My site was hammered by this last update -- I'm freaking out -- what now

[Tolod]

I looked at my seomoz report yesterday, almost all my money keywords went to hell. When I was looking at the graph for one of my keywords it looked so depressing I don't think I can look at it again. The funny thing is that my competitors have bunch of low quality links on unrelated websites and they haven't been touched. How to approach this problem, I'm scared to do anything at this point.

[Tolod]

I logged into my wmt but nothing, I don't think it's links, since one of my internal pages that has no inbound links got slammed the same way as the homepage targeting the same keyword

[858-SEO]

Tolod,

Did you get any messages on your GWMT? Any messages on Unnatural Links or not meeting Google Quality guidelines? That might help in figuring out why you were penalized.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi, You are not alone... http://www.seomoz.org/q/lost-50-google-traffic-in-one-day-panic Best wishes, Georg

[MatthewBarby]

Taking from a recent blog post that I wrote today, here are a few tips:

• _Make sure that your webpage titles make sense and are relevant to the webpage content. For example, don’t have your webpage title as ‘New Shoes, Running Shoes, Sports Shoes – Sport Shoes Ltd’. This kind of title looks spammy in itself and will certainly not help with your click-through rate. Try something more along the lines of ‘Sport Shoes Ltd – High Quality, New Running Footwear’. You will have got in pretty much all of your keywords there but without the chance of being penalised.
   _
• _Check that the links on your webpages are relevant and that you don’t have too many. No webpage should have more than 100 links, and even that is pushing it. I would say that a total of 70 should be the most that you use. As well as this, make sure that the anchor text isn’t just a blatant use of an unrelated keyword; Google will notice this.
   _
• _Find out who is linking to your website to ensure that they have not been punished for carrying out ‘black-hat’ activities. This will only drag you down with them so use a utility like Open Site Explorer to check where you are getting links and check them out.
   _
• Make sure that you aren't keyword stuffing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have your keyword in your content 100 times (which would be a very obvious instance of keyword stuffing), but it can also be much more acute. With the use of more specific, long-tail keywords, try to refrain from putting them into text when they are not relevant, or just hiding them under image ‘alt’ attributes.

Hope this helps guys,

Matt.

[stubby]

I think your problem is crappy links. You will need to build some high quality content that people will want to link to. And get rid of the crap links if you can.

[JohnHerrigel]

Greetings..I was coming on to ask a question with the exact same thing!

What I have done is made a full copy of my old/spammier site and now I am actively going through and taking out as many keyword/spammy type stuff from my live pages to see what happens.

I am really trying hard to edit each page from a non-SEO perspective...specifically with regard to alt tags, title tags, etc..

One additional question I might ask to anybody is: If you remove the spammy stuff and Google recrawls the site....will the penalty go away or do you thin it will stay with the site for awhile?  Thoughts?