Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I looked at your backlinks and honestly, you should consider starting over with a new url. Just my opinion but I didn't see one actual link worth keeping and lots of spammy links. And you should consider getting some professional help and see what their recommendation would be.

I think that would be your most expedient solution.

Best,

Submitting a disavow list to Google will not eliminate the links. It is a request for Google to ignore the links and has been described as Google will see the link as "nofollow". It is fine that you are disavowing Domains! Exact links are not required and in the case of directories or scrapers, it's a good idea to disavow at the domain level in case more links "pop up". One thing to note is when you say you submitted 3 lists, they should be cumulative. When adding links to your disavow list you should append the list keeping the previous links in the list.

Also assuming you are disavowing because you are concerned about your rankings in Google. When you say you disavowed "all links", I hope you meant all bad links!

Except that the bad links may have been disavowed in their GWMT.

Thanks Jeff!

Are there duplicate content concerns? Since a lot of this stuff is boilerplate?

We also saw an increase in traffic and rankings around 10/17 and were feeling pretty cocky. One tracked keyword jumped from 7 to 1 and in the last 3 days has come down to 5. Traffic also reduced and I think it coincides with the 3 day thing Dennis mentioned. I just attributed it to the Penguin update "settling". But now Dennis makes me want to do better on page!

Impressions are up looking prior to 10/17 so I think that is a good thing overall. Have not had any similar drops on social or Yahoo/Bing.

I think it will be a taxonomy issue. Go to your Wordpress dashboard and seo (Yoast). Click on "Tiles and Metas" and make sure meta robots noindex, follow is checked for categories and tags. Woo Commerce probably creates additional taxonomies which need to be set the same. Also click on "other" and set author archives and date archives disable and noindex, follow. I see author archives "Yossil" is creating duplicate pages. You need to learn the Yoast settings I think and you will get rid of these duplicate pages. It is not straight forward by any means, but worth the time.

First check GWMT and see if you have received  a Manual Penalty. You cannot file a reconsideration request if you have not received a Manual Penalty. I don't think you have since using the operator site:http://www.aquaspresso.co.za/ you show up indexed for 5240 pages. That seems like there may be some duplicate content Panda issue. Wordpress may be causing duplicates with incorrect category/tag settings. I see you have Yoast and this is a good way to manage this. Also Woo Commerce and I think Yoast has a plugin specific to Woo Commerce. Hoping someone with more knowledge chimes in, but 5250 pages seems odd.

Under the performance tab and  general settings check to see if debug mode is checked. Not that I am expert on this plugin! It is very complex.

Best!

I also noticed there appears to be a W3TC debug file on the home page that is pretty big. Is it possible this plugin is misconfigured and causing issues?

Hi Sam. I would advise you to move on with safer SEO in any case! As Chappers states, Google won't notify you of algorithmic penalties. If changes in rankings/traffic coincide with know algorithm updates, that is your clue. Things may change a bit in the days to come as things settle but might as well clean up those backlinks now! Hopefully the next refresh will not take so long.

Sorry!

Well if you believe you have an algorithmic penalty then I'd say yes. Otherwise a proactive disavow is controversial but generally seems to be thought to be fine. Of course it can effect rankings so you need to vet the links carefully. It is also possible that although you don't have a manual penalty now, you might in the future. So it is a good practice to keep the records of the removal request emails in case you will have to respond to a manual penalty. There are some great tools out there to help like RMOOV which I have used successfully.

But I'd get on that disavow quickly if I were suffering from a Penguin thing since an update could come soon.

Also it's important to know if the links were paid for or the results of a previous "SEO" company. In that case I would definitely want to keep a record of the removal emails, just in case.

Best

I have seen links reported in GWT that when I clicked on were not there. I like to look at the page source and search for the link just to see if it might be hidden. But all I can guess is the GWT data is old and the link is no longer valid. Recently I read this article by Marie Haynes http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2374406/Penguin-Recovery-Should-You-Be-Removing-Links-or-Just-Disavowing   and asked her in the comments what she thought about proactive disavow. Take a look but basically she says if you have no history of shady spammy links, you have nothing to worry about. But please read her words as she is very respected in this area.

Well if the site is new and you are not greatly tied to it in any way, I'd start over. Not that you can't recover but it can take quite a while and will be some work. You have come to right place to learn though and that is to your credit! Check out some of the beginner guides here:  http://moz.com/learn/seo

Wordpress is great and I am a big fan of Genesis and the Studiopress themes. Get a good host like WP Engine or Websynthesis just to name a couple. But most of all read in this forum.

Welcome and good luck!

Also in addition to what Gazzerman sees, looks like the WP template files that probably came as a demo with the theme are still there and indexed with the WP Latin boilerplate. This needs to be cleaned up. Use the site: operator in Google search and you will see them. I don't mean to be blunt but Backlinks look pretty spammy to me. If you paid for links like a lot of the comment spam and profile spam, you need to clean those up as well.

Best,

Interesting. I didn't know position was an SEO factor for content but can see it makes sense.

Thanks again for sharing!

Curious what you meant by "Boiler Plate"? Was this content duplicated elsewhere on your site or the web?

Thanks for posting your experiences.

That's highly unlikely. Sure you can capture an ip and see who it belongs to but that's a real stretch. If someone is at their desk behind the corporate firewall and you get the ip belonging to a company you have no way of knowing who in that company was on your site.

Why is that valuable anyway? If they are interested they will contact you. Your efforts would be better spent closing them while they are on your site with good copy. Move on from these guys with their promises or I fear you will regret it.

Best.

You might take a look at this thread which is similar to your query:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-find-a-good-ppc-firm

Best!

Nice find EGOL.

I have a general rule if they are cold calling me, I won't do business with them. There are tons of these scams out there using spyfu to generate leads among other methods. On the other hand Moz has a list of recommended service providers yo can check out:

http://moz.com/community/recommended

As for Multiview Run Away!