Did Google notify you of a link-based penalty? You should set up Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already. Then you can read notifications about suspicious links pointing to your site and disavow the ones that are spammy.

I am not so sure that you are under a link-based penalty. I know you did not ask for this, but I had a look at your website's link profile, source and index health.

1. SEO: The online web form market is hugely saturated. You probably can not compete with Wufoo on terms like "web form builder". Honestly ask yourself if you currently deserve a top 10 spot for this term. Are you a top 10 player in this field? Explore more specific and longtail keywords. Create better targeted pages and page titles. "Documentation - NicSoft Software" is a missed chance. Create more content on the blog (inbound marketing).

2. Links. You do not have enough natural links to beat competitors. They get linked from webdeveloper forums by real users of the software. You also should check out Google's stance on "Powered by"-links. If this turns in the majority of your backlinking profile, you get links from a lot of bad neighborhoods. These links may thus do more harm than good. It is not an editorial link, but probably in exchange for a free version of the product. Much safer to nofollow links created for profit or SEO/online marketing purposes.

3. Site HTML is not well-structured for information retrieval. For every page on your site, the first heading is "Home". Browse your site with styles disabled. Reorder repeating boilerplate code below the relevant page content. Specify a canonical or make sure only one version is served to visitors with redirects (both www- and non-www versions of the site return duplicate content).

4. Index health is poor. Robots.txt file is indexed. There are a few inactive subdomains, an unattended Wordpress and Drupal install in a subdirectory. Includes are indexed as separate pages "/inc/footer.php". Documentation (the content "meat" if the site) is off limits for bots. Over 90% of pages on the site are in the secondary index, which is not a good sign.

About 10 hits a day from Google is far too low for any commercial site to survive on. You could get more than 10 hits on a random wordlist.

Do not solely think about in-links. Are you even linking to reputable sources yourself? End-node sites are far less interesting for visitors than hub sites.

Didn't ask for it? If I've learned one thing from this whole affair it's how understanding and kind complete strangers can be. Your feedback is hugely appropriated.

That said, a few thoughts:

1. The link based penalty stems from the fact the traffic drops correlate exactly with Penguin release dates. Also, the "official" volunteers and other good folks over at the Google Webmaster forms came to the same conclusion. Before those exact dates I had ranked on page 1 for "php web form software", and page 1 or 2 for "web form software", since mid-2008.

To that end, you're 100% correct the market is tough, but we're a very specialized form builder, made especially for developers.

As far as deserving Page 1 - Google used to think so for several years, as my product is pretty darn great if you need flexible form software. We have four versions, two of which are free, covering both self-hosted and SaaS models. No one even comes close to offering such a wide variety of solutions.

In short, if you need form software and you find my site you're guaranteed not to be disappointed. If nothing else you're able to choose between two pretty awesome free versions, something no one else offers. I'm also ecstatic to answer questions and help users out, even if they don't buy or use my software. I would think this would be of high value to Google -- and it certainly used to be before the penalty.

As far as the site recommendations: I'm taking these to heart for sure, though I have to say, the previously mentioned Google Webmaster forums -- the current site is a direct result of working with them for over 3 months, making the exact same types of changes and improvements. Nothing, and I mean nothing, worked.

I didn't know at the time, but it was recently stated by John Mueller from Google that a Penguin recovery is simply not possible until they refresh and release a new version of the Penguin algorithm.

So at the end of the day, sadly, (and please do not take this as dismissive as you bet I'll be making changes): my problem is not content or structure, it's that darn link penalty.

All the while, and again, I'm not sure who this benefits.

Let me first say that I am sympathetic to your situation. My startup was financially ruined by the Google penalties.

However, I'm not sure that anchoring yourself to "they used to think I was good enough" is a valid argument. Perhaps they were presenting bad results that benefitted you before, and have fixed that with better results now.

It honestly sounds like you're mostly upset because something was taken from you that you were used to having. That does not necessarily mean you deserved it previously.

