Site used to rank first for main keyword - now dropped drastically

[Boogily]

The home page for this site (http://bit.ly/4m1eXy) was ranking between #1 and #3 for the term "Minneapolis criminal defense" as of a few months ago. Now the home page has dropped to #23 for this keyword, and the only changes we've made should be enhancing its ability to rank - through on-page optimization, cleaning up site errors, and ensuring good, quality content. The thing is, the sites who rank ahead of our site have lower domain authority and page authority, and their content, quite frankly, just isn't that great. Some of them are definitely doing SEO but they aren't necessarily targeting "Minneapolis criminal defense" like we are for the search term.

Before our company started doing SEO for this website, they hired a company that generated a large number of backlinks that Google would probably now see as spammy. The previous company also used to direct traffic towards the home page for the keyword "Minneapolis DWI laywer" too - and we have since stopped doing that. So I'm wondering with all of Google's algorithmic updates if this is the reason we're seeing a drop for this term, and if Google's confused. We're pretty confused, too, though, since the sites ranking ahead of us don't seem to be doing squeaky clean SEO by any means.

Advice for us? We're stumped. Would anyone consider Google's disavow tool for the bad links?

[KevinBudzynski]

Check your Google Webmaster Tools for any messages. Yes-use the Disavow tool to eliminate any spammy links and manually shoot an email to the webmaster of the incoming links to remove them. Document the correspondence as evidence that you are making an effort to clean up your backlinks and save in a Google Doc for the future.

[Boogily]

Thank you Kevin. It's always fun to clean up other people's messes.

Are you thinking that's the reason for the tanking?

[KevinBudzynski]

Sounds like it. You said: Before our company started doing SEO for this website, they hired a company that generated a large number of backlinks that Google would probably now see as spammy.

Penguin targeted low quality links (and seemed like you have them). Prune those links out and see what happens. Also, focus on reducing/eliminating any over-optimization (specifically anchor texts/kw stuffing and etc). I'm sure other mozzers will weigh in, but at face-value, that is what I'm guessing.