This site got hit but why..?

[JamesAgate]

I am currently looking at taking on a small project website which was recently hit but we are really at a loss as to why so I wanted to open this up to the floor and see if anyone else had some thoughts or theories to add.

The site is

Howtotradecommodities.co.uk

and the site appeared to be hit by Penguin because sure enough it drops from several hundred visitors a day to less than 50.

Nothing was changed about the website, and looking at the Analytics it bumbled along at a less than 50 visitors a day. On June 25th when Panda 3.8 hit, the site saw traffic increase to between 80-100 visitors a day and steadily increases almost to pre-penguin levels.

On August 9th/10th, traffic drops off the face of the planet once again.

This site has some amazing links  

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/04/algorithmsdata-vs-analystsreports-fight/
http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/using/help/business/researchingfinance/stockmarket/

That were earned entirely naturally/editorially. I know these aren't "get out of jail free cards" but the rest of the profile isn't that bad either. Normally you can look at a link profile and say "Yep, this link and that link are a bit questionable" but beyond some slightly off-topic guest blogging done a while back before I was looking to get involved in the project there really isn't anything all that fruity about the links in my opinion.

I know that the site design needs some work but the content is of a high standard and it covers its topic (commodities) in a very comprehensive and authoritative way. In my opinion, (I'm not biased yet because it isn't my site) this site genuinely deserves to rank.

As far as I know, this site has received no unnatural link warnings.

I am hoping this is just a case of us having looked at this for too long and it will be a couple of obvious/glaring fixes to someone with a fresh pair of eyes.

Does anyone have any insights into what the solution might be?

[UPDATE] after responses from a few folks I decided to update the thread with progress I made on investigating the situation. After plugging the domain into Open Site Explorer I can see quite a few links that didn't show up in Link Research Tools (which is odd as I thought LRT was powered by mozscape but anyway... shows the need for multiple tools). It does seem like someone in the past has been a little trigger happy with building links to some of the inner pages.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

There is probably a days-worth of discussion here James. But just looking at your links very quickly, I do see quite a few questionable ones, some odd ones, but I do notice that most have the same anchor text and appear to go to the home page.

Could be nothing at all, but something to look at. However, unless you have a links warning from Google in WMT, then it is unlikely this is the cause.

You do also seem to have a little bit of duplicate content outside of your site so presumably this is your content and someone has plagiarised it? For example, here is a random search from one page.

I honestly think there is a lot more to look at here, but something of a starter for you.

Andy

[donford]

Hi James, I'll didn't see any punch in the face this is the issue..

But, the site IMO is clearly a site that is looking for ad clicks. Had I come across it in my day to day life, I would immediately leave. I say this because it is clearly trying to force you to click the toro ad which is displayed 2-3 times on every page.. Furthermore, actually reading the text of the site is off-putting as you can't help but be distracted by the flashing or moving images, and I feel like I'm reading a spam site due to the over-abundance of underlining. So in this case I would say my user experience is 2 on scale of 10.

On the SEO side I think you have a challenge. This site is clearly about commodities, but how search engines can ascertain the difference between each page seems difficult, commodities and the derivatives are on every single page I looked at.

Andy also touched on a good point and it was what I thought immediately when I saw the site, which was.. is this text from another site? When you look at the user experience, and the amount of text on the site, it is hard to believe somebody sat down and specifically typed and wrote every page for this site. If somebody did, I think the web designer needs to give them more credit and not treat their time like a plate of spaghetti thrown at a wall.

I am not trying to be harsh, rather constructive. I believe a sites that offer poor user experiences should be out of SERP's when there is better competition, I also believe "copy & paste" sites should be thrown to the back of the line. I can say IMO the user experience of this site was very low, and the information provided is suspect, so it would be hard for me to argue with Google or any search engine ranking a site like this low.

[DavidKonigsberg]

The home page and inner pages  has tons of internal anchor text links that look pretty spammy could be that is hurting you. Tons of exact anchor texts all with word commoditie in it very unnatural.

[JamesAgate]

Hi David,

For some reason these weren't showing up in Link Research Tools - just run the site through OSE and now I can see a fair amount of junk to inner pages...

Thanks for your input here

James

[DavidKonigsberg]

also the onsite pages have bad anchor text links

[Vizergy]

Just a quick look at the home page a some quick navigation of the site showed me that on the home page alone there are at least five links that go to howtotradecommoditiesDOTcom/go/etoro which just redirects to the etoro website.  It almost looks like there are ads that are disguised as internal links in order to keep from getting the 'above the fold' penalty.  Who knows how Google sees this but I would think that they wouldn't see it in a very good light whether this was the intention or not.  I would certainly look at reworking your internal linking structure as well.

Good luck

[JamesAgate]

Thanks Billy - another individual touched on this above actually but I think it is a very valid point. It is something I am adding in to my list of recommendations as well.