[Mike Gwilliam]

Ok, some of us may suffer from incomming anchor text penalty....like what i did

These links can harm your site and it can be unbelievably difficult to remove them.

Notably Mike Hallidays site seemed to be penalised if I remember and which I posted to.

So heres the story..... 18 months ago all was well and i was ranking well. Come end of Sept 2012 I was hit by google and most of my ranking dropped and i was loosing £200 per week from web searches. I couldn't figure out why.

First I thought it was something i did to my web site, then eventually i found  a load of incoming links from articles that were posted on my behalf. In those links were multiple anchor texts which were as an example, carpet cleaning clethorps, carpet cleaning clethorps etc etc.
I'd been hit by an anchor text penalty. Not only but also, all the related articles were duplicate content multiplied 10 times over with many duplicate anchor text within the articles.

After much investigation I found who had posted the articles and also he was advertising on forums. However he had no contact details other than a few email addresses.

So perhaps 6 months ago I sent an email to the offender to hopefully remove all the links to my site that he was in control of without any reply.....then a second polite email and still no reply. In the meantime I used Google disavow tool to remove the links and nothing!

Anyhow......tonight I thaught Times up I reported this guy to a forum that he posts on....job 1

Next, I sent him an email giving him 10 days to remove all incoming links to my web site or I would carry out a full investigation to his online presence with Google.....and hey presto he responded within 5 minutes deniying any relation with my web site.

I then replied with all collated evidence such as forum posts, assosiated links and who is information, links from his domains to mine....di da di da, also no business address on his web site which is illegal. In the mean time, he was removed from one forum that he advertised on(due to me reporting him).....so things were moving on. Obviously I had really been checking up on this guy

I waited and waited for a reply.........

One hour later he responded with
"fair enough......I'v removed all the links that you sent me. let me know if there are any remaining links that I'v missed"

Ahh.... a sigh of relief! This guy actually responed and his reply was quite friendly but his first response wasn't. In retrospect, I think this guy cr@ped himself because all his info was online and his business could be at risk.

One hour after his reply, all links were found to be removed (about 50).
I replied to him that I appreciated his time and help.
He even said if I have any further problems to let him know.

I don't know if I was hiting a nut with a sledge hammer, but i think that if I had'nt threatened him, he just would not have done anything to remove the links.

All in all......I havn't got a clue who this guy is either!

[Carpet Dawg]

Did you pay him to post these articles with your link on these sites?

What kind of links where they? forum posts? Press release type sites?  article directory's? blog comments?

Good luck with getting your ranking back but google is the most unethical, biggest pieces of poo company in the planet. Once they have put a black mark on your domain name it seems impossible to fix.

[Mike Gwilliam]

I payed an seo company to do some seo and they employed the guy to post articles which were duplicates on multple domains. At the time it wasn't an issue.
The seo company did not even know who they were dealing with and couldnt get in touch or were ignored by the article writer. All payed by paypal

I can only wait and see if there is recovery after the next algorythem update.

[Ian Gourlay]

I understand what you are saying

But are you say article marketing is not the way to go?

Although I have never done it I have oviously read about it

If i did I would do it myself

[garry22]

I payed an seo company to do some seo and they employed the guy to post articles which were duplicates on multple domains. At the time it wasn't an issue.
The seo company did not even know who they were dealing with and couldnt get in touch or were ignored by the article writer. All payed by paypal Roll Eyes

   Come on Mike, can you not see the funny side of this?

You paid someone (SEO company) to manipulate your rankings?

You then benefited financially from these better rankings and all was great until the alghorithm changed. In other words, the supports that were holding the site up were taken away.

Your site then dropped and you now want to crucify a guy who was paid to do a job (by a third party, not you).

Have you refunded the money?

I'm with Tony here. Sounds like the domain is toxic (telling Google through the Disallow tool probably has not helped). Maybe a new domain is required (it's probably far less effort that trying to resurrect this one).

It may be worth looking at the site as a whole, not just the links. As far as I know, the September 2012 updates were EMD (exact match domain) and Panda (site quality) upgrades. The major link spam one was Penguin in April of that year.