Linkspun.com

Looks like I got an over-optimisation penalty on one of my earners, down from 3000 SE hits a day to about 300 and the only remaining traffic from Google comes for terms that I don't have as anchor text in any backlinks. My question is, is that what Google does if it sees that you've over-optimised your anchors for one particular search term? Or should it only drop you for that term? I know a couple of things I did which may have caused it, hoping I can rectify them or I'm going to be poorer this month!

Might not be over-optimisation for a single search term in this case.

I lost a fair bit of traffic last month on a handful of sites, but over the last 7 - 10 days most have moved back to where they were in th Google SERPs. Notably, the traffic those sites are seeing is mostly from searches that don't utilise the terms used as anchor text for backlinks.

Sometimes I think it's possible to get too bound up in the perceived wisdom about search engine traffic. As I see it, backlinks from relevant pages are important, but not to the exclusion of on-page content including page titles and descriptions. Nor are text links the be-all and end-all of good rankings. Banner links are still useful for that purpose and, if the banners are good, they attract some decent click traffic.

Anyways, sit tight and see what happens with traffic to your site. Hopefully it'll only be a temporary blip.

Fingers crossed you may be right. I was worried because the same happened to another site but the traffic hasn't come back yet on that one.