Sudden drop in rakings for a keyword.

[marcusuk-304105]

Hi,

A few weeks ago my homepage - http://www.linearsky.com dropped out of the rankings completely for a keyword I was promoting  (web design staffordshire).

I was thinking that one of the reasons could be a sudden link spike. The reason being is that I have been doing some development work (for a client) on one of my sub-domains.

Now this is a Magento site with thousands of products, with my keyword rich link in the footer. From looking at the Google webmaster tools, it seams that alot of these pages got indexed accidently.

Could this sudden link spike be enough to be penalised by Google?

Apart from that the only borderline black hat stuff I have been doing is some reciprocal link swapping with a few websites in my niche - http://www.linearsky.com/misc/links.html

I also bought a paid link on http://www.iwebtool.com/browser_details, (that I have now asked to be withdrawn) to see what kind of boost it would give me. I know this is unethical, but a number of page one competitors were also using this said link. Also it was only indexed for a few weeks.

Could Google really pick this up so quickly?

Any ideas of how to resolve this?

Many Thanks

Marcus

[iAnalyst.com]

How long ago did you begin link building for this domain. Its strange that its registered in 2007 and you have no pagerank. Looking at your back links, it looks like you have lots of sitewide links, not necessarily a natural looking link method. The paid linking site you bought from is not good, was your link actually on that page or you just used their service?

How would hosting your clients site on your server create thousands of external links? If it was on a sub domain, i highly doubt working on client dev site would cause any issues. Though to play it safe I would use another domain for client dev sites.

[NiftyMarketing]

Yeah, I would say all of the above could have played into factor. Your best bet is cleaning up the sub URL (might not be the main cause) the reciprocal links are really easy to pick up on so get rid of those and depending on how the link was bought, it there is anything that makes it obvious then drop it.

If you have a new domain without much link history throwing a bagillion gray/black tactics at it will generally put it on googles radar for filtering. I see that we occasional new sites that we put a bit to much promotion into. Focus on content for the first bit, get some national brand links, then if you want you can get a bit more aggressive. Just stay away from things that are easily identifiable and focus on guest posting, etc for good links.

[marcusuk-304105]

Thanks for replying

I began promoting in about April time, its a domain i purchased a few years ago. It was PR3, but now is back to 0.Although some of the inner pages have kept their PR: http://www.linearsky.com/portfolio.

With regards to the site wide links; I tend to put a keyword rich link back to me in the footer of most of the sites i build. The paid link I bought also had keyword rich text back to me. I find it hard to believe that Google figured it out and penalised me though after a few weeks?

I didn't host my clients site there. It was a site in development for a client, on my own sub-domain. I noticed that it indexed lots of pages from there, that linked back to my root domain with keywords. So I thought this might be a contributing factor,

Many Thanks,

Marcus

[marcusuk-304105]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for replying.

I guess I knew deep down that I had over optimised too quickly. Although many of my competitors were doing the same. No excuse I know.

How easy is it to get rankings back after being penalised? Do I admit to google that I have sinned? An SEO confession so to speak

Many Thanks,

Marcus

[NiftyMarketing]

I think you should probably just correct the links and try to get a bunch of natural going on. You might find that is enough without a request. And unless you were de-indexed completely you generally can fix filters but correcting whatever is keeping you in the filter.

[marcusuk-304105]

I thought most of my links have been natural. Apart from some garbage reciprocals that have barely been indexed; one bought link; and my silly dev url.

I tend to only get natural links from the sites i build. Which go straight into the footer. Is this a bad idea then?

Thanks for the input

Marcus

[NiftyMarketing]

Site wide footer links are border line. They work.... But they dint look very natural. You need more than just those.

[Francisco_Meza]

Google picks up my Magento test sites FAST! That's why I immediately noindex nofollow them.

[marcusuk-304105]

Thanks for all your input.

I have noindex, nofollowed all of the suspect stuff and asked for my paid link to be removed.

Hopefully this will resurrect things.

Regards,

Marcus