Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It's likely because of this DMOZ listing:

http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=rick+case+honda

Sometimes Google grabs the DMOZ title instead of your page title.  To stop that, just insert this code in your head:

(It stands for no open directory project).

Can you pinpoint when the drop happened?

Have you purchased links in the past?  A number of link networks have been deindexed lately.

It's possible that you could have issues with the Panda algorithm, although don't take this info to the bank as I have only spent about 10 minutes or so looking at your site.  When I did a site: search I see that Google has over 94,000 pages of your site indexed.  The majority of them have what could be called thin content.  I see a lot of definition pages that contain one or two lines of text and also company portfolio pages like this one (http://privateequityfirms.com/portfolio-company/Captain+Tortue+Group) that don't really contain much info.  Having tens of thousands of pages in the index that don't offer significant value to readers can be a sign of low quality and can cause the Panda algorithm to look unfavorably on the entire site.

If this is the case, then the answer could be to noindex all of the definition and portfolio pages.

Did your site's overall traffic decline as a result of having this page?

Do you have other pages with copyright infringements on them?

I would definitely remove them.  They're probably a factor in the Penguin algorithm.  If for some reason Penguin hasn't picked up on these links then it probably will in the future as Google is constantly evolving the Penguin algorithm.

If your site is truly affected by Penguin then you're going to need to be really thorough with your disavowing and removing.  Removing just some of the links is not likely to make a huge difference.  The only sites that I have seen recover are ones that have removed and/or disavowed close to 100% of their unnatural links AND also have a good base of natural links.

I really do think that sites with bad links are penalized as opposed to just losing the link juice from those links.  I am working on a site right now that was ranking well for years.  Then they hired an SEO to try to rank even better.  The SEO built a bunch of anchor texted links and on April 24 (Penguin) their rankings plummeted.

No one knows exactly what is necessary for recovery from Penguin.  I think a site can recover if the backlink issue is an easy one to fix.  For example, the SEOMoz article on WPMU recovery showed that they were able to remove a pile of footer anchor texted links and regain their rankings with the Penguin refresh on May 25.  But for most sites, if you've got anchor texted links in a bunch of places, recovery is pretty much impossible.

In doing unnatural links penalty removal I have found that maybe 15% of webmasters respond to my requests to remove links.  For some niches that number is higher.  But in order to recover from Penguin I'm guessing you'll need 85-95% of bad links removed and that is probably not going to happen.

I'd start fresh.  Definitely don't redirect the old domain to the new.

You can noindex all of the content on the old domain and reuse it on the new domain.  It may help to go into webmaster tools for the old domain and ask Google to remove the old urls from the index.

Of course, you'll be starting fresh and have to earn good quality backlinks. Good luck!

It's a known bug that the disavow tool does not always give you a confirmation message after you submit.  Around the 6:50 mark of this Webmaster Central Hangout John Mueller confirms this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoQxHeD-jZM

As Dr. Pete said, as long as you see that your file is in place, you just need to trust that the tool is working.  When you submit, you'll see a notification within the disavow tool that says, "You have successfully submitted a file with xxx domains and xx urls" to show you that your file has indeed been submitted.

A reconsideration request will not help if there is no manual warning in WMT. Penguin is algorithmic.

It really depends on what you mean by "take effect".  As soon as you submit the disavow, Google starts applying an invisible nofollow tag to each link that you have in that file as they crawl the web.  However, in some cases, it can take 6 months or more for all of the links to get crawled.

Will you see a change in rankings after you file a disavow?  I have seen some sites where within 24-48 hours there is an improvement which is always nice.  However, if you were affected by the Penguin algorithm then you won't see any improvement until Google refreshes Penguin which could be any day now or even months from now.  AND, in order to see improvement you have to have good links present.  If your previous rankings were there because of links that are now deemed unnatural, then there may be no improvement at all either now or when Penguin refreshes.

Mark's got a great answer.  I just wanted to add that in my experience with looking at sites that have been penalized in one way or another, the links reported in OSE are usually quite a bit smaller than what is available from webmaster tools.  OSE does a decent job, but they don't get all of the links.

