Site rankings down

[stephenshone]

Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases.

Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now.

Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board.

We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'.  Can anyone please shed any light on this?

Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that.  We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5.  We've lost out with the more generic terms.

In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all.  Are those likely to be the issue?  I'm guessing so.  It's hard to know which to get rid of though!  Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+.  The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that.  I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly.

Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com

Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here.  Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories?  Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes!  If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now!

Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice.

Best Regards,

Stephen

[jesse-landry]

Hmmm... glancing briefly at your link profile I'm not sure I could classify this as a Penguin Penalty. Especially with the SERPs dropping back in April. I understand it got worse post-penguin but still... Your link profile isn't too deep and you don't have thousands of weird bizarro-links coming in. Relevant blog commenting and social media will definitely not affect your site negatively.

There's a chance you just need to pick up your SEO efforts. Maybe the algo updates bumped up other sites that have been gaining more links than you recently or something of the sort. I'm not sure but I feel like you just need to get back on top of your link building efforts in a truly white-hat fashion and see what happens.

Sorry I'm not sure I'm being very helpful here.

[stephenshone]

Thanks for your response, much appreciated.  I have thought along those lines, now I'm a little unsure.

I'd be happy if it wasn't a penalty, but I'm not sure.  I downloaded the list from Google Webmaster Tools and there are quite a lot of directories there - most I don't remember building which is odd but possible over the years.

I've deleted a videogame forum profile I'm a member of I had which linked to my site, I'm looking at things like that.

I did think similar about other sites gaining links, but so many at once is odd.  And there are now sites above us with zero links and hardly any on-page SEO, and hastily cobbled together pages with exact match domains - one of which if you do a Google search for 'nuts and bolts' is called 'bolts-nuts-washers', I won't link to them fully. That gives a good example, complete with flashing text(!).  Very frustrating!

Google and SEOMOZ tell me I have 12 pages with duplicate titles and 80 with duplicate meta descriptions.  I'll remove those also, other than that I'm not sure whether to start disavowing links.

Any ideas where I go from here?  Any help appreciated!

Best Regards,

Stephen

[jesse-landry]

I'm still thinking about this.. I'd continue building links myself and see what happens.

The one thing I definitely wouldn't do is start disavowing. Make an attempt to remove the links yourself by contacting webmasters before doing this. And then still be sure you actually have been penalized before using the disavow tool. That thing makes me nervous...

[stephenshone]

Hi Jesse, thanks for your response.

Your advice is sensible, and I will keep building links with relevant sites.  I've read a bit about disavowing now and I'm not sure that's the answer either.

What confuses me though is sites have leapfrogged us who have very few links and little on-page optimisation.  I've optimised for 'nuts and bolts' - title, h1 tags, body text - hopefully without going overboard.  Some of the sites above us are simply not relevant / have no links.  So is linkbuilding still the answer?

Would you get rid of the dropdown navigation?  With that, every page has 107 internal links.  Ditching the dropdown would mean 2 clicks to get to the item you want rather than 1, but I don't think that's too bad.  For example, it'd be 'Bolts and Setscrews > BSF Bolts'.  I even had static pages rather than dynamic to help with SEO, and that's some major upkeep when I want to make changes!  I think I'm going to move to a responsive design, I've been experimenting with other sites.

Best Regards,

Stephen

[stephenshone]

Our rankings on the two main keywords have recovered slightly.  We've gone from page 5 to page 3 on 'nuts and bolts', and are page 2 on 'bolts and nuts'.

I think what's happened is that, rather than us being penalised directly, sites that link to us have been penalised, resulting in a knock on effect.  Does this sound reasonable?  I don't think we'd be page 2 on such a competitive term if we had been penalised.

I've been slowly building relevant links with prospective customers (ie a few classic car sites have linked to us, our old imperial bolts are very useful for them) and kept up a very basic social media profile - just the odd blog post and sharing on Facebook and Twitter.

Regarding links, looking through my link profile

<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a>

we do have links from directories that don't look fantastic, more are shown in Webmaster Tools than are listed here.  Some of the directories no longer seem to exist, I take it I don't need to do anything and Google will catch up in those cases.  For the others, should I attempt to remove (or disavow) all links with names like best-directory etc? Are most directories bad these days?  Or should I just concentrate on building better links?

Again, any advice is greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,

Stephen