Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for all your input.

I have noindex, nofollowed all of the suspect stuff and asked for my paid link to be removed.

Hopefully this will resurrect things.

Regards,

Marcus

I thought most of my links have been natural. Apart from some garbage reciprocals that have barely been indexed; one bought link; and my silly dev url.

I tend to only get natural links from the sites i build. Which go straight into the footer. Is this a bad idea then?

Thanks for the input

Marcus

Hi Mike,

Thanks for replying.

I guess I knew deep down that I had over optimised too quickly. Although many of my competitors were doing the same. No excuse I know.

How easy is it to get rankings back after being penalised? Do I admit to google that I have sinned? An SEO confession so to speak

Many Thanks,

Marcus

Thanks for replying

I began promoting in about April time, its a domain i purchased a few years ago. It was PR3, but now is back to 0.Although some of the inner pages have kept their PR: http://www.linearsky.com/portfolio.

With regards to the site wide links; I tend to put a keyword rich link back to me in the footer of most of the sites i build. The paid link I bought also had keyword rich text back to me. I find it hard to believe that Google figured it out and penalised me though after a few weeks?

I didn't host my clients site there. It was a site in development for a client, on my own sub-domain. I noticed that it indexed lots of pages from there, that linked back to my root domain with keywords. So I thought this might be a contributing factor,

Many Thanks,

Marcus

Hi,

A few weeks ago my homepage - http://www.linearsky.com dropped out of the rankings completely for a keyword I was promoting  (web design staffordshire).

I was thinking that one of the reasons could be a sudden link spike. The reason being is that I have been doing some development work (for a client) on one of my sub-domains.

Now this is a Magento site with thousands of products, with my keyword rich link in the footer. From looking at the Google webmaster tools, it seams that alot of these pages got indexed accidently.

Could this sudden link spike be enough to be penalised by Google?

Apart from that the only borderline black hat stuff I have been doing is some reciprocal link swapping with a few websites in my niche - http://www.linearsky.com/misc/links.html

I also bought a paid link on http://www.iwebtool.com/browser_details, (that I have now asked to be withdrawn) to see what kind of boost it would give me. I know this is unethical, but a number of page one competitors were also using this said link. Also it was only indexed for a few weeks.

Could Google really pick this up so quickly?

Any ideas of how to resolve this?

Many Thanks

Marcus