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Check Google Webmaster tools if you actually got a manual penalty, and what their reason was/is.

Also make sure that no one in WMT has checked the box to remove the site from Google's index. Doing so will usually result in a warning, so it's unlikely you wouldn't have seen it. The only thing you mentioned that I'd look into more would be the hosting change, but that impact should have been more or less immediate. Are you receiving any organic traffic from Google? A huge drop could mean a lot of things, but 0 traffic usually means a technical issue is to blame. If you've just lost most of your traffic, it's possible that it's a penalty or algorithm adjustment of some sort. There are a few directory links that I'd be concerned about, and I'd disavow any questionable sites with sitewide links (I saw at least one). It could also be a Panda or a "Payday" adjustment. Check the algorithm history and see if it aligns with your drop in traffic: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Take a look at the pages that are indexed. Chances are that since it is a cart or CMS-based site, you just need to use robots.txt to block out some areas you don't want indexed. You also need to look at your indexed pages, to see if any of them are duplicates, meaning you have 2 or more url's that display the same content. "It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? " Could be that your cms or cart is not forwarding all the pages to the canonical version. Again, check to see if you can access multiple versions of the same page. Ecom and CMS sites always have these types of errors if you dont keep a close eye on the URL's since they are database driven, vs static HTML. Look for www or non-www versions of pages, url's with and without index.php, etc. Once you target what the offending url's are, use redirects to forward them to the proper and search engine friendly version.

Hi Karen, As you mentioned its hard to work Google out so you have to sometime use your best guess.  Logically I would agree a mix of anchor text, and keywords could hep that page. The other way you could look at it was the keyword volume for each term and then target those terms presumably better than the likes you asda etc. IT also comes back a little to what Google interprets the terms for, I would recommend looking into the search volume between the two. Good luck!

Yes, I noticed that big domains (on the basis of popularity and brand awareness among the public) have an enormous advantage in the SERPs.  I think that they generally deserve it. Where they don't deserve it is when they have a single product with a skimpy description but they outrank websites where the entire domain is dedicated to information about that product category and they have offer many different products of that type and all of the supplies and accessories. Google seems to be very poor at identifying topic-level depth and expertise.

Hey Phil, Which one is the one from Wistia? Do you have a link? Does that one automatically submit the video sitemap on Google Webmaster tools?

Hmmm... that is strange, especially if you haven't pushed any link-building to that section. Unfortunately, the duplicate content aspects are really tough to speak to without seeing the site/page. One easy spot-check I do is to take the page title of the section, let's say it's "Section Title" and search the index within your site, such as: site:example.com intitle:"Section Title" That will show you if copies are being indexed, and it's a really easy place to start.

The best directories in my opinion are directories focused in your niche. For example if your website is about web design services, I would look for web design directories. You might search for something like allintitle:web design services directory

This is perfect thank you. Exactly what I was looking for!