I know all about the penguin update, i looked into analytics and found that my traffic took a HUGE hit on April 24th, then another on May 18th. I'm left with a site that gets a fraction of its former traffic.The site is: gothair.co.uk The keyword mainly affected is "generic propecia" which the site has ALWAYS ranked 1st for, it now lurks near the bottom of the first page. There are a few other keywords that have dropped off but this is by far the biggest. I'll hold my hands up, i have previously used linkmarket to build some reciprocal links, not all of which will have been relevent. I've removed the link directory from my site and regenerated my sitemap in an attempt to help matters a bit. The site is mostly original content, and has always ranked well as a result. I can only assume that the backlink profile has caused the ranking drop with the penguin update.What is the best way to go about recovering from this? The site has always been fairly successful and the domain is of a decent age too. I've got lots of minor sites linking to this site with manipulated anchor text, obviously i cannot remove these links myself (although linkmarket should send them a notification that i've removed their link i think?) Any input would be appreciated, is there any content that people think needs to be re-written so it does not appear spammy?Any help would be appreciated.
Your backlinking profile (according to opensiteexplorer) is very "skewed" towards the keywords you wanted to rank for, and apparently that's part of what Google was looking for with their Penguin algo. If the site was making you some decent money, it may be worth creating lots of backlinks (in your case, it'd be thousands) using "naked links", that is, just the URL of the site instead of the keyword as the anchor text. And also dropping some random anchor texts like "click here", "read more", people's names, etc. At leas that's what most experts recommend now, have between 30-50% of your backlinks using the target KW as anchor text, another 30-40% using naked links, and the rest using random anchors. Of course, creating these many links to get to those % and compensate those you already have may be time-consuming and expensive, depending on how much you were making it may not be worth the effort.
The thing is very soon, according to some sources, Google will be charging companies if they want their products to be found in Google's free searches. It could be that you are seeing that hit because what you are advertising may not be listed for free anymore. But... I am only guessing.
Thanks for your input, that's very helpful. I had a look a tthe site on ahrefs.com and can see (for the keyword generic propecia) that there are 166 domains that collectively provide 5579 links. 5365 of these links are provided by a single site (2bfriends.net). This site has nothing to do with mine and smacks of spam to be honest. Would this be a good start? I can ask the site owner to remove my link, cutting the backlinks for this keyword down to a fraction in a single swoop. As mentioned, i've also removed my whole link directory as i know google doesn't like these. I'm not convinced on that one - their whole mantra is making the internet a level playing field. By excluding sites that don't pay, surely they would simply dole out SERPs to companies that have the deepest pockets?