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You need to think about whether your site has been hit with a manual penalty or an algorithm penalty. If you have had no messages in WMT then it is probably an algorithm penalty. Panda is now part of all algorithm changes so you may have been hit by that. One of our testing sites got hit by Penguin in May and we decided to test out if a 301 to a new website would work...it didnt!! It took just over 5 weeks for Google to catch up and the site lost all its rankings again. I was actually surprised it took that long to be honest, Google's algorithm is too smart for that so I would advise trying to fix any problems before you give up and start a new website. Penalties will last as long as you have the problem. The issue here is, if it is an algorithm change then it is harder to figure out what is wrong. Whilst a manual penalty is worse, at least you know what to do in order to fix the problem. You need to look at any duplicate content issues you may have and if that is all ok then look deep into your backlink profile because it must be 1 or the other. If you show us your URL then maybe one of us could take a quick look and give you some more info.

Hi Marcus, Thanks so much for adding some more really great suggestions to this post. The NAP consistency is something I will look into ASAP Kind Regards James

So every page has several hundred links to spammy duplicate pages? This is a bad thing. First off, link equity leaving every page on your site would be split between all these several hundred links whether your NoFollow them or not. Second, the fact that they are essentially duplicate of each other and there are potentially hundreds of these pages means that your site is likely hurting from thin content penalties. Third, that image makes it look like old school 90s keyword stuffing. Which is just all sorts of wrong. My assessment is that Yes... this is hurting your site.

Hi Michael, very good question. For some unknown reason the contact and report pages for Google Plus are not easy to find. I had some friends who wanted to contact them as well and, after long hours of search they came up with this email: profiles-support@google.com They basically saw it in some discussions posted by people on the web. I think you should give it a try and report them, you got nothing to loose!

Pretty good advice all-around here, but I just want to second Alan that the risk of this kind of focused directory-based link scheme (and it is a scheme, if they've built their own network) is very high. This is white-hat sermonizing. I'll be honest - yes, those links could help you in the short-term, and they could improve your ranking. The problem is that, if this scheme goes down, you will very likely be penalized, and you could lose everything. The SEO company will walk away, but you won't. Solid, relevant directories, in moderation, are fine. Worst case, they may not carry the weight you want them to, and they're just part of a larger strategy. When you start gaming the system, though, you're facing the very real risk of a Capital-P Penalty.

Advertisements can definitely reduce the quality of your website in Google's eyes, however, if your site as a whole is informative, 100+ pages and optimized as you described, I might take a quick look at over optimization of link anchor text or the site for competitive keywords. Definitely check WMT for any warnings from G as well and, be aware, that the Hummingbird algorithm just rolled out. Also, are the affiliate links set to rel=no follow?

Tom's answer is pretty right on the mark. It could be many things. For one, I think your link profile in terms of anchor text is pushing over optimization, especially for that one page. I suspect the link sources might be mainly press releases etc (known "link building" methods) but I didn't dig into that a whole ton. I'd really try to get your links a bit more branded for anchors etc.  Check out this for link building ideas - and check out this for some possible trickiness because of your partial match domain. On site, there may be some basic things to clean up. I ran Screaming Frog - see some long page titles, long descriptions (or missing descriptions) and in general the page titles could be a bit better I think. For example; "Cheap PVC Banners & Vinyl Banners Custom made Plastic material" Could be a bit better for search engines and users. Maybe; "Premium PVC & Vinyl Banners At Affordable Prices!" It could be whatever you'd like but I am finding that "un-seo'ing" titles these days and making them more user friendly (while keeping your keyword in there) can help. Also - are PVC and Vinyl the same thing? If they are different you may be throwing off the semantic relevance there. -Dan

Firstly, read http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284 for the basics on addressing this problem.  It was noted in the other response but it's key that you approach it this way.  Its common but easily fixable. On your other note, robots read everything on the page, content included.  They may not index any of it (considering it's on a NOINDEX page), but the absolutely read and crawl everything.  And yes, naturally they follow the links on a FOLLOW page.  They won't on a NOFOLLOW and will look elsewhere for links to follow. Hope this answered your question.  Let me know if not.

Very good point Peter!

There was an update today and it was pretty ugly. If your drop was in the last 24-48 hours, that might have been the culprit. Did you use C-class IPs on the blogs? Or were they hosted on different hosts? Did you interlink the blogs? Theres some silly rankings going on, sites with 1 backlink ranking for 25k monthly searched keyword.

Hi Felip, Posting on ezine and other article directories are tactics from few years ago and shouldn't be using because Search Engines see that as duplicate content on the web and if the those directories have higher authority than your site, it doesn't benefit you at all in SEO stands.  I'm pretty sure most people recommend not to use it anymore. However, talking about any good for these sort of directories.  Yes, i believe they are still a bit useful.  For example, if your website is not getting any traffic and you have no luck in building up the traffic via Social or Search, posting on article directories with thousands of visits, it helps your article get more impression.  That is the only good I can think of for using article directories now a days.

Yes, I got the exact same issue on September 17th, but the drop in traffic was around 10% from Google only. It is really bad for us because usually from mid September traffic is picking up toward the Holiday season. I am trying to understand what caused that drop in traffic. I have opened a thread about my own issue starting on September 17th: http://moz.com/community/q/what-happened-on-september-17-on-google Jonathan1979: what kind of metrics would you like to see? I'll be glad to share as much as I can. Thanks!

Backed by quite a bit of real-life experience on EGOL's part.

Seems to me that Google are under pressure to be more secure with the data they collect so it's a natural progression I feel to hide all the data from us website owners and SEOs; so I'm not one of those who think that it's a ploy to get us all to spend on AdWords. However, I'm not sure that hiding the keyword data rather than anonymising it was the best way for them to go. After all having the keyword data and knowing what keywords are performing best helps us and webmasters to fine tune content and deliver a better experience for our website visitors. Still google ain't gonna change just because a few SEO whine and whinge about it. Rather they'll strengthen their security position and maybe remove more data from our view. I predict that they'll remove the New Vs returning visitor stats on the same security basis. After all you would not want a web site owner knowing you came back to their website. That'd be a massive infringement of their right to privacy!

Yes, that's correct Kurt. We want to disassociate our brand from those pages. Thanks for your FB!

Unfortunately the site is not wordpress so I dont think I'lll be able to use WPMU DEV for my site. Thanks

Thanks again for your valuable insight. It appears the links have slowed down quite considerably now and I’ve read a great deal about the subject of NSEO and it seems in normal cases you can receive thousands of new links almost overnight so it doesn’t look like a major attack in my view. Although my anchor text is now heavily diluted with irrelevant terms which still worries me. I haven’t disavowed anything yet as my reading hasn’t pointed me to anything conclusive and my rankings still seem to be slowly increasing. When you have disavowed links in the past did you also include a note to Google with an explanation of why you were doing it, as a reconsideration request was not necessary? And do you think that might flag your site up to Google and in a sense hand yourself in even though you are not responsible for the spammy links? I’m just worried (possibly more paranoid) Google will keep a record of the site and monitor it more closely in the future.

Why not just buy a new domain if it is a totally separate product? You are correct: a sub domain is essentially (for SEO purposes anyway) treated as its own entity. As long as you build great content, find great link opportunities and treat it as you would any other domain you should have no problem getting it ranked.

Thanks for taking the time to reply Michael, much appreciated!

I'm using joomla sites. I now know how they got into our sites. We had malware on one of the computers, and apparantly keeps filezilla the passwords in a text files without encryption. I have changed all the comprimised files back, and changed every password on the sites. The hack changed every index and footer file. Let's hope it doesn't came back.