If our ranking is dropped (not deindexed, no PR drop) by around 90% in organic traffic, if it's due to selling links how do i fix this issue? If the site was completely banned and deindexed I know i can request a review in webmaster tools then, but in this case i'm still indexed and have just been dropped (almost no searches from several hundreds per day) so how do I fix this issue. Also, i'm not sure if it's because selling links as I sold just 1 link and I don't think Google would be aware of it. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
If you are talking about the site you have in your signature, then i think you have somekind of malware on your site, because my antivirus noticed me about something on your site...bla-bla. In this scenario, i would recommend you to clean up your source and resubmit to google, bing and yahoo, or whatever... P.S. Never, ever again admit that you sold links, and if is the reason you have been banned for, then... I don't think you have too many chances to get your position back (sorry to say that)
I use nod32 and counterspy however i am not warned about my site,also none of the browsers warned me so your antivirus must be very strict, does this message appear a lot when you casually surf as well? could the ranking just drop because of the change in algorithms, could this be temporary? thanks.
More likely you've just plummeted in Google for other reasons. Sometimes Google just bounces around. My domain is 2 years old and I rank 5th for my keyword. Just a couple of months ago I dropped to 5th page and pretty much lost all my traffic from that keyword. Don't blame it on something like selling backlinks and as said above, you're a madman for admitting you have done this. Personally you don't have a hope in hell if you're going to blab about selling backlinks on a site where Google is constantly scanning it.
PS: I don't know about for others but for me your site's home page renders EXTREMELY slowly. It renders the first post, then 15 seconds or so later the 2nd post pops up, then 15 seconds or so later the 3rd post pops up... etc. 2-3 minutes later it's done loading. Not sure what that's all about... But if it's not affecting your rankings, it is a terrible user experience.
Thanks for the info, however it looks like i've been apparently penalized, as i ranked for 100s of keywords, now i sit on the 1st result of page two for most of them, in any case though i mention about selling links, i didn't really sell any links (just put it up on the link sales forum), so i guess they can't penalize me if it still follows the webmaster guidelines. I used to rank in the top 5 for several keywords, i've dropped to page 2 for almost everything now, thanks for the info on the site however i cleared the cache and loaded the home page on chrome and firefox and it loaded in reasonable time.
Well dropping from pos 5 to page 2 is some type of small degradation. Do not feel its a big issue. If you remove the outbound links and malware as mentioned above, sure u will be retun to the first page. Penalization always make vanish the site from SERP
the drop to page 2 or 3 are for a few of the 100s of keywords, there are some however which don't rank at all, my search traffic used to be around 350+, now it's around 50 a day. the only thing i could think of is the change in the algo but in that case others here would have experienced something like this too.
when did you checked your google webmasters account last time ? you might find the reason why google doesn't show you so much love, under "HTML suggestions" section Peace
Thanks I looked into it, there wasn't really much wrong though, in any case, i'm following the wemaster guidelines completely for the most part now, proper htaccess redirects to prevent dupes, proper titles, permalinks, robots.txt, sitemap, etc. so hopefully it's a temporary fluctuation. thanks for the help again.
About 10-30% websites lost their top ranking in New Google search engine Caffeine update. They are upgrading all search engine and I noticed some funny results in google.co.uk earlier. Probably they are doing something about this new update. I have checked for several keywords, and noticed that about 10-30% difference from current google.com and caffeine update search engine. You can also read it here.
Remove the paid links and request for reconsideration. Change your site layout and theme, it will help.
i tried several of my popular terms with the caffeine update engine and it actually ranked BETTER in the SERP's however now after the drop both engines don't rank my site well anymore. my site completely follows the webmaster guidelines now, and properly SEO'd as well. I will wait a few days and then request for reconsideration. thanks for the feedback.
Well as far as I know selling links wont get you banned or drop in your rankings or PR unless that link you sold is against the googles webmaster guidelines (i.e. if the link is a spam).