The average density of any keyword on my sites is around 2.10. I thought that was low?
What do we mean by purchased links? If it means buying a gig from Fiverr then I'm guilty. I bought ONE link gig one time in 2011.
If we mean purchasing links like using Unique Article Wizard then yes, I've been using that for two years.
2.1% ratio of keywords to total words is not likely to get you a penalty. That's low.
Using an article spinning software is not a purchased link. I haven't heard of a single person being penalized for Article Marketing. The Article Sites haven't faired too well, though, so I don't think this is an up and coming link source.
The gig with Fiverr -- it depends on what they did. If they used BMR (a blog network who has had many of it's blogs de-indexed, they had 22K) to build your links, that would be it. That's the risk you take when you have an outside contractor build links for you. You have to know them and trust them with your website (maybe your source of income). Google -- blog networks -- and read up.
There are many other Blog Networks other than BMR, do some reading.
Go to webmaster tools and check your links. Do the top domains have about 10K to 30K links coming from them? It's either a sitewide link and they've got a lot of pages or there's a s**t load of blogs in there. Go to that site. Do they have a blogs tab? Do you have to register to get in there?
You can see in there by entering the following in the Seach Box --
site:spamsite.com www.yoursite.com, or
site:spamsite.com "your company name"
site:spamsite.com "keyword anchor text"
If you go to one of those pages, you may not be able to find you link easily. Just right click and select "view source" (Firefox) and then enter "Control F" and enter your url in the search box. It will highlight the first occcurrence of your URL and you can see where on the page your link is.
You need to get rid of the links with the big link count from one domain.
Also, go through each and every link, this will take a long time, whew!, and check for blogs or membership sites. Get rid of them.
This will be a long uphill climb my friend. If yours are just recreational sites, I would try to take down the links from the domains with the largest link counts, file a request for consideration and hope that does it or they are nice to you and tell you the offending links. If they do that, your life will be much easier. If they won't tell you what's wrong, I would consider walking away and buying another couple of domains. It's always faster getting up and running the second time.
Also remember, if you ever go to buy a domain, this is the kind of site you may be purchasing. You have to know who you are dealing with and there's not too many people you can trust out there.
If you depend on this site for income, I suggest you get busy and do the full plan I described above.
Also, set up a Google Docs spreadsheet and share that link at the very top of the Request for Reconsideration -- they may not read your whole Request for Reconsideration, they've got a lot of them.
Use that blog to document everything.
Also, this is a great time to finally clean up those sites and make them squeaky clean -- 1) updated and removed unneeded canonicals, 2) check 301's and fixed or removed non-working 301's 3) Removed duplicate Title Tags 4) Updated Title Tags to engage users (rather than stuff keywords -- don't include that) 5) Descriptions were re-written to engage users 6) Updated H-1's, H-2's for users 7) Removed non-essential footer links 8) No-followed links from my other site 9) Removed the 50,000 links from my brother's sites, I got tired of paying him every month -- just kidding! 10) Planning a system to create highly appealing content that will enage users and result in links editorially given, etc., etc, etc.
I believe they will give you credit for coming clean and working hard to remove all the SEO driven optimization that users won't appreciate.
Remember, a real person will audit your site, so they need to see the results.
That's the best advice I can give and it assumes that blog networks are the source of the problem.
Any reciprocal links?
Edited by ChuckFinley, 30 April 2012 - 04:18 AM.