Thank you for the understanding, and my heart goes out to you as well for your penalties. In a more just world real users would decide what succeeds and what does not.

My defense of the current site from a content perspective is simple: just go to it (www.rackforms.com).

I feel very strongly the look (clean professional), layout (easy to navigate), and technical details (fast, fully responsive, etc) are not causing it to be penalized from a content perspective.

My reasoning for why it should rank is also simple: it used to rank high, and none of that was an accident. I've always followed common sense methodology when creating it, such as creating content for humans, not search bots.

Never the less, since the penalty I've happily made dozens of changes, most of which were suggestions from kind and well meaning SEO folks -- none of them made a difference. Not a single one.

Conclusion -- my issue isn't nor has it ever been content, it's links.

Of course the irony is the vast majority of changes I made were to please search engine bots, not humans. Google has always said this is the opposite of what we should be doing.

For example, one guy suggested I used to word 'form' too much on my home page, and Google may consider this keyword stuffing. And so I pruned it from 23 to 12. Trouble is I sell web form software, and let's just say changes I made were, in many cases, a stretch -- many sounded decisively nonhuman. Who and what am I helping at that point? Google bot is clearly smarter than that. The kicker: the current page 1 site used the word 'form' 43 times. It's just silly voo-doo at this point, and no one except Google knows what the hell they're talking about.

Here's why this is all a bit scary: as link-penalized webmasters poke around the edges and make such changes, we're getting further away from a site that used to be looked upon favorably by Google from a content perspective.

The reason I cite "it used to be good enough" is common sense. Yes we can always improve our site and we should be: but a link penalty, mine especially, is so thorough and so unrecoverable so far, that making loads of other changes will very likely hurt more than help.

But again, just visit my site, visit the page 1 and 2's, and then consider I'm page 15 or lower. I have no doubt my site, should it's ranking be restored, would be a delight for Google users to visit.

> Unfortunately loads of spammy links I never created came home to roost

Does this mean that users were posting spammy links on your site, that spammy links elsewhere pointed to your site or something else?

Option 2: spammy links elsewhere pointed to my site.

And I do mean spammy, as in pure spam. Almost all came from foreign language sites, and would be in the form of mysite.com as the link and Louis Vuitton|Fancy Watch Brand|Viagra|Etc as the display text. At no point was my site ever compromised.

The kicker is it's unknown if these links were actually helping my site at some point, and the penalty was simply a reflection of the links being devalued.

@vdaniuk - Totally with ya, but I've actually done that already. In fact, a 301 actually transferred the penalty from the old site to new back in 2012!

I'm literally the worst SEO ever, but in my defense I used a 301 to create a smooth transition for my existing users (which number in the thousands). I had no idea that a 301 would be used against me like that.

I guess from my point of view then, the objections to changing brand/identity are:

a. My brand is something I work hard on, and changing it is confusing for my users, and difficult and time-consuming from a business standpoint (SSL, taxes, etc). What's more...

b. My deepest apologies if I'm wrong on this, but I've heard that even if I do change brands, Google has actually made it clear they may follow webmasters who've been penalized, not just the domains they ran.

Now it potentially becomes this bizarre cloak and dagger world of hiding from Google, something I'm simply not comfortable with. I'm proud of my past.

c. There's been, and I hate that I know this stuff but I do follow the topic closely now, but I've heard that new web site remain in something called the sandbox for much longer now. God I hate that I even said that as I deplore SEO stuff, but starting a new site simply is no guarantee that rank will be restored. Not to mention the aforementioned costs of setting up a storefront, building the site, possibly being targeted for a new penalty for who I am, and so on.

But yes, at some point it may very well come down to starting a new site...again.

Look, you should dance with Google, not fight it. If your domain(sic!) was pessimized, you just upgrade your site, rewrite content, add more data and images and create a new domain. Then you concentrate on promoting your new website.