Is there anyway to recover my site's rankings?

[benners]

My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'. My conclusions is I was dropped by Google because of poor quality links I've gained over 10+ years.

I have a Domain Authority of 40, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 42, user reviews and quality content.

Since Oct 2012 I've done some technical improvements and managed to get a few questionable links removed. I've continued blogging reguarly and got more active on Twitter. I've seen no improvement and my traffic is 80% down on last year.

It would be great to be able to produce content that others want to link to but I've not had much success from that in over 10 years of trying and I've not seen many others in my sector, with small budgets having much success.

Is there anything I can do to regain favour with Google?

[FedeEinhorn]

First step would be to check on your competitors. What are they doing? How have they reached those rankings? Do some research on them and then compare to yours. What are the differences? Are they doing something that you aren't?

[benners]

I've been watching my competition for 10 years so have a pretty good idea what they've been doing. I stopped running singles events in about 2008 and started promoted other event companies events on my site in returned for a link back. Often these links were run of site in their footer. Although I varied the link text I think these type of links were unnatural and perhaps the cause of my problems now.

[FedeEinhorn]

Well, if you have cleaned your backlink profile, and there are still links that were not removed, you could try disavowing them using google's tool and see what happens. You should only use that tool if you are sure those are hurting you and have already done everything to contact the webmasters to have those removed.

If that doesn't work, then it is your content. Are you creating worthy content? Is people accessing your content pages? sharing it? Is that content really good for users? or was it built thinking on engines? Good, worthy content will give you some backlinks, which ultimately will increase your rankings.

[benners]

Well I'm not really sure how to clean up my back link profile. How do I know links are a problem? A lot of my links are perhaps questionable. I'd be wary of removing links that are of some use. How do you evaluate this?

In regards to content, the regular blog posts are user focused, well written and relevant but not link worthy particularly. Over optimised content has mostly been removed.

[FedeEinhorn]

There are several tools online to review your backlink profile. I would start with OpenSiteExplorer. Check all links and get those with very low authority, check those pages and see if they are related to your content, if there's no much value on them (content is unrelated, and the overall 'worthiness' is low) you could contact the webmaster asking to have that backlink removed.

[benners]

Thanks, for your help. I'll give that a try

[FedeEinhorn]

No problem! If you notice several bad backlinks, you could use a tool like removeem.com. Is a paid tool, but it will help you identifying those back links and contact the site owners. I hope you get it resolved.