Website/SEO Audit Needed

[AHH888]

We've been outsourcing our link building to India for the past 3 years and the results were pretty good up until beginning of this year. What they were essentially doing is putting links into directories, a few per month, and posting a few articles per month. Out of our top 10 keywords, 8 got into top 10. Then something happened around Jan 1 last year, our ranking started dropping, falling out of the top 50, before settling around 20-30ish. We disavowed most of the low quality links since then.

Also, very odd, all the top ranking competitors all fell (including me) and were replaced by less "specialized" companies who sold a broad range of products (for example: all parts of the car, rather than someone who just focused on mufflers). Theres also other differences but again I can't put a finger on it.

I'd like to find someone who can do a detailed audit of our site, and our competitors, what happened to cause the drop, and why the new top positions sites are ranked high. And I really don't have time to do an audit myself. Our site is American Hospitality Furniture dot com. Any feed back would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[WesleySmits]

Well, the link building done in India is probably the reason. Directory links are not the way to go and in most cases the articles in which your brand gets linked from are bad quality articles on bad quality domains.
This form of link building is an old SEO 'trick' which is considered to be black-hat SEO nowadays.

I would assume that you got penalized by Google for having a unnatural link profile. You can read more information on that in this article. I took a really quick look at your site and couldn't find any on-page issues which would trigger such a ranking drop and i'm fairly certain it's in the link profile.

If you could verify that your link-profile is fine and the issue comes from something else i could do a more detailed site audit.

Hope my response will be useful to your. If you have any questions left please let me know.

[AHH888]

Hi Wesley, according to the article you sent, I do not believe I was hit with the unnatural link penalty because I never saw any notification in webmaster tools. It seems more like a algorithmic update. I'm not sure if you are able to tell anything via open site explorer, or whatever other methods... Your thoughts?

[WesleySmits]

Could you provide me with some keywords where you dropped in ranking? (If you don't feel comfortable sharing it here you can send me a private message.)