[blauwbilgorgel]

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.

[rackforms]

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.

[theworst]

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.