Site received penalty, Traffic restricted to 3-4 visits/hour

[Shashidhar.SEO]

Dear all

We received a penalty notice at webmaster tools 2 months ago, in that stated  "your pages violate our quality guidelines" and "contain some inorganic links to your site".  Ours is a Coupon website and tried to follow all quality guidelines given in webmaster central. Also we tried to identify and remove spam kind of links and still we are working on that. Suddenly from yesterday website traffic restricted to 3-4 visits/hour, but website main keyword SERPs are not changed much and still ranking at good positions. my question if any website is under manual penalty, it's traffic will be restricted by Google???. Every link we build manually and not gone for any paid links or reciprocal links. But the sites given some links as sitewide, example we tried to get a back link & submitted url at once only, but it was showing in webmaster Total links 468 and linked pages 1. Can any one please explain, how it can happen?.   We are trying to remove these spam kind of links, but from directory owners response is a bit disappointing, kindly any one suggest that, will Google Disavow tool  help in this regard and how much time it will take to nullify the links?.

Kindly help us..Thanking you all in advance

[Raydon]

So do you think this had any impact as of sep 2013? Im curious to know if this method works at all or removal or modification of other links will still beat it. thanks

[Shashidhar.SEO]

Thank you for the time & valuable advice.

Sir, If we stopped link building completely, what will be the impact on website ranking ability?. From last 2 months we already  reduced link build-up speed and trying to get some quality back links.

We received manually penalty, due to the previous SEO work done by Free lancer & we received the submission report from him. Many of previous submissions targeted to get back link from Directories and the Linking anchor text is almost similar to the Title/keywords we targeted for ranking.

Kindly guide us to overcome this penalty, without or minimal traffic/ranking drop. Our website age is about 2years.

[Shashidhar.SEO]

Yes Alan, on what we are working from last 2 months is diluting the link profile, mostly trying to link with 'brand name' 'click here' or 'read more'/view more kind of anchor texts.we checked with opensite  explorer for the anchor text and found around 350 links are having keyword on the anchor text, by diluting the link profile we reduced the keyword based link profile to 1.4% of total back links. In this case can we go for reconsideration request, with out removing the back links. Thanking you in advance.

[generalzod]

Alan pretty much summed it up. ONLY go for quality backlinks that happen naturally. If you link profile is over optimized for your keywords you could dilute it with other keywords such as 'click here' or 'read more'.

However, if this is a manual penalty, then you're going to need to get those links removed as best as you can and then submit a reconsideration request to Google.

[AlanMosley]

My advice don't do any link building let them grow organically, and grab the occasional quality opportunity.

One of my sites was hurt by penguin update, I have been too busy to do anything about it. it had a lot of footer links from clients and a lot of forum signature links. I finally removed a lot of them and my site that used to dominate and had dropped off the radar came back to life this weekend almost as well as ever so their is light at the end of the tunnel.

Google does not stop traffic, only affects your ranking, you say that your main keywords have dropped only a little, but your long tail has probably dropped a lot.