It's not possible to remove a Penguin issue in 3 days even if you have managed to get Google to crawl and disavow all of the links on your disavow file.  This is because you won't be able to escape Penguin until Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm.  AND...in order to see a dramatic recovery like the Link Detox graph shows, you'd have to have a site that has a really good base of good links underneath the low quality links.  Most sites with Penguin issues will not see a dramatic recovery...and if they do, again, it would almost always be on the date of a Penguin refresh.

However, the Link Detox tool is describing a manual penalty, not Penguin.  (However, they're a bit misleading saying it "speeds up recovery from a Google Penalty".  Officially Google will tell you that Penguin is not a penalty, but simply an algorithmic change, but most webmasters would tell you that Penguin is a penalty.)

If it's a manual penalty, then you don't need to have the links in your disavow file crawled in order to lift your penalty and if this is the case then the "boost" that they are talking about won't really help get a penalty lifted. Within 24 hours of filing your disavow, the webspam team is able to see what is in the file.  When they review your request for reconsideration, they check to see if you have disavowed the right links.  It doesn't matter if those links have not been visited and thus disavowed yet.

Is it possible to lift a manual penalty in 3 days like Link Detox's website suggests?  Yes.  I've had it done.  We once filed for reconsideration and three days later we had a response saying that our penalty was revoked.  But, out of the hundreds of requests that I have filed, I've only ever once had Google respond that quickly.  Most requests are taking 4 weeks to get a response back right now.  Is it possible to have such a dramatic recovery as the graph shows?  Yes, if you have a sitewide manual penalty and your penalty gets lifted, AND you have a good base of natural links then some sites can show a dramatic improvement.  But, again, it has nothing to do with getting your disavowed links crawled faster.

I think that tools like Link Detox can have some value in helping site owners (but as I have always said, they don't replace the need for a manual audit.)  But, I have to say that I am concerned about the way that they're marketing this tool.  I think there could be some value, if you have a Penguin hit site, in getting your disavowed links crawled faster.  It's conceivably possible that if you didn't, then Penguin could refresh and your disavowed urls have not been visited and therefore are not disavowed.  But, the way that they've marketed it it sounds like any site that uses this tool can have top rankings again within 3 days of using it and that's quite misleading.

Had you gone a while without any on page changes?  Sometimes if Google sees that a page has remained the same for a while they'll decrease the crawl frequency.

Have you made any changes to your robots.txt?  You've got a lot of things disallowed...this could certainly inhibit a crawl.

Have your rankings changed?

My guess is that this is just normal and nothing to worry about.

Provided that your press releases are valid press releases that you would have published even if the links were all nofollowed and had no SEO value, then you shouldn't need to be concerned.  Stay away from using keyword rich anchor text and you'll be fine even if some get republished with followed links.

There was a Panda update on Aug 20, so you definitely could have been affected around that time.  Generally, there are Panda updates about once a month (usually every 4-6 weeks).  If you've cleaned up well, then when there is another update (perhaps end of September) you should recover.

Be sure to have a good look for duplicate content issues and any pages with duplicate content on it as well.

It's a little bit strange that Bing and Yahoo dropped as well....makes me wonder if there was something other than Panda going on.  Check out this article for other reasons for your traffic to drop.

Good luck!

I ignore these links when I'm doing a backlink audit.  If you've got a penalty, I would look elsewhere for culprits.  There's no harm in disavowing mrwhatis, but my guess is that Google knows that these are not self made links and just ignores them too.

If you have a manual penalty you will have a warning in your Webmaster tools.

Now, if a website didn't have webmaster tools, you could set it up and then file a reconsideration request.  If there was no manual warning to start with you will get a notice from Google telling you so.

However, when you ask for a reconsideration request you are opening yourself up to potentially have a manual review from Google.  So if you're not squeaky clean you could end up attracting yourself a manual penalty on top of the algorithmic issues you have.

As far as diagnosing Penguin, here is some information on how to diagnose Penguin, but it's not always a simple diagnosis.

Hi Marek,

I have a few thoughts.  It's odd that you received a message and then when you filed for reconsideration you were told there was no penalty.  Back in June of 2013 any site could file for reconsideration.  But, now, you can only do so if you actually have a manual penalty.  Otherwise, no "request review" button is visible.

