Recent Rank drop after Penguin 2.1?

[Develop41]

Recently, a lot of pages from our website have moved from page one or ranking number one, to page ten or something.

We got a manual penalty message from Google Team, we removed a lot of unnatural links pointing to our pages and disavowed the rest. This got the penalty removed and we got a message from Google confirming the same. Before the manual penalty we were getting about 140,000 visits per day, after the penalty about 80,000.

However, after Hummingbird or Penguin 2.1 all our ranks have vanished. We are nowhere in Google for our primary keywords and we getting like 40,000 visits per day. Most are direct or from sources other than Google.

We had another look at the links we disavowed, a list of about 11000 domains, we found about 3000 domains to be good. We fixed the disavow file about one week back, but no changes in traffic since. We checking the domains again to see if we have missed more good domains in there; yes, we have. There are still a very few good domains in there. But we are not touching the disavow list; waiting to see the change for the last submitted.

We have a dedicated user base, good liking on Facebook, all the stats in Analytics speak good, about 40% repeat visits about 30% direct. About 3000 people search for the site using our brand name as reported in Analytics.

I doubt the on-page optimization, the pages could be over-optimized. But the on-page factors for other pages ranking for the keywords are similar. The keyword density is similar, so are the usage of headings and stuff. We have not made any recent changes to these on-page patterns.

Our team is not able to figure out what could have gone wrong.

[joseph.chambers]

Have you looked for panda triggers? The pages with the highest exit stats AND lowest average time on page mean low user satisfaction and is a panda trigger.  You want to make sure that the landing pages with the highest exit rate AND lowest time on page are best serving the "query intent" of whatever query the person made to get there.

Also I feel like you have too many ads above the fold.

[crackingmedia]

Hi, I think the likelihood is your site is still suffering a kick back from Google. Whilst they have removed the penalty that doesn't mean to say, your status will be automatically restored and unfortunately, to some extent or another, Google will still treat your site cautiously from a ranking perspective.

Also, with the links you have disavowed that has still left a lot of domains from the numbers you have given for which links are still active. They may be good links, but with your site having so many it is possible that Google are still checking the large number remaining.

Restoration will take time I think and yes, the recent Hummingbird update may have impacted your site as well. The on-page optimisation looks OK but as a directory site with little "answering questions" type Hummingbird content, perhaps you need to establish conversations with potential customers using an on-site blog and through social media.

I hope that helps,

Peter

[crackingmedia]

I agree with Joseph on his points he has raised as well.

Peter

[joseph.chambers]

good answer. Remember that it will take google some time to go back and index those links. A good trick is to use some indexing tools on the old links that were removed.

If you have a LinkAssistant you could put all those links in there and see when the last time they were indexed - this could speed things up.

[Develop41]

Yes, we are working on pages with low average time and improving the content. But the pages removed from top 10 have always been performing well and still are with direct or brand keyword visits.

[Develop41]

The "good" links we disavowed earlier are ranking well on Google. Most are from high quality sites related to the same niche.

The issue was, the reconsideration request got rejected the twice. The example links mentioned in the response were all created by our site visitors. We were in now way responsible for the links placed on those pages. The pages were from BlogSpot, Wordpress and some really popular forums with content created by the users.

But we had to disavow those as well and similar pages to get the penalty revoked. We never checked the page quality and authority that time. We checked later when the traffic dropped and found a lot of pages to be good.