Welcome to the Q&A Forum

good observation. let us know how you get on. Thanks

HI Rand, I understand where you are coming from as SEOmoz is a white hat community. However, when I started my business and did not know anything about SEO, I used these spam techniques for the simple reason I didnt know any better and thought that was SEO. Does this make me bad? I dont think it does. Since then, 5 years ago I have come a long way in SEO and consider myself a white hat marketer.

I wouldn't want to put my business at risk with dodgy SEO techniques. However, I did when I was clueless. Now I want to fix it. I'm sure many webmasters on this forum are on the same boat as me.

"simply fell down in the SERP"

you say it like it means nothing....

already mentioned on the post Alan

we need a new sub forum to deal with all this and have all answers and questions in one place.

Peoples business's are being ruined, we need to all come together in one place and learn from each other to get over this as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Please like this and I will email SEOmoz to see will they do it. Thanks

Its nothing got to do with the site in question. Its purely negative SEO. Read the case study about "Dan Thies" who says he is the SEO to Gurus and knows Matt Cutts on a personal basis. They targeted his website and got it off the ranks in about 1 week. He was ranked page 1 for "SEO" and "SEO services" now he is nowhere to be found.

Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website.

I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in.

This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google.

http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/

http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/

This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.

Yes, the Majority of them is coming from Link Networks, this is what i have noticed in search for answers.

What do you recommend on then? Like Matt Cutts also announced that they were going to level the playing field and penalize websites that are over SEO'd. Whats does over SEO mean.

I ask these questions because I am now completely reviewing my SEO strategy. I want to build a long term business. But, If im going out trying to get links all day everyday, am I SEOing too much then, where do you draw the line?

To be honest, I dont think you should. You should be proactive and review all your link building you have done to date.

I have done this on my other websites and deleted links that might cause suspicion.

This is a rolling update they are doing, they have contact 700,000 website in Jan and Feb, SO FAR. I think not being proactive and trying to clean up your linking profile before it gets crawled could save you a lot of rankings

Dear site owner or webmaster of xxxxxxxxx,

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

I know getting the above was from participating in a service called buildmyrank. A high PR blog network. This was the only sort of thing I did that was somewhat grey hat (or so I thought) the content was always 100% and good. I have hundreds of other links that I worked really hard to get and now its practically all lost.

Google has confirmed they have sent out of over 700,000 messages through its google webmaster interface in February. Thats more than what they sent in all of 2011.

Where does this leave us?

What have we done wrong?

What works going forward?

Im sure many business's will be left in a very bad position over this update, people will lose their jobs.

I always considered myself to be very careful with my link building as I am totally reliant on search for my business.

I think something so big requires a better explanation from google. Has SEOmoz any more info on such a big update? This really needs input from the big SEO heads.

You need to remove all the offending links ASAP. Its seems PR blog networks are causing it. Dont worry, your not the only one going through this, over 700,000 people got the message

http://searchengineland.com/google-sent-over-700000-messages-via-webmaster-tools-in-past-two-months-113807

"easy and quick way to get links then"

No such thing going forward, SEO just took a twist making it a lot more labour intensive. Good SEO now is all about building relationships with people and having them talk about you.

im guessing that seo company did some sort of link building that got you noticed by google and you just axed. Did you check your google webmaster for any messages?

HI Vinod,

3 way linking is bad business, dont do it.

Are you making forum profiles or just linking from forum posts? Building forum profiles is very spammy.

Your blog comments, are they from spammy website and were they done with software or manually?

Are you varying your anchor text?

It makes me feel better knowing someone else is experiencing my anger/pain sorry

let me tell all you guys from experience dont use BMR.

I started SEO on a website 9 months ago, I used plenty of variety and the rankings were good, I noticed that and page getting lots of BMR links got good results very fast, so I got greedy

I started to put more and more effort into BMR, as of January, I solely did BMR for the website.

On Feb 25th a good an email on google webmaster about taking part in a blog network to increase my page rank. As of this weekend my website is now page 50 and I was in the top 3 keywords for Gifts, gift ideas, christmas gifts, personlised gifts. Highly competitive keywords

They are under big fire and anyone who uses them risks their website. I had a website ranking in the top 3 for major keywords in Ireland and since the weekend its gone.

I also see a few other websites that I was using BMR primarily on drop in rankings, blog networks are risky business. I learned the hardway, 9 months work gone......

what sort of backlinking have you being doing to the website? Have you being using PR networks? I think your problem may lie in the sort of linkbuilding you are doing.

whats your websites URL and I can look to see if you have the canonical tag working correctly. Just incase.

Also, magento 1.4 has the canonical tag as standard now, what magento are you using. I know one I switched it on and did a small bit of editing all my dup content was gone after the next crawl.

However, I still have a bunch of 302 redirects.