Was I hit by panda or penguin?

[Craig210]

My site, graciousbridal.com was hit pretty hard by google at the end of April. I actually noticed our traffic decreasing around February, then towards the end of April, it got really bad. Our sales this may were half of what they were in may 2011. We have never done any black or gray hat seo, wouldn't even know how to. I know in the past we did blog commenting, but changed up our keywords so it wasn't all the same, maybe we didn't change it enough?? We have another very similar site that I'm now wondering if we were penalized because they are too similar. We always have changed up the copy, but they have most of the same products. This second site barely gets traffic or sales and has about half of the items graciousbridal does. But, I'm wondering now if it's to similar and that is why we were penalized. I can't figure out what we did wrong to have this big of a drop. I really need help with this as this is supposed to be our busiest season of the year. Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated..

[Francisco_Meza]

Penguin was released on April 24th 2012. If you GA show a decrease on that date, then it's Penguin.

[JamesNorquay]

I had a quick look over your link profile, I feel you have been hit by Penguin.

I notice you have been doing some ok link building in terms of using varied anchor text in your link profile,

But I also notice you have been targeting some lower quality directories for your dedicated page "<a class="clickable title link-pivot expanded" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">personalized wedding favors"</a>

For example I notive you have a link on this directorie: coloradosph.org

http://coloradosph.org/index.php?s=A&c=363&p=17

Google has totally de indexed the URL for this low quality directory, If you take a similar sample accross more of these directories I see more like this.

Also in regards to your "Blog Comments" I notice some poor quality links from this area example:

this looks like it is a blog comment on a link network [comment made 28th Feb 2011), I mean their are 100s of other spammy comments this isn't really going to do any thing apart from have a negative impact on your SEO.

http://mommies.genuineinteractive.com/blog/post/Connecting-with-Alpha-Moms.aspx

To future proof your strategy you need to target higher quality link building strategies and do not let the lower quality stuff work.

Google has been very harsh after the last update, work done by agency's 5 years ago can get hit I have seen it over and over, from my experience "Quality" will be the winner in the end

[Craig210]

Hi James, Thanks for responding. We hired an SEO person to help us at the beginning of last year, that ended up not working out. I know she was working on link building, and it seems like she must have left comments on irrelevant blogs.. What do you recommend in this situation, focus time on getting high quality links or trying to get the bad ones removed? And is blog commenting still okay to do on blogs that are relevant to our industry, or does google see that as spammy? Thanks! Audrey