I do appreciate the advice on this forum and I know that this post might make me unpopular, but I am getting a little fed up of people accusing other people of trying to ‘cheat’ on Google SEO. I run a small children’s fashion business, I am not a website designer or SEO expert but I do my best to list well otherwise my business will not get many sales. Over the past decade I have jumped through the various hoops Google has presented me with e.g. keyword content, link building, article writing. Then Google changes its algorithm and penalises me for having too many articles or links that are poor quality, too much of the same anchor text etc. I am not a ‘cheat’ but my website is old and inevitably has some of the stuff Google asked me for in the past but now penalises me for. I am not dishonest but simply trying to run my small business in an increasingly difficult online world.
Some people seem to not realize that Google has NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE SEARCHING FOR WHEN YOU PERFORM A SEARCH... Google just makes continual adjustments to try to figure how they can give search engine users what they are searching for. It may not be that Google was penalizing you, but maybe the adjustment/s that made that affected your website, just had more of a positive effect on other sites that were somehow categorized in the same or similar genre as your site. Basically Google make just have noticed a few things it liked about other sites like yours, compared to yours. Most like the changes Google made had little to no effect on your site at all, but it could have just been normal market fluctuations. From Google
I have two sites of same niche, the site on which i follow all the guidelines is still behind my other site. So its always difficult to tell what google analyzes your site and rank them.
Google never asked you to build fake backlinks or to send articles all over the internet once again to create fake backlinks in order to try to manipulate google's search results to your advantage. You say your site is old, I believe you if you've spent all your time creating fake backlinks. Imagine if you had spent all your time on improving your website and maybe facebook fan page, building a mailing list, etc.. maybe you wouldn't be crying today
Google Algorithm changes with time, so you also need to keep optimizing your website accordingly. If you see the updates here on DP and get it worked on your site, it might help you. Try whats been the best your website and see the result with Google's update. Basically, you also need to concentrate on traffic from other sources like social media and blogs, this might help you add a bonus
I think, most of the things you know as well. Try to find, why are you not getting success, is it due to over-optimization or something else? As you said that poor quality articles, so try to write quality articles so that your visitors would get benefited.