Site ranking lower, could I have been penalised?

[oliflorence]

Hi,
I am working on an existing site, the domain is 6 years old and the latest version of the site 2.
Nothing much as ever been done in terms of SEO until october or so last year when I revised the text slightly, reviewed the title and meta tags and alt tags for the images. I have optimised for one or two keywords per page with little repetition of keywords. Within a couple of weeks the site ranking improved gently.
i have then submitted to directories, noationwide and large international directories, I have done that several times on other site before and it has always been fine.
In total, we are talking 35 / 40 directories, submitted to in a week, new links to follow in the weeks / months to come hopefully.

This is all has been done, I can't imagine being penalised for this but the ranking is lower for keywords that shortly after having optimised. I have only use one anchor tag on all submissions, could this be the problem?

[AussieWebmaster]

you may want to add a variety of anchor text... just add more using a bunch of different text to even out and wait

[cryptblade]

Are you sure you did everything right? I mean, it sounds like you went ahead and just made changes - did you analyze and document the site before you made changes? Like ID'd what pages were ranking, why they were ranking, etc?

[Angela Charles]

Did you check to see which pages were ranking prior to the additional optimization? We tell clients to "leave well enough alone" on pages that are performing and concentrate only on pages that aren't. Perhaps you hurt the performing pages by switching things up.

[leanne]

In addition to the previous comments re: being careful about not disturbing pages that are already performing, I also wonder how many links the site had before you did this work. If it was just a handful, suddenly picking up 35-40 links may have looked unnatural, especially since in certain directories you actually wind up picking up more than just a single link with one submission.

[oliflorence]

hi,
Thanks for the replies.
The site ranking improved shortly after I have made changes to the pages so i can't imagine the problem is coming from that. I did not spend much time documenting the performance below as it is was pretty low in any way.

In the meanttime I have looked closer at the content and found out that the client had copied quiet a lot of it from a variety of other sites. I now suspect that it is the problem and have asked him to update his content accordingly.

[cryptblade]

You should document the performance of the site before making changes and all changes should always be performed on a dev server so that you can properly document before and after. You will often find changes in rankings after some initial site edits. That's a false positive. It does not necessarily correlate to improved rankings unless the rankings stay.

[Angela Charles]

Originally Posted by oliflorence

hi,
In the meanttime I have looked closer at the content and found out that the client had copied quiet a lot of it from a variety of other sites. I now suspect that it is the problem and have asked him to update his content accordingly.

If your client has copied content from other sites that already are indexed and performing, that could be the key to your problem. Google usually ignores duplicate content.