Reality of Panda 3.9 Refresh

[FidelityOne]

I have had a 10 page website(registered in 1999) rank for my top keywords(top 5) for over 4 years.  No changes have been made to the website. (Static website).

July 11, 2012, most of the keywords, and all the major keywords were dropped from Google. They remain steady in Bing and Yahoo.

I saw that some people referred to a Panda 3.9 refresh on that day, but also saw that Google(Matt Cutts) denied the refresh.

Given the simplicity of the website and the strong backlinks, which remain, what are other reasons I could see a drastic drop in 1 day.

Any ideas on where to target my search for solving this very serious issue?  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[KevinBudzynski]

Did any of your rankings dropped during the Penguin update? Panda update?

[stevecounsell]

HI,

I guess there are updates happening all of the time with Google algorithms where they're always trying to improve the quality of results.

So my questions to you are:

Are you sure that you've not been doing what google might consider "naughty tactics"?

Have you had anything flagged in your Webmaster Tools account?

How far down the listings dod you drop and how are the competitors ranking. Are there any similarities between your site and the main competitors. IE if they didn't suffer, what are you doing differently?

I know it's not really an answer for you but some food for thought that I hiope helps.

Best of luck

Steve

[FidelityOne]

I have only been with this company since July 2011, but I believe they were hit by the Penguin update of March 2011. Since then it has been steady. During that update, they lost their local listings but retained there national rankings. Since that time, the rankings have remained in the top 5 for our major keywords.

[FidelityOne]

Nothing "naughty".  I have done some guest articles on various blogs related to the industry over the past 4 months but they are all legit unique articles and on sites with a domain authority or 30 or higher so that should not have been the issue.  Also, they were not paid articles, they were free articles.

Our chief competitors have been actively promoting theire sites and increasing the sizes of their websites. We have been limited. We also do not do any PPC, but all our top competitors are doing PPC. That should not be an issue, but maybe things are changing. I am not sure on that point.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Andropenis_Australia]

Check WMT for any notices too. Check for any new spammy links pointing to/from the site.

Neg seo has been talked about a lot lately.

[FidelityOne]

Thanks for all the feedback. After some serious review, I am convinced that Google somehow began indexing our HTTPS pages and dropped all our HTTP pages.  As this is a .net website with a web.config file,  what would you all recommend I do to make the google bot read the http pages instead of the https pages.

Would you add robot.txt file to the web.config file or handle it another way.

Again, thanks for all the assistance.