I got penalized by Google (I think).  My website (language translation) has been in existence for over 10 years, and all those years it has been (mainly the home page) in the top 3-7 positions for almost all relevant search terms one could imagine.  A couple of weeks ago “that happened!”.  While my website is still found in SERPs on the first page for some (less significant) search terms, the site has evaporated from SERPs or is found on the 7-8th page of the search results for my major, most important search terms.  The indexing or PR of my pages do not seem to be affected. (I am still fine with Yahoo! and MSN.)

I can only suspect one reason for the penalty, and that possible reason is totally unintentional.  In the middle of January I exchanged home page links with a major European seller of home appliances present in 26 countries.  They placed my link in their footer, and the link got duplicated in their hundreds and hundreds (thousands?) pages.  I did not ask for that.  I just got it.  Five+ months later I am getting this penalty.  I assume this is for an “unnatural” jump in the number of incoming links.  Plus my link to them is not really relevant to the content of the page it’s sitting on.  It has taken that long to have happened (unless the reason is something else I am not really aware of).

I have discontinued the link on my home page and advised them appropriately.  They are still keeping my link(s), though.

Now is the question: What shall I do?

Shall I sit and wait for months until Google reverts the situation, if they indeed do that?  What can I do to make them like my site again?  Should I apply for re-inclusion, and if yes, when is the time to do that (I have never been out of their index, though)?

Please advise and please suggest any logical steps that I can take to remedy this situation.  I will be deeply thankful.

It's good to see that you removed the irrelevant home appliance link from your home page! Optimization for Google today is in many ways the opposite of SEO a year or two ago. What worked then makes problems today. Google has made no secret that they have declared war on paid links.

The goal is a natural backlink profile. Piles and piles of paid links don't look trustworthy to Google, especially not if they all came too quickly, and all had identical anchor text. What Google wants to see are a few high quality, relevant, natural one-way links accumulating slowly. Search for Google + "paid links" and you will see Google's contempt for manipulation.

Try to get any link that looks obviously like you paid for it removed from their sites, starting with those that are not relevant, and those that are sitewide. Try to get your money refunded from any link sellers who hurt your business. Check to see if their sites were banned.

At the same time, do what you can to get natural links. Example of natural: Local immigrant club with a .org site posts a news release about your free ESL class for their members, with a link.

This is a less important detail: You could get rid of keyword repetitions in your meta keyword tag. It's not a very significant problem, just part of the bigger picture.

Okay, here is another idea that might be useful. People have been talking for some time about how reciprocal link exchanges have stopped being counted and have had their worth pretty thoroughly devalued. That's pretty widely accepted. (However, Google can probably tell when a reciprocal link is of the natural kind.)

Now there is some speculation that reciprocal links are actually taking away from what is currently being called "trust rank." If you search for that phrase you may find some good ideas about how to move forward. You may have to sort through a lot of finger-pointing about how Google itself created this mess.

 

I think I found it. It was pretty far down in your results for site:

[link deleted by Drilldown on June 28, 2007]

I think if you delete this page, then submit a re-inclusion request, Google might relent.

Since languageusa has deleted the page above, I have deleted the link to facilitate its removal from the search engine index. If the page has any other links to it, languageusa should try to get them removed, to speed things up. Otherwise it might remain indexed for some months to come, and the benefit of this good deed might take a long time.

For those just reading this, the topic of the deleted page was an offer for a 3-way link exchange. It was a strategy that once worked to improve PageRank, but which has now become more controversial. There is speculation that 3-way links are detected and possibly penalized by search engines.

Some other nitty-gritty for languageusa, if you see this: The (former) page now redirects to your contact page. I understand the logic of it, however, it will not fully achieve the intended effect. Instead, return a 404 error (page not found). It could be a plain 404 or a special one that you have for your site. This will more successfully re-assure the search engine that their webmaster guidelines are understood completely. (Think: trust rank)

After a cursory check, it appears that the other site included in the above 3-way also falls into the -50 SERPS range now. IF this is really the case, think about separating involvement between the sites. This could mean anything from simply not crosslinking, to fully re-purposing the other site so that it has a more unique presence on the web. It could be a relevant subject, just not more of the same. Perhaps it would be a good place to put some of those useful things for your clients, that do not have such a tight relevance to translation itself.

Good luck, hope you are on the way back into SE good graces!