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Has anyone else seen rankings bouncing all over the place since the end of Feb? A client's site is for the term hcg which I know is controversial but we were in 3rd or 4th for the past couple of months until this update. Now for the term "hcg" the rankings are bouncing from the twenties to over 100 multiple times a day. I check them throughout the day with non personalized search, rank checker, etc to just try and keep updated.

I have never seen rankings bounce around so much after an update and am wondering if this update is somehow effecting these more controversial search terms.

Since The end of Feb our traffic has almost dropped in half due to the drop in just the "hcg" term ranking

We have been cleaning up the site, updating lower quality content, blogging frequently and trying to build better links for the past couple months of working on the site.The problem is there have been a few other previous SEO companies that worked on the site and I don't know how much black hat tactics were used.

Any insight or suggestions on this would be appreciated, we are all scrambling to try and recover from this.

I have a client that is looking to be listed on a group of directory sites for the service that they offer.  After reviewing the site I found that they have a unique way of listing their links, check out one example at http://www.lakidsguide.com/Summer_Camps.php#educational where each title is a link that goes to the client website.  IF you look at the first listing for Adventure Treks the link actually goes to http://www.lakidsguide.com/linktrack.php?type=listingionid=33&bid=9391&listingid=10176 and then is redirected to their true website at http://adventuretreks.com/.  Would this link be picked up by Google and the other engines as a link from lakidsguide.com to adventuretreks.com with the way they are directing the link to their own tracking page first?  To me it seems that the engines would not see any outgoing link and therefor the listing would not give the client any benefit as far as SEO is concerned.

Any input?