If you woke up to see your site has disappeared from the Google SERP – your site was likely affected by the most recent Penguin Update, So far there have been 3 major Penguin rollouts along with several updates.
April 24, 2012 – First Penguin Update is unleashed
May 22, 2013 – Penguin 2.0
October 2013 – Penguin 2.1
October 17, 2014 – Penguin 3.0
Each update was intended to reduce the amount of web spam, by penalizing webmasters who used manipulative or spammy SEO techniques. Websites that had lots of inbound links from low quality directories or article farms were targeted, as were sites that had an over abundance of exact match keyword anchor text. Hint, if your site has hundreds of links that say “Los Angeles Personal Injury lawyer” – your link profile is not very natural looking.
In a previous post I showed an example of client whose link profile got him penalized after a web 2.1. Their previous SEO company had engaged in very spammy link practices and overnight they went from the first page to the eighth page for all of their most competitive keywords. (Phoenix Estate planning Firm) The sheer number of bad links made continuing on the same URL impossible, so we started over. In late March we launched their new site on a new domain – www.gormanandjoneslaw.com . Now thanks to great content like this – they have attracted an impressive amount of quality natural links and are now back on top of the Google SERP for most competitive phrases.
The lesson here is that you can definitely come back from these penalties if you do SEO the right way.