Why did I fall off the SERP for my url query? Im i being penalized?

[Nicktaylor1]

The website is privateequityfirms.com, We would rank as high as 4th behind wikipedia from the query "private equity firms" but recently dropped to 77th for no reason. All my other keywords seem to no affected? whats going on, Im i being penalized?

I attached GWT search query info

Thanks,

PEFDrop_zpsd4002b86.png MozAnalyticsDROP_zps9401bf4b.png

[FedeEinhorn]

Can't see the image.

Please use imgurl as suggested by Moz.

Did you receive any manual penalty? (check in GWT).

[Nicktaylor1]

Hey,

I fixed the image and no i did not receive a manual penalty.

Thanks!

[KeriMorgret]

Have you made any changes to your site recently that might have affected this? Perhaps put a robots.txt file or robots meta tag in that blocked the page that was ranking for this term? Have you seen traffic for this term drop in Bing and Yahoo at all? Do you have any messages at all in GWT?

Do you have both www and non-www verified in GWT? Maybe the non-www is ranking for this term, and you've only verified the www, which isn't ranking?

[MarieHaynes]

Can you pinpoint when the drop happened?

Have you purchased links in the past?  A number of link networks have been deindexed lately.

It's possible that you could have issues with the Panda algorithm, although don't take this info to the bank as I have only spent about 10 minutes or so looking at your site.  When I did a site: search I see that Google has over 94,000 pages of your site indexed.  The majority of them have what could be called thin content.  I see a lot of definition pages that contain one or two lines of text and also company portfolio pages like this one (http://privateequityfirms.com/portfolio-company/Captain+Tortue+Group) that don't really contain much info.  Having tens of thousands of pages in the index that don't offer significant value to readers can be a sign of low quality and can cause the Panda algorithm to look unfavorably on the entire site.

If this is the case, then the answer could be to noindex all of the definition and portfolio pages.

[Nicktaylor1]

Hey,

First off thanks for the response, We recently added a sitemap to the site. It is an online database so its a custom site map that changes constantly and Yes im seeing a drop on yahoo and Bing. I do not have any messages in GWT. I don't believe we have both, but like I said before it was ranking around 4th before the drastic drop.

I also added another picture showing the drop.

Thanks again for the help.

[Nicktaylor1]

I cant pinpoint the date but it has been in the last 3-4 weeks. We have never purchased links in the past. As for the Panda algorithm we were ranking as high as third for the term with all those slim content pages so i dont think that is it, but ill look more into it.  We have two versions of the site, a paid and example. So it shows 2x the pages when a site: search is done, the HTTP and the HTTPS. That is something we are working on fixing.

Thanks for you help and if you have any other idea what could be causing this please share.

I also added another picture showing the drop, maybe its more helpful