Is this a Penguin hit; how to recover?

[Kibin]

Our site is: www.kibin.com

Our organic search traffic has dropped significantly in the last few days (about 50%). Although we don't have a ton of traffic coming in via organic search, this is a huge blow.

We we previously the top spot for keywords like 'edit my essay', 'fix my paper', and 'paper revision'. These kw phrases linked to smaller services pages on our site such as:

• kibin.com/s/edit-my-essay
• kibin.com/s/fix-my-paper
• kibin.com/s/paper-revision

We no longer rank for these keywords... at all.

My first question/concern is... is this a Penguin penalty? I'm not sure. Honestly, I know we have some directory links, but we've never been aggressive on the backlink front. In fact, in the last few months we've been investing quite a bit into content: kibin.com/blog

If this is a Penguin penalty, how should I best go about cleaning this up? I'm not even sure what links Google would be considering spammy, and again... we really don't have that extensive of a backlink profile.

Please help, this is a real blow to our business and it's got me a big freaked out.

Thanks!

[dotfly]

Hi! (please see the screenshots)

Your website seems to be a very young site. Young sites always receive a bonus according to their rankings from Google but they have to prove if they are worth it.

If I take a closer look on your visibility chart (I used searchmetrics) then it becomes clear that your site has suffered from several up and downs. The harsh fall-back im may this year indicates that you were hit by the penguin update.

But the visibility chart also shows that your site has recovered from that very fast. Normally this is not a regular recovery development - this recovery process usually takes longer.

Actually the trend for your site is "up" and as far as I can see within your backlink structure there is no need to do some drastic re-optimizations. It`s very frustrating loosing good rankings but those where not established yet. If your site is a very young site and your rankings start good or even very good, this is a circumstance not a consequence which is carved in stone or on which you can rely on.

Be careful with linkbuilding - use a moderate speed and continue with your content in the blog. You have to be patient - not the best answer and maybe not the answer you would like to read but thats my opinion and its based on experiences.

**There is one single exception I have to make: your categories under "services" seem to be a little bit spammy according to the density of similar keywords. Some users might say that this looks a bit "too much of everything" and so Google might recognize this as well! Maybe you should think of using a different structure with less of the same (key)words?   **

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[Kibin]

Hi, thanks for your response (although the screenshots aren't appearing...).

I'm going to have to disagree with you regarding the May "hit". We're a very seasonal business with the majority of our clients being college students. We see a big drop in our traffic, and general organic hits, after May and throughout the summer. That's simply part of our business cycle.

We're currently in our busy season until about Christmas break. The drop in traffic we're seeing right now is not natural. Yesterday's organic visits were one-third what they normally are on a typical Sunday. It seems to be getting worse.

Furthermore, our site is not that young. We've been around for 3+ years, so I don't think this is a factor right now. Like I said, we were ranking for many of these keywords, often times in the top three spots; now we're nowhere to be found.

I have a feeling this has something to do with our backlinks, but I really don't have the expertise to know for sure.

[SEO5Team]

Hi Kibin,

You can use this tool to check if your site was hit by any algo updates.

Cheers,

SEO5..

[MarieHaynes]

Hi.  If your drop happened in the last few days then it's unlikely that Penguin is the culprit.  You certainly can have a dramatic sudden drop with Penguin but it would happen on the day of a Penguin refresh.  There was one in October, but it was October 4th so you would have been seeing the loss then.

I don't see anything that obviously sticks out to me as a reason for your traffic drop.

Is it possible that the drop happened in the local listings?  There was some type of local shakeup in the last few days.

[Dr-Pete]

There was a big local shake-up around 10/25 - were you potentially ranking in local markets for some of these phrases (they don't seem like local queries, but just thought I'd ask)? I'd have to agree with Marie that the timing suggest this wasn't Penguin, but Google hasn't been very forthcoming on Penguin data refreshes.

Your link profile looks pretty clean to me, and your site isn't really large enough to have large-scale content issues. Those services pages look a little keyword-targeted and border on thin, but if you're talking about a handful of them, I doubt it's enough to cause you serious problems. If you rolled out hundreds of them that were all just variations on the same core keyword phrases, that would be different.

On the other hand, if those pages specifically target the terms that dropped, it's hard to ignore that fact. Did you do any targeted link-building to those pages. I'm seeing one weird thing - OSE is showing a ton of recent links from Scoop.it - across a large number of pages - but when I check the source site, I'm not seeing any links. It's possible you got a temporary boost from some links that got removed, but that's really hard to track.