Mysterious drop of website ranking in google

[grojoh]

Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice.

My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links).

Yesterday night (May 15th)  the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1.

Here are some more details:

• I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected.
• The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time.
• site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages
• Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all. 
  I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools.
• I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking. 
  To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com.
• Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+
• No malware on website
• I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones).
• I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty.

It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!?

I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com.

What do you think about it and what shall I do?

Thank you so much for any help!

[SteveOllington]

Did you always have as many links going out of each page? There's quite a few... plus that spammy content, whilst I hate to say it, might have provided the longtail exact matches you were ranking for. Maybe get those keywords back in to their pages in a non-spammy way?

There's no rel="canonical" tags which would help if it is down to dupe issues.

Also, you're cannibalising a lot with the keywords... not just content and links but for a quick demo look at your page titles, the same keywords cropping up in a few of them.

[MSWD]

Not much value on your city pages.  Really, makes you wonder if you are selling a tourist destination or an ac company.  The two just don't mesh to me.

I would really work at the content on the city pages.

http://kobiecomplete.com/air-conditioning-service-area/ac-repair-sarasota/

Also you might consider using references from the city you are targeting on the city page.  Keep it super targeted.  This one has a reference from different city.

[grojoh]

I appreciate your honest response Steve!

@many links: I will get rid of some links for instance the repeated link to the city pages - correct or? Do you think I should also remove some links in the footer?

@spammy content: Did you think that all content was spammy or certain content (e.g. city pages, homepage, recent posts etc.)? Believe me, it was much much worse before. I am trying to improve...

@rel="canonical": Currently a WordPress plugin already adds the rel="canoncial" tags to the header (). Or do you mean I should have a common canonical tag for all the city pages? But then they would not rank any longer separately.

The weird part is that I didn't really change these things in the last few days, google had these pages in its index and they were ranking pretty okay.

So you don't think that the slightly older copy of the website on brightsidewg.com was the main issue? Because brightsidewg.com started to show up roughly (- ~10 ranks) were kobiecomplete.com was showing up.

Thank you so much!

[grojoh]

Thank you for your response Kathy!

You got a good point with the tourist destination vs. ac company. Even though I was aware of it I decided to do such a mix because I did not know how to target 9 locations with the same keywords and at least some unique content. Actually the bounce rate on the city pages was around page average. But I will work more on the content. Thx!

@references: Good Advise! But which references did you mean on the Sarasota page? Siesta Key Beach is in Sarasota (if you meant that one).

But I still think the city pages might not the reason for the sudden drop yesterday night.

Do you think brightsidewg.com was maybe the issue? If so shall I submit the website for reconsideration and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace (brightsidewg.com)?

[SteveOllington]

Sorry Johannes I think I confused matters... I didn't mean there is spammy content now, I mean the spammy content that you removed. I'll be cursed for saying it but it's quite possible some of that spammy stuff was working if there were exact matches in there then which aren't now. Google isn't perfect yet so unfortunately some spam does still work (for now) though it will likely hold risks too. My suggestion with that was to look at the spam that was removed and figure out how to incorporate some of it back into the site in a non-spammy way.

With regards to the link numbers, yes if it was me I think I'd remove at least some of those footer links too.

My mistake with the rel canonical, I didn't spot it but just noticed it was a bit lower down.

The duplication could well be the issue, but if that's the case and the dupe is no longer there then it should sort itself out pretty quickly.