Help! Why are my rankings down?

[MangoMan16]

Hi,

Over the last couple of days I have found a HUGE drop in traffic. I checked a lot of our rankings, and we are definitely out of the game for at least a few keywords (not on 1st page). Our ranking has dropped on other keywords. We even dropped to #2 (for the first time ever) for our branded keyword search term.

What happened?! Could it have been the Penguin update, 1 month after it was released?

Help!

[PeterM22]

hi there,

It could be penguin.. There was another penguin update a couple of days ago...do you have a lot of exact match anchored links?...  more information on it here..http://searchengineland.com/google-pushes-first-penguin-algorithm-update-122518

[MangoMan16]

Thanks for your response Peter.

I think I do have a lot of exact match anchored links. Are you referring to in-linking on my website, or external inbound links?

I have a large network of websites (geographical location + industry domain names) which all pretty much have the same content, and the exact same links pointing back to my main site. We haven't had time to go through all of our sites yet because we've put all focus on our main website - which had been seeing tons of progress until Penguin hit!

It looks like it was the penguin update that hit us. Our traffic dropped significantly over the weekend, it was relatively normal for the rest of the month of May.

What can I do at this point?

[MangoMan16]

Actually, I should add that my network of sites are all hosted in the same place.

If I go through all sites and add a nofollow tag to each link, would this resolve the issue? We haven't had the resources to create unique content for all of our sites just yet.

[MangoMan16]

Is it OK if I just add nofollow tags to my inbound links?