's really an unnatural amount.  And if it looks unnatural it's always in line for a penalty.

Has a commercial anchor text been used? Or is it brand? Even if it's brand, it's still a grotesque amount of links, while many of the pages linking to your client's site may be from low quality pages.  If it was a commercial anchor text, partial or exact match, then I'd be in little doubt this would cause the penalty.

I'd get the links removed ASAP, or ask the webmaster to make the links nofollow, although that may not suffice now the penalty has been put down.

If this coincided with the penguin update, the likely thing is that you won't see a recovery until the algorithm refreshes - unless we hear otherwise from Google - which is pretty frustrating.  A manual penalty can be appealed any time with a reconsideration request, of course.

Hope this helps.

[Webrevolve]

Hey Tom,

That's great. Just the sort of confirmation I was looking for.

I'll get on to the process of removing these links now.

[Webrevolve]

We've now managed to remove the footer links that were incoming from the website I mentioned.

Any advice on the next stage of the process? Or is it just purely a waiting game? Should we submit a reconsideration request? Will we be able to see any immediate changes?

To give you an idea of the scale of the ranking dips; the site was originally floating around 6/7/8 for a competitive keyword but has now dropped to the third page.

[Webrevolve]

Just an update on this; after removing the footer links we're still seeing a downward movement for one of the most competitive keywords that we were ranking on the first page for.

As I mentioned in my last message, a couple of days ago it dropped to third page and now it's on page 8! Should we be looking at a reconsideration request even though we didn't receive an actual warning from Google?

[ciznerguy]

Hi Tom

this may be a waiting game.

I would assume this link is not the only reason for the drop in ranking.

continue with your site review. get busy creating content and clean any other unnatural inbound links.

[Webrevolve]

When you say a "waiting game", do you mean weeks? Months?

We've now returned to page three for the keyword.

[ciznerguy]

Hi

continue optimizing and do not assume it will get back to where it was before.

I see some of the site I optimize stuck in new positions and only a very slow movement upward.

I guess it takes a lot of work to move up again