Was I Kicked Off Google Page One by Panda/Farmer?

[reeljerc]

Took over this site in March. Got a Panicked call from client Mid-March that all of a sudden keywords that put the site on Page One weren't working.  There are still 9 that work, but apparently there were more.

A large percentage of the backlinks are from Article Directories and Link Farms.  Is this my problem?

Also, a large percentage of the 149 pages suffer from keyword stuffing and were obviously written for Search Engines and not people. How much of a difference does that make?

[AlanBleiweiss]

And the beauty is you have the opportunity to help change that.

[reeljerc]

Thanks Alan,

As a writer, I'm disappointed reading through the pages that were created for this site.  Unnecessary language injected for SEO purposes that really only obfuscate the piece. I gather that it was relevant and standard practice at some point in SEO history, but in that they were created solely to promote keywords just seems wrong.

I appreciate your response.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Dave,

It's possible that it was a Panda related hit - From the moment Google implemented Panda, and they got a flood of feedback, they began making minor changes to it, all the way up to and through their global April 11th roll-out.

It could have been many other factors as well.  If the site had a serious crawl problem in the days leading up to the drop, that could have triggered the drop.  Or that could have triggered falling into Panda.

The end result however, is that it sounds like you're aware of a number of SEO best practices related problems, and whatever the cause, these should be addressed.  Any one or more of them could have been a trigger point or added to it.

I always advocate to clients that regardless of the cause, it's important to implement SEO best practices both to help restore drop-off and to prevent future drop-off based on whatever next change search engines make.