No that should not be an issue...a single privately sent email to customers should not effect your rankings in the google rankings.  Do the due diligence on the provider company that you worked with, use the open site explorer and Webmaster Tools to see if you have new links, if so where did they come.  It sounds like an issue that is not related to the email...but at any rate try to find out why a dropped happened

The problem with a straight up link analysis is that there are other metrics involved in the equation.  Maybe they have great engagement metrics...there is something about the site that makes it look "better" than the other two you listed...maybe it's the bright colors? the first thing you see are "10% Off", "Free", "save $$S" etc.

I am not going to tell you what to do -- I'm just trying to tell you some of the options.

It looks like most of those links are from indexed search results pages from within their site, right?

If that site promotes your actual business then I would err on the side of caution, and investigate as much as you can, but that's me

check this video about the disavow tool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA

Matt Cutts wrote on his blog yesterday:

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice.

I pasted that b/c he wrote "English-US" queries, so you are probably good.

Having said that I would be careful with free directories with anchor text like that -- seems a bit too good to be true.

Did you try writing the directory to be taken down? Did you use the disavow tool in GWT?

Where are the other links coming from? Other Directories? What % of links is that to all of your inbound links?

No I don't have any experience with this, but I noticed SEOMoz also has a vanity URL  -- I tested a few other big companies with local presence to see if any there was any correlation, all had the vanity URL.  How do you get the G+ vanity URL?  I'll do it and see if I experience anything similar

I am not sure I understand what you are referring to exactly, but the footage in the video just looks like the internal link report from Open Site Explorer with the url's ordered alphabetically...

That report doesn't show any errors per se it shows the relative "strength" of each url - what each url links to and what links to it.

Clarify a bit and I'll try to help

I looked a few times and am not sure what you're referring to...you want to attach a screen shot?

Here is Matt Cutts talking about this topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I

The idea  is to avoid spammy looking urls (which all of those do) and focus on URLs that are easy for users to remember and link to while also keeping some sort organizational structure for the site.

eg: example.com/widgets/blue

example.com/widgets/green

Aren't you getting letter grades?

You wrote:

"Other than the one you mentioned what information could really help me?"

--The only thing that pops out at me right away is, and I don't know it you do the copywriting, but the language used is extremely technical.  I understand that you are B2B, but you might add some descriptive text to the product descriptions (for long-tail kw's) and a maybe a bit more sales-oriented text.

Christopher,

I am dealing with a similar issue with my company.  Cody's suggestion might work, but in my case, many time the large retailer has no inbound links to the particular product, just the the power of internal linking via its domain strength making it rank high.

I don't really have a great solution other than targeting long-tail keywords that are easier to rank , and including in the Title Tags and Description something to the effect of In Stock, On Sale, etc.  Then buying Ad Words to try and get attention in a similar fashion

Make it logical...if the referring blog says "awesome deal for x" make it as easy as possible  for the user to find the deal and convert b/c ultimately a sale is better than a link.

I would also add that once the deal expires on that particular page you might want to either redirect the incoming traffic to a similar deal or change the language on the linked page to reflect that it is no longer live.

No I have not noticed any differences on other engines...it seems weird that they would have crawled your site and noticed new reasons to devalue your site.

When you say "some keywords" are they the same keywords affected across engines?

I searched "love messages" in the east coast of the US and you are top of the 2nd page.

Give it a couple of days before making any conclusions about the update.

I'll agree with Karl look into those links, some are fine, just looking at a few of the linking pages -- they look questionable.

Daniel,

To your first point -- for my main keywords (which according to Google have been commercial in intent for the last few years -- i.e. the kw queries bring up only retail options) are now showing reviews from authoritative/journalistic sites.  So for instance, "Men's Jeans" might have used to bring up all retail stores, now it might bring 8 stores (plus ads) and 1 or 2 "Men's Jeans" reviews from GQ or something to that effect.

But having said that, I started noticing this about a week ago...

Yeah I think that I have seen that before.  It looks like a G+ Local page for a company.

Is DIY Kitchens the name of a store in your area, and is "DIY Kitchens" what you searched for?

I have not seen any studies indicating such a thing,

(but my guess is that is that dwell time seems to be such a strong signal of relevance that google would never release that info, I could be totally wrong though)

An idea to improve UX... if you have a page with 2 paragraphs of text, take the average  time it takes for 10 ppl in your office to read it and set the 'bounce rate' accordingly.  Then you'll know if ppl are reading it.

If you have a page with 2000 words, avg. that time, etc.

If visitors bounce too soon, edit the text until your office avg. meets visitor avg.  That would equal relevance right?

Hey Jason,

I have been studying this SEO stuff for the past 10 months ( so I am no expert), and the conclusion I am coming to is that you have to play Google's game (as it seems like you are doing) while constantly looking for other sources of traffic/ customers.

My feeling is that Google wants the commercial landscape to essentially look like a shopping mall -- minimal effort to find what you need (Hmmm.... I need a new DVD player. Oh there's Best Buy! I'll go there, I've heard of that place).  So small business needs to try to differentiate as it does in the real world

But just the eye test on your homepage...(take this with a grain of salt, I'm just trying to help)

i don't like the vertical "Sale" banners they look cheesy, and the moving reviews -- 1) they are too fast/ impossible to read and 2) I always look at Amazon and Zappos, and what do they do? Reviews = Stars.  Also if I'm nitpicking, the product photos on the homepage are a bit on the small side

Also this product:

Denver TCU-203C portable stereo with USB - Pink

is listed as out of stock ...so? what do if I want that? Is there something similar?

Just some thoughts...

I'm with Jesse -- it will take a bit before we can tell anything conclusive, but I'll watch my site, and if I notice anything I will report and add to the discussion.  I don't think it will be anything unexpected if you have been following what Google says and watching the trends within your markets for the past few weeks/months.

But we will see...