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Thanks, Dr. Peter. That's exactly the sort of inputs I was looking for.

Yes, as you notice, we have started links clean-up : deleting, changing anchor or disavowing.

It is hard to develop great content for a list of service apartments in a city. At my suggestion, client agreed to add 1 page for each property ( you will see more details...  link below tariff table for each apartment) in April 2013.

Do you think we should combine all cities (e.g. http://www.alcove.co.in/tariff-bangalore.html )into a single page with a search form?

Karl,

I too feel that studying Nike's anchor profile would be frustrating because small businesses like ours cannot achieve that. Further, I am not sure that my site was hit by Penguin.

'serviced apartments bangalore' constitutes only 0.6% of total links. But combinations of this with other cities and terms was what I pushed most. 'Bangalore' occurs is 47% of links along with brand 'alcove' and other keywords (not all 47% of anchors  have serviced apartments).

If articles' content is good and are posted on Article directories with PR > 1, can they do harm?

Thanks

I'm working on a site for a serviced apartment site http://www.alcove.co.in/ which offers apartments in 9 cities in India.  Site was ranking in 1st page of Google for “serviced apartment + city” for 7 cities until sometime in Jan 2013.

However organic traffic has been gradually falling since sometime in September 2012 (40% fall this month over same period last year).  There’s been no sudden fall in traffic which we may link with any Penguin update. There have been no warning messages in Google WMT.

Even today the site ranks in 1st page for 3 cities;  however  ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’ which  was  the biggest revenue earner, is not ranked in first 5 pages.

My questions are whether

1. will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text  will attract Penguin’s wrath,

2. does Google makes allowance for case  when  company's name includes keywords. In our case, company name is Alcove Service apartments,

3. could there be some other reason for fall in ranking/traffic?

The distribution of anchors (external links, multiple links from same domain are counted) is :

percent
Keywords                        34%
brand+keywords            43%
Natural                               4%
only brand                         11%
URL                                     7%

For the above,

• Brand = ‘Alcove Service apartments’ or  ‘Alcove Serviced apartments’

• brand+keywords = various combinations of ‘alcove’ + [‘guest houses’ or ‘hotels’ or ‘accommodation’]  + city1 + city2…

Intriguingly, Open Site Explorer analysis of domain metrics (Domain Authority, Followed Linking Root Domains, etc) ranks Alcove higher than all but one site appearing in 1st page of Google for ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’. Most  of alcove’s  links are from article directories (no spun articles were used), directories and link exchanges with relevant sites.

Any suggestions and guidance on what we could do to remedy the situation would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks