Google can only penalize you for outbound links to bad sites from yours. Google cannot penalize you for incomings links from bad sites.
Ok, bottom line is I'm pretty sure we are being penalized at this point. Next step is how to find out what the problem we are being penalized for?
it is very difficult to pin point the exact problem that could be causing your difficulties as it could be a grudge from your ex SEO person or it could simply be Google identifying the links that they were posting for you as spam links, esepcially if you obtained a large number in a short space of time. The only thing you can do is go back to building organic links at a human rate and give it a month or two.
Google does not want to penalise you, you're doing something very wrong. Did you even have a look at your backlinks? They are the problem, read my previous post again and drop your sarcasm!
That kind of stuff happens all the time try to be patient and monitor the situation for a while.It could be nothing.
1. Dropping in rankings is not necessarily penalty. This may be caused by the fact that your site cannot rank for a given keyword, that is the content of your site does not really cover the targeted keywords, not enough backlinks, and especially relevantly anchored ones. This, after all, may be competition. 2. Incoming links cannot hurt your site in any ways apart from not contributing to its ranking. You have no control over who links to you. 3. What I would do if I were you is a thorough analysis of what has been done seo- and promotion-wise in the period this person was working for you. Have you been getting any reports at all? 4. Finally, having a look at your site itself might be of help for people to evaluate the on-page condition of your site. Just my two cents. P.S. Make sure you don't blindly rely on opinions posted - these may be largely wild guesses.
It's probably worth checking out your Google Webmaster Tools account. This can shed light on any errors the crawlers encountered as well as show you this external links it's picked up. I've found in the past that having lot's of 404 errors can be detrimental to search positions, http://www.gravy834.com/2009/03/25/are-you-losing-search-engine-rankings-due-to-404-errors/ It might not be the solution for you but it's another area for you to tick off the list! Good luck!
No sarcasm meant, but I've been around for 10 years!!! Do you know how many links have been created in that period that I had no control over. Also, I'm not finding out that Google doesn't like Link Exchanges, but back then that was a very acceptable policy. Google is being like microsoft, they are trying to change the industry and it leave some of us in bad shape. So the answer is yes, I looked at my backlinks, but there isn't much I can do with some of them.
Earnest, this has to be a penalty since I rank #69 for my own domain name. Unfortunately, I don't have a clear picture of what he did. I was more concerned he wrote google and complained or something like that. He did some Blog Sites and such and some link exchange email. One guy ever turned me into my ISP which was GoDaddy at the time and I moved ISP so I don't know if that same guy could have contacted Google. g
First of all, hire an expert to determine exactly what is causing the penalty. Then rectify the situation. Next, sign into Google Webmaster Tools, and click the link for applying for reconsideration. Explain in great detail what happened with the SEO guy, and what you did about the problem. Then wait 2-3 months and you should be OK.
I'm not convince this is the best way to go. We tried to hire an expert and the got us in this situation. What I don't understand is if you don't know what the problem is, how can you fix it? I still haven't been able to figure out how to see what the problem is. g Ig
This is the danger of blackhat seo's they have totally control of ur backlinks.I saw a lot of sites going perfect due to hacking abilities of their seo but if some day this break he deletes all the links and boom google traffic goes to hell.I dont know if this happened to u but its risky to depend only to one provider in general,this applies to hosting,seo,ad revenue etc. try to share ur power to multiple factors.
Google its not irrational.Or at least it trys not to be.But i am interested to know why ur replys say the same thing.What happened to ur rankings?Are abnormal?
Not really. My site is also penalized. I was receiving 3000 visitors from google and not NO ONE. type in google as goamaze you will find my site on number one