Rankings have fallen suddenly - I need a plan of attack.

[danlovesadobe]

I started my business a few years ago. Only recently (6 month) I started to get some good traffic and sales.

At first I was ranking pretty well 3-5 for my main keywords and business began to pick up. After Penguin I was hit hard and I'm placing 10-17'ish. My Google local/places has disappeared too.

I haven't received any contact from Google about unnatural links (but I'm not sure where that would appear? Email? Web Master Tools? Horses head on my pillow?).

I've read so many different things online about what I 'could' do. I'm not sure where to start. I've checked and I know we've created lots of questionable back links. Using the Open Site Explorer lots of the backlinks don't have terrible DA but some do.

I guess I was hoping someone would give me a checklist or priority list of things to do. It's just me so I need to use my time as best I can. What should I be doing first? Should I be trying to:

1. Remove my bad backlinks?
2. Spend my time making quality backlinks.
3. On-page issues that I can't see?
4. Telling google i'm sorry via web master tools.
5. Changing to new domain (eek)

I'm very time poor and hoped the seoMoz community might save me from wasting my time.

www.bringyourownlaptop.com.au

Keywords: indesign training, web design courses & photoshop courses

Thank you in advance.

Dan

[danlovesadobe]

Hey Cryus,

Thank you so much. This is exactly what I was looking for.

I'm ready for the hard work. The tricks I got my SEO company to do were bound to get me into trouble.

It's great to have some expert advice

• thank you Cryus & Trickshotric!

Dan (from NZ)

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Dan,

Sorry to hear you got hit by Penguin. Because Penguin is an algorithmic action, you often won't receive any messages in Google Webmaster Tools, unlike when they place a manual penalty on your site. But it's not uncommon to receive both a Penguin slap and an unnatural link warning.

Ok, deep breath.

1. First things first, you need to take a deep hard look at your backlink profile to see where you stand, if clean-up is worth the effort, or if you should start over.

If you engaged in questionable link building practices, you need to asses if you have any links worth saving? Do you have any editorial (non robot generated) links that you didn't pay for and/or didn't control the anchor text?

You probably know the answer, but for more complex cases a couple of resources that might help:

A. Manual Review - In the end, you're own eye is the best tool you have. You want to look for:

• links with keyword-rich, optimized anchor text
• Comment Signature and Forum Signature links (these are different from the more legitimate forum links)
• Sitewide links, such as in the sidebar or footer
• Obviously paid, or suspicious looking links on low-quality sites

Our friend Paddy Moogan wrote a great guide on how to do this step by step. You should check it out.

B. Link Detox - http://www.linkdetox.com/ For $40 dollars it will analyze your backlinks (be sure to upload them from Google Webmaster tools) and give you a full analysis of what links they think are bad.

Most of the links I'm seeing for your site are similar to this: http://www.computer-desk-furniture.net/date/2012/06/  which would be considered a low quality link.

2. You may decide to try to get the links removed, which to be honest can be a long, arduous process.

Even if you didn't get a link notice, you can file a reconsideration request to see if they will verify a penalty. Sometimes this will get you more information then you had before. In any case, it might be well worth it to do a complete link audit and cleanup, and even go through the disavow process if necessary.

in addition to removing suspicious links, I'd continue to build good, high value links as well. If you need inspiration, here's a good place to start: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Hope this helps clear things up! Best of luck with your SEO.

[danlovesadobe]

Awesome thanks!

[trickshotric]

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843 third option at the bottom.

You will need to be logged into your Google webmasters account.

[danlovesadobe]

Has anyone else got time to have a quick look into my post. I'd love some more feedback before I set off with my SEO strategy.

Any and all opinions are welcomed.

Dan

[danlovesadobe]

Great advice. Thanks Trickshotric.

The reconsideration request you mentioned - Where is that done?

Thanks also for the content advice. End results is something I'll work towards & shouldn't be to hard to create.

[trickshotric]

Before removing links it is worth posing a reconsideration request to google. This will confirm if your site has been manually punished.

This removes a lot of the doubt out of the process so definitely do this first.

If you have lots more links like this http://kierszencweig.com/with-wordpress-website-design-to-make-websites/ (this is super dodgy!) then you may well have a unnatural link penalty!!

I think your site is pretty good but would also be nice to show-off some of the end results e.g show some great images that your students will be able to achieve. This is more of a salesy point rather that search engine ranking one, however, if you have some great images on your site you could start getting some real good natural links!.