My site was a PR 5 and now is unranked?

[KillerProductions]

A site that I do SEO and SMM (www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com) had a PR 5 and now it shows "unranked".

I had the #1 position for many core keywords, and now they are all gone.

I don't do any black hat at all.  Mostly article distribution and onsite content growth.

The only logical thing that I can think of is, the server was going down several times a day, for about 3 days, a few weeks ago.  But I can imagine that would cause me to lose all my rankings, and a PR 5.  But then again, this has never happened to me before.

I am trying to find out what caused this, how to fix the problem, and how long it will take to recover.

Any suggestions or help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

I am willing to pay for good advice on this issue if need be.

JT

[William.Lau]

Give it some time, this happens sometimes in my experience.

It is unlikely that the down time will cause PR problems because PR isn't updated frequently. So give it a few days and try different PR checkers.

Also on another note, if your traffic and organic traffic hasn't changed, there shouldn't be too much worry.

[NakulGoyal]

It looks like your homepage is not cached in Google. A lot of the category pages I checked were not cached as well. However your article/post pages are cached. Did you install any new wordpress plugin lately that might have messed up ? It does not look like related to your server being down. Do you see any errors/warning in the Webmaster Console ? I would suggest you install a XML sitemap Plugin, Generate the Sitemap and submit it via the Webmaster Console unless you are already doing so.

[MarieHaynes]

Do you have any messages in your WMT?

You've got a lot of unnatural looking stuff in your backlink profile including a large amount of anchor texted links.

Were you aware that you have links pointing back at your site with the anchor text of "buy cheap viagra online" and "buy cheap software"?  I checked out one of those backlinks and they're linking to your home page.  The link (on http://archive.d3sports.com/dailydose/) is a hidden one.

I would venture a guess that you've got some penalties going on.

If you didn't place those links, then you may need some professional advice on how to get rid of them.  Hopefully some of the more seasoned pros will chime in for you.

[KillerProductions]

Marie,

Thanks you so much for your answer.  I had no idea those nasty links were there.  I took the SEO and SMM over on this site last November, and there were a lot of that stuff.  I thought I had gotten rid of it all.

Do you mind me asking what tool you used to find them?

Your explanation seems the plausible.  But I have never had a Google penalty, and unfortunately I have not used WMT.  So I did not receive any messages.  That mistake will be corrected immediately.

Any advise on how to handle the penalties?  Procedures? - Time-frames?

Thanks again,

JT

[KillerProductions]

William,

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah! I've lost ranking before that quickly bounced back in 3-4 weeks, but never something like this.

I had about 8 #1 rankings and they are all gone.

[KillerProductions]

Nakul,

Thanks for the reply!   No errors, or major changes lately.  I wish that was the problem!

Many Thanks

[MarieHaynes]

Hi JT.  Here's how I found the nastiness.  I looked at your url on Open Site Explorer and clicked on "Anchor Text".  This shows you how your site is linked to.  The 6th most popular anchor text was "buy cheap viagra online" and the seventh was "buy cheap software".  I expanded the first one and saw the urls linking to you and clicked on one.

Then, when I was on that page, I did a CTRL-F to search for your site.  I also searched for the words "buy cheap viagra online".  My CTRL-F told me that the words did exist on the page but I couldn't find them.  So, I did a view source.  (I'm using chrome, so I just right clicked and chose view source.) I can't remember exactly what the issue was but I believe they were positioning the words so that they are off of the screen.

As far as removal goes, it may be a good idea to start a new question on this one.  Perhaps title it, "My site has 'buy viagra' links pointing at it that I didn't create!  How do I get them removed?"

I have never had to deal with such an issue so I'm not sure how you would do it.  You can certainly try to find contact info for the URL but I'm doubtful that they're going to talk to you.  I do believe that you can file an reinclusion request with Google and explain the situation and they may listen.  But I'd want to get more advice on that before I did it.

Also, set up your webmaster tools now!  You may not get a message, but I have heard of sites that set up WMT and 1-2 days later the unnatural links warning pops up.  At least then, you'll know what you're dealing with.

Good luck!