Penguin 3.0 hit caused by Pinterest?

[WePlann]

I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. My URL is: http://www.weplann.comHello there,Since 10/24 we've seen a critical impact in organic results in our site. At first, only taking a look at the date of when it all started made us think about a Penguin 3.0 hit and then we went to take a look at our linking data to find we had more than 14,000 links from Pinterest (significantly more than any other source). Then, another thing that made us think about that dramatic organic drop is the anchor text: an exact match (www.weplann.com) is at #1 in our anchor text ranking but we're not 100% sure if this could affect our organic results because of the Penguin update.So our questions are:- A lot of Pinterest links could affect dramatically our organic results (understanding that Google may find that huge difference between linking sources as a bad practice)?- The anchor text exact match could really affect our ranking? If none of this points could cause that drop, then what would be causing it? We're sure it has to do with the Penguin update.Thank you very much in advance for your help!!

[MonicaOConnor]

To my knowledge, Pinterest is a very high quality linking source. Having several links back and forth should mean that you have an equal amount of images, products and/or pages. No matter how good the source is, when you over use something it doesn't look natural.

From what I understand, Penguin 3.0 really targeted linking "neighborhoods". This means that you could see an effect because of link associations that your linking sources have. That could be Pinterest, but my gut tells me that it is probably some other source. These social media sites are pretty safe and usually have ways to prevent bad associations.

Have you used Open Site Explorer to compare what you have in GWT? I would just take a look and see what the quality of your links are and if there is any low hanging fruit you should disavow. You want to find high quality linking sources, these are the safest. I would try to eliminate links from low ranking domains with not a lot of root links behind them.

You might be suffering the effects of someone else's bad links. Have you received any manual notices in GWT?