Has this site been a victim of negative seo?

[Digirank]

The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried:

1. Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links
2. Removed any internal Duplicate Content
3. Removed any broken links
4. Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality
5. No-Followed all outbound links
6. Added any missing title tags
7. changed hosting
8. Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally

The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site -  just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.

[MonicaOConnor]

There seems to be a lot to your question. I am going to try to start at the bottom and work my way up.

• If another domain is copying your text and embedding it in your site without consent I would contact the copyright department where your server is hosted. The solution might take some time but they should be able to get your content off of another site. I know that GoDaddy helped us with this problem a few months ago. One of our competitors IFramed our website and used it as their own for a couple of days.

• The content on the site seems to be be pretty solid. There are a few pages that are lacking content and seem to be pretty thin. I suggest beefing up the landing pages a little bit and working on your title tags. It seems unclear which keyterms you are targeting from looking at the source code. There seems to be a lack of consistency on page with repetition of keyterms and using them in the URL, title tags and content. I would suggest a little bit more research on the keyterms to make sure the ones that are being targeted get a good amount of search traffic. I would maybe try to target some not so competitive terms just to get something from your sight to the front page to help your impression share increase.

• When you say you disavowed links, was that because of a penalty? If so you might not start to see improvement if those changes weren't good enough for Google to remove the effects of that penalty. If it were a result of a Penguin update you could have been suffering the effects of a negative penalty. Now that another update in process you might start seeing better results. If not, that means more work on the link profile needs to be done.

• When you say you no followed all outbound links, does that mean that any link on your website is a no follow? I am not 100% sure here, but I don't believe that is really best practice. I might reconsider that strategy. Too many no follow links don't look good to Google.

These are just some things that I can suggest briefly looking through the site. I hope that helps.

[NowHealth]

Check Google Webmaster tools if you actually got a manual penalty, and what their reason was/is.