Seo results are down. Is my "all in one seo pack" to blame?

[Noobtraveler]

My website www.noobtraveler.com has shown a dip of 40% since Penguin's last update in November. I also transferred hosting at time, but I was wondering if I'm over optimizing with the all in one seo pack.

I would appreciate it if someone could do a quick sweep and share their thoughts.

Thanks!

[AU-SEO]

Hi Geoff,

Id start by doing a website crawl and utilizing SEOmozs excellent toolset: http://www.seomoz.org/tools. Your questions is a rather general: will you do an audit of my site issue. Which many of the people on this board do for livings. You are better off asking specific questions.  As people can answer those and best practice recs.

The All-in-one SEO pack has limitations but is overall usually pretty decent for a basic WordPress website with low to medium competition thresholds.

If you believe you were hit by penguin I would recommend checking your backlink profile and disavowing any nefarious links.

-Phil

[ahockley]

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is pretty good and used quite widely among WordPress-based websites.  It focuses on on-site optimization including keywords/density, appropriate linking, canonical URLs, and the like.

Use of this plugin should not cause a 40% drop in traffic (you didn't say what you mean by a "dip", but I assume you mean traffic or search traffic).

Such a significant drop in traffic after the Penguin update is more likely to be related to what Google is perceiving as non-organic backlinks, including paid links or link exchanges.  If you engaged in such practices, it would be best to work on removing those backlinks, including the link disavowal tool if you can't have them removed.

[MattAntonino]

You have a huge amount of high DA links, specifically from boardingarea, hyatt blogs and appsumo.  You need to build a better link profile, not focus so much on 3 sites with high DA, and get links more naturally as often as possible.  Almost every link on your OSE is a "controlled" link - blog comments, profiles, appsumo pages, etc.

These links are bad by themselves - they're actually good.  But because they're such a high percentage of what you have as a whole, it can look to Google like you're not really all that popular except to 3 sites.

You have 1850 links on OSE from 46 domains - about 35 links per domain, a LOT.  Also, nearly 100% of your anchor text is branded.  That tells me you're controlling it. If I can see you're controlling the anchor text, Google can see it.  Again, diversity is best.

202 of your 1850 links are nofollow, 1650 are dofollow.  As before, a high ratio of nofollow signals spam or controlled link building.  Natural nofollow profiles have 5-10% nofollow ratios, yours is 16% which is a touch high.

So I would start with your actual link profile.  It's not likely AIOSEO unless you're doubling up on titles and meta, you should be ok.

Also, when you pin things, don't use the non-www version of your site.  Several of your pins have "http://noobtraveler.com" instead of www-noobtraveler.com  I would be as consistent as possible on that particular issue.