Good Morning, Our site http://carfinance.netcars.co.uk/ has within the last 12 hours dropped quite significantly down the natural listings. Yesterday we were in position 2 for the keyword "car loans" and position 3 for the keyword "car finance" naturally in Google.co.uk. These are just 2 of many big phrases we were listing for. Our site has been in the top 5 naturally in Google for many keywords for over the last 12 months and our domain is approximately 3 years old. This morning (11-09-08) a quick search for "car loans" finds our position at 57. It's not only for this keyword but all of our keywords that have dropped back a number of pages. All of the above also relates to our other website www.netcars.co.uk. Again this site is over 7 years old and ranked extremely well naturally over the past 12 months for terms such as "used cars" "car search" "buy car" and many more. All keywords for both websites seem to have dropped back around 50 places approximately. In order for us to rectify this problem we need to identify what the cause is. We have not been using an SEO agency as such but a freelance SEO "expert" that we give a monthly budget too. He has since informed us this morning that he has been purchasing links from various places. We were aware of this however we weren't aware of the severe consequences. We have been reading forums and Google's guidelines this morning and this is the only reason that we can see why the penalty would have happened. After speaking with our SEO consultant we are fairly confident that it is the links that we have purchased and as a result we are going to start cancelling all of our paid for links to both websites. However if there's anything else that we can do after you've taken a look at our site then please let us know. We do also have very small link directorys on both websites but fail to see why this would have a negative impact on our natural search results. Our websites are of really good quality as you can see and we feel that the user is missing out due to the penalty being enforced. I believe BMW, MoneySupermarket and Confused.com have had issues in the past and their results have been re-instated. Our websites are core to the business surviving and would really appreciate some quality feedback as soon as possible. Kind Regards, Louis
You've already identified the problem which is about the paid links to your site. And you're already cancelling the paid links which is good. The next thing you need to do is inform google (through Google Webmaster Central) about this and tell them the steps you've taken to rectify the problem and that you were UNAWARE that your SEO consultant was buying links. After they are reassured, they will lift the ban (*hopefully*).
I would dump the SEO consultant; considering he costs you a lot of money and should of known that paid text links could of been behind this. However, I've yet to see reports of sites "buying" text links get penalized; it's usually the sites "selling" text links that get hit. I would look into more possibilities.
@ssandecki: gocompare.com was recently penalised by google for buying links. Here's the proof http://gocompare.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-google-penalised-gocomparecom.html It's not only about the sites which sell links now, both sellers and buyers need to be careful
Louis, If your SEO consultant is going to buy links, the least he could do is purchase them from related sites. With a brief look at your backlink profile, I can tell he purchased ALOT of links, from various unrelated sites. Below are a couple of examples. http://www.deadmule.com http://www.masters-of-photography.com I'm not going to get into the debate about link relevancy and if irrelevant links do/don't help your rankings. What I will say is that any of your competitors can easily contact Google and tell them how you are manipulating the ranks by purchasing links on unrelated sites. If the links were atleast related, it would be much more difficult for your competitors to prove their complaint is legitimate. As ssandecki noted, Google does not generally penalize sites that buy links. However, Google can and will devalue paid links. And Google may simply devalue your entire backlink profile if warranted. I would contact your SEO consultant and ask him why he is using your money to purchase links on unrelated sites. This has painted a large bullseye on your site. While your positions may return to normal, I would certainly refine your offpage SEO methods to protect yourself for the long term... Good luck
Here is a tool to check your backlinks and anchor text, http://www.backlinkwatch.com . This will tell you more about your links on related/unrelated sites. Clearly you have a lot of links on unrelated sites.
The problem with that thinking though, is that its probably the bought links that were keeping him that high in the first place. Now they are going to be removed, you can forget getting back to that position.
I think Snowbird has actually provided a very good explanation for your predicament. There's nothing much you can do really except to contact google and admit your mistake and then give your assurance that it's an overlooked matter. At least we all learn from experience never to trust easily and we should monitor on any project progress especially for SEO services.
Not always the case. I've seen some major fluctuations on sites before and they eventually return to their nice positions. It's no different in this case. Searching Google UK pages, he is ranked number 2 for car loans. Not bad for a competitive niche. The problem is that any of his competitors can snitch on him and his site will get reviewed by a human. There's a lot of unrelated backlinks to justify discounting many of his links, and I'm sure Google would do something. I'm just surprised that the competition has not already turned him in...
Well maybe it was the competition that turned him in. I've not checked the backlink profile, but if most of his links are paid links, and he removes them all then its reasonable to assume he won't get back on the first page immediately. If the paid links only made up a tiny % of his total links then I doubt they would have harmed him in the first place. Louis - If these websites are "core to the business surviving" then you are making a massive mistake posting this on a free forum, and giving all your competitors an insight into the problems that you have found yourself in. You should be searching out someone who can solve this, contact them in private and hire them.
I don't see how this is a big revolutionary idea for competitors. If they are serious themselves about making a company they will find the same low search results in Google by searching keywords. I can guarantee that they will have more, and better niche keywords than that. Remember that in order to compete all you need to do is have your site on a relevant site with a nice PR. 10,000 links on PR 1 are not going to be a good as 2,000 hand made links on a pr5-8 site. If you want to clean this up you need to hire someone that hand submits links to sites, forums, blogs, that are relevant to yours. If I were you I would get a nice list of sites with nice PR ranks and hire someone to hand submit them. Do about 20 a week. I mean you can do that yourself and save money. Also the new thing is viral video networks. Make a nice 30-60 second commercial about your site, what it offers, how it can help consumers, and submit that to a crap load of video network sites. "STAY AWAY" from viral networks that have XXX material. I know it's obvious you won't do this, but something as simple as posting a video on a site that has anything remotely close will get your site flagged for adult material from these new website watch sites like http://www.mywot.com/ If your smart you will set your company up with this site, and get a nice "WOT=Web of Trust" logo . And post a claim to have other viewers view and comment on your site. After they give you good feedback your site will have a sexy green safe check on it in Google. There are hundreds of thousands of people who use this site to help them go to safe sites, and prevent them from spam and so on. They already have 20,201,615 sites on file and, 1,281,509 dangerous as well. I think they will be the biggest source of safe browsing on the internet. There plugin for Mozilla already gets 94,937 weekly downloads. Hope this helps,