Rankings drop

[neooptic]

This post is deleted!

[MarkScully]

Hi there,

One of the biggest issues for you right now is the domain name unfortunately -

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html

Exact match domains have been hit pretty hard. When did you notice the large drop in rankings?

Mark

[neooptic]

Hmm, good point. First of all there was a drop when Penguin was introduced, then it recovered, then a massive drop a month or two ago.

Would the exact domain issue affect "anglian windows" though?

[edwardrj]

This is not an EMD issue. There were other updates around the time of the EMD update. What specific date did the traffic fall off?

[MarieHaynes]

Did your drop happen around October 5?  That was when Penguin refreshed.

If it is Penguin then we have not had a lot of stories of recovery yet, even with the disavow tool.  Most likely Penguin needs to refresh again in order for a site to recover.

But, I have found that most webmasters really don't know which links to disavow.  I'm guessing that there are very few actual quality links to your site.  I didn't look at your links but I'm concerned.  The page that you mentioned as a potential "natural" link looks like a site that publishes articles.  You may argue that it's a guest post, but it's not black and white.  Matt Cutts in a recent video recently mentioned that guest posting is ok if you are doing it occasionally and are a great writer who has been sought out by a quality blog.  But if you're doing it for the point of building links in a large scale it's not going to work and could be penalized.

Unfortunately the only links that are truly natural are ones that are earned because someone else decided that your site was worthy of a link.

You've got a pile of backlinks all with the anchor text "anglian windows".  That type of pattern doesn't happen naturally.

Now, with that being said, before you go disavowing more links you need to be sure that your problem really is Penguin.  Panda refreshed on September 27 as well and it affected a lot of sites.  Cutting links and disavowing links will harm your site if this is the case.  Panda is about on page quality.  If you've got information on your site that is duplicated across the web then Panda could be your issue and links have nothing to do with your drop.