Google ranking drop?

[thehen]

I've just stumbled across something rather disturbing. My website was ranked 6 in google for the search term 'Henry Hoffman' and now its not even in the first ten pages. I've been working on SEOing it for ages and I've submitted to countless link directories and swapped countless recipricols.

I think google may have punished me for brewing a link farm. Is there a way to get back up the search engines? It has happened completely suddenly and kind of seems like all my work has gone to waste.

Thanks for your help.

[webmaster]

For how long has it been gone? It could happend that sites drops and get back up in a few days. So if it haven't gone a week yet, just wait and see how it turns out.

[thehen]

Its only been a day, so I'll wait it out. I've also got rid of all my outgoing links - I don't think my recipricals will be too impressed. Should I contact them or let them find out on their own accord?

[jonespr]

I would not worry at first, I sometimes see some of my web sites drop and then go up again, but never seen a difference in incoming traffic stats though.

I would wait it out and keep on promotin.

[Tomi]

Abit of topic but i just seriusly can see your site, when i go to the url i just get a plain white screen, nothing at all... strange

[thehen]

Really? Do you have javascript disabled? Its kinda dependent on that.

A few days have passed now and Im still right at the bottom of the search engines. I think I have been penalised - a warning I guess, to those breeding link farms.

[thehen]

I just thought I'd say I'm back up Google now.

I don't think it was the link farm, I think it was my lack of quality incoming links meant I didn't get re-indexed for ages - I guess this made me drop.

[pdacrandy]

I never used a link farm, but Google does sometimes have an arbitrary way of destroying your link popularity seemingly overnight, Google is constantly fine-tuning their link popularity algorithm, which can cause things to change drastically overnight. Alot of people are now using a service called "Blogitive" to get one-way anchor text links to their site posted on relevant blogs. It costs $20 per link, and Blogitive can usually come up with a formula to help any site climb back to the rankings. I'm not sure if that will help you though if Google has blacklisted you. I suspect that Google's blacklisting is permanent. You may have to start over.