John Mueller recently said in a hangout that if the manual spam actions viewer shows no penalty then you can be certain that there is no manual penalty.  So, it's unlikely that there is still a manual penalty there and you just don't have access to see it.  Still, one thing you could do is contact John Mueller through Google+ and ask if he could have the webspam team take a look.  You may not get a reply, but if there has been some kind of error then it should come to light.

My guess though is that you are probably suffering under EITHER the Penguin or the Panda algorithm or possibly both.  You've definitely got unnatural links such as this one: http://www.house2homefurniture.com/ which make Penguin a possibility.  A lot of e-commerce sites were affected by Panda.  A quick site:search shows a large number of pages in the Google index.  Are they all adding unique, quality content?

It's probably a good idea to go through your organi bc traffic and see if you can pinpoint the day of your drop and see if it coincides with the date of a known Penguin or Panda refresh.  http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Do theses domains have links pointing to them?  If not, 301ing them to your domain won't have any SEO benefit.  There could be a traffic benefit if any of these urls get type in traffic.

If the domains had backlinks then yes, doing a 301 redirect will pass the majority of the link equity on to the main domain.

Why do you want to remove the file?  Are you concerned that you may have disavowed links that you shouldn't have?

When you remove the file, then as Google recrawls each of the sites that were listed in your file, they will re-avow them which means that they will once again start to give you the link equity that comes from that link.  If it's a good link then you'll regain some good link equity.  (But then this begs the question of why you would disavow it to start with.)  If it's an unnatural link then at first what will likely happen is nothing as Google will not give you any benefit for this type of link.  But, if you've got enough unnatural links then the next time that Google runs the Penguin algorithm your site will look less trustworthy when it comes to links and you could see a drop in rankings.

It's complicated though.  If you are already under the effects of Penguin and you filed a disavow and then you removed your disavow then really nothing would happen.

I wouldn't recommend removing your disavow file unless you feel that you have accidentally disavowed links that are good ones.  If you're not sure if you've done that then you should consider having someone review your links for you and give you an idea of which ones should be disavowed.

The page that you have linked to has 3 sentences of text.  When I search Google for "Appartementen Meckyheim" it looks like there is a lot of competition.  3 sentence of text is not going to add a lot fo quality to a page.

But, I do think there is more than just a poor ranking issue.  I searched through 6 pages and didn't see your page at all.  It's still in the index, but it's not ranking.

Also, I'm concerned that the Trail Map and Accessibility pages may look like duplicated content to Google.  They really can only evaluate what they can crawl, so this page likely looks the same on every listing you have in Google's eyes.

I am suspicious that there may have been a Panda update in the last few days.  Sometimes Google doesn't announce them right away.

Thin content like you have shown us as well as duplicate content are what Panda goes after.

I'm guessing that you ranked well until the Panda filter detected thin and duplicate content. It's possible that removing the duplicated pages will be enough but I'm suspicious that you'll need to have substantially more content such as a thorough review of each place in order to get back to ranking again.

If I am right and there was a Panda update then you may not see recovery after beefing the content up until Panda runs again.

Do you have a manual penalty or is it Penguin that you are trying to escape?

If it's Penguin it's debatable whether you even need to remove links or whether disavowing is just as good.  My current advice is to remove what you can easily remove and then disavow the rest. Of course, if you have a manual penalty then you've got to make efforts to remove every bad link.

Regarding the percentage of links that got removed that really varies depending on the type of links you have.  For the link removals that I have done for manual penalties, I rarely succeed in getting more than 30% of the bad links removed.  I'd say we're usually in the 10-15% range and we've even had penalties revoked after only removing 5% of the bad links.  For manual penalties what Google wants to see is that you've put good effort into trying.

In this webmaster central hangout at 41:20 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYooFjmx5c&list=UUthrUiuJUtFSXBUp48D8bAA&index=2) John Mueller was asked if disavowing was just as good as removing in regards to Penguin. He said, "From a theoretical point of view, using the disavow tool is enough...from a practical point of view it almost always makes sense to still delete those links as much as possible."

And in this hangout at 13:48 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaT0aie9Wqk when asked about disavowing vs removing, John says, "That's pretty much the same with regards to an algorithm...Essentially if you can't have a link removed then putting it in a disavow file is pretty much equivalent."