Google Penalty for strong industry link?

[Gerad]

I work as the SEO manager for a company and we recently launched a new site. Along with this I've been doing some intensive SEO over the past 30 days in getting partners to add or change links and had a big impact on our main keyword, document management software. For the past 2 weeks we've been at position 6 but today I noticed that we dropped down to 11th. I'm wondering if I'm getting penalized for too many exact anchor matches because we recently have been featured on an industry site, cmsreport.com with good anchor text and suddenly we have dropped. Is Google penalizing me for this? If so it seems odd that with legitimate PR and posts I get penalized.

[EGOL]

Nobody can say for sure... but if I look at the anchor text of the links for sites  that are powerful but do zero linkbuilding they have almost no matching anchor text and a ton of links with domain.com as anchor.

I am not disputing the value of keyword anchor text... but just saying that domain.com anchor text might be better than you think with the words in nearby sentences delivering the goods. .

[Gerad]

I absolutely agree with you as far in that some of the best sites have few to no exact anchor matches, I'm just surprised that with a featured press release on a very related site that Google dropped my ranking. Given your advice I switched my latest release and will see if the Google oracle likes me again

[RyanKent]

I can't offer a direct explanation for your recent ranking drop. I would not suspect a penalty. It is a common practice for articles to be published or PR announcements to occur, then for this content to be picked up and duplicated. I disagree with the idea of changing your latest release to adjust for a penalty that may not exist.

You shared you have been recently performing a lot of SEO work. The changes you made kick up a lot of dust with respect to Google. They index the web in chunks so it may take a bit of time for the dust to settle. If the changes you made were improvements I would expect your ranking to be restored without any further action. I hate to offer a "wait and see" response but often that is the best approach.

Whenever someone asks "why did my rankings drop" I look at their site and the first thing I ask myself is "does this site deserve to be on the first page of Google results for a competitive term?" It's a lion fight. If you want to be the best then all stops need to be pulled out and an intense focus is required on every last component of the site. This is my approach and others may disagree.

I noticed opportunities for improvement on your site. Below are a few I noticed immediately but there are probably others.

• your image names should be changed to include more accurate descriptions that perhaps include keywords. For example one image is named "Homepage42.jpg". It seems most images follow this naming convention.

• some images are missing alt text, such as the one mentioned above. The couple images I did see with alt text show "document management software". I would suggest caution here. Using that phrase in alt text once should be fine but make sure the alt tag describes the image and gently includes keywords otherwise it may appear as stuffing.

• The current page title is "Document Management Software for a Paperless Office | Docstar". Possibly consider shortening it to "Document Management Software | Docstar". This is a judgment call but it would give more weight to your primary keyword phrase and you can include additional details in your meta description.

• The site uses 7 H1 tags. For most sites I would say this is too many. Your site looks very nice and makes it work with the header images rotating. I would suggest changing the tags outside the header to H2 tags out of concern that Google may not like that many H1 tags. A side suggestion would be to slow down the header image rotation. It is so fast that a reader cannot possibly even read the header, not to mention the other text. I realize the rotation can be stopped by selecting the appropriate tab in the menu bar but users may not understand how that works.

• A couple non-SEO suggestions. Add a favicon. Your gold star would work well. Also remove the "Page optimized by WP Minify plugin" footer. These changes will slightly add to the professional appearance of your page in my opinion.

[netminds]

My rankings dropped as well, although we got a relevant link from bbc (linked with only the url)... I didn't see any positive impact on that yet.