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It's quite a big drop, but hard to judge whether or not it is due to a penalty.

The issue could be that you haven't made changes to the website, as in adding new and fresh content. You don't seem to have a blog and these days it is all about adding new and fresh content to your website to keep things up to date with Google. Adding a blog with a daily short post about how important it is to repair your fridge, or how often your dishwasher breaks down etc, could not only help bring in relevant search engine traffic, but also help rank for your other static pages that are unchanged as you are more commonly giving Google and other search engines a ping.

Your sitemap (http://applianceassistant.com/sitemap.xml) also says that all your pages are changing daily. This means that when you submit it, Google is expecting to see a daily change, but obviously that is not happening. I would recommend changing that, and having daily/hourly for the new blog posts. There are some plugins you can use.

Also, where you link to pages for support information on brands such as Samsung etc, you should create those pages on your own website and have it as "Samsung Recall information" or something similar to bring in that extra traffic, and have the information and tips etc provided in your own words.

Are you running a wordpress website or another Content Management system?

If so, you can use an SEO plugin to easily add meta descriptions to pages. If you run a simple HTML website, you can add the meta description, as shown on this Moz page:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

Title elements being too long simply means you need to shorten your title so that the end is not missing from Google search results. Keep your titles short and too the point and maybe remove the site title if needed.

Duplicate page title will list the pages on your site that have the same title as another page on your site. Simply change those and ensure all pages (URLs) have a different page title.

It doesn't really matter as long as it is high authority sites. Getting your news quoted by another major news site is always a big plus. We once got quoted on Yahoo which not only brought us a buttload of traffic, but also gave us a solid link back which boosted our authority.

With news sites, its all about the content, and I have to say with 3 editors, you should be popping out a lot more than 5 articles. That's a pretty low amount for a news site. I can work alone for an hour a day and do more than that.

On a side note, if you'd like to write a summary of a news story in 150 words, and submit it to me, I can put this on the relevant SearchBuzz Media website that I run, and have you listed as the original source - it's a completely genuine link back. Email me if interested - info@searchbuzzmedia.com

is it in Webmaster tools or another link checking tool? Try using another tool to check for these errors with a new scan of your site's pages. If the page is genuinely inaccessible then I wouldn't worry about it and you should be able to mark it as fixed in your webmaster tools account.

In my experience it varies massively, but sometimes our titles have helped us secure massive traffic for breaking news etc.

The classic "How to" is a perfect example, because it matches the query that people are physically typing into search engines.

Both your titles are fine for a homepage, but it's the pages within that you'd focus on those keywords, such as Red Lollipops, or How to make your own lollipops etc etc, stuff people are typing with their fingers on those keyboards. That's what you should focus on. The homepage in my opinion can have whatever title as long as you are a multi-page website with regular content being added. ie, mashable just have Mashable.

So use open site explorer, download a CSV file to excel and see which sites are giving you these 11k links, and see if they are low quality or not.

Your title is too spammy, shorten it.

Have a much higher quality image for the slideshow on the homepage, and this can be something assignment related to help bring in image search traffic also.

It's very hard to say how long it takes to reach the first page of Google, but there are many things you can do in order to boost that timeframe, such as regularly creating original and fresh content, ideally on a daily basis through the means of a blog or new pages.

Ensure your sitemap (http://www.makemyassignments.com/sitemap.xml) is submitted to Webmaster Tools and you are keeping an eye on it for any errors with crawling etc.

I notice you are giving people the opportunity to purchase through you also, so in that case I would recommend you switch your site to https mode instead of http. This was recently discovered to be a ranking factor:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Hi, it is hard to say without knowing the types of sites that these links are coming from.

Is it low quality blogs with trackbacks and comment spam? If so, you can disable comments and trackbacks on your site by using a plugin.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments/

If they are links that you have built up yourself, ie through directories etc, then you need to manually rid these, and this can be done by creating a disavow file and then submitting that to Google.

As this is an aged domain as you noted, there is always a chance to make a decent recovery and strive in the future.

You need to ensure that all issues are taken care of. Have you received any notices from Google about a penalty or have you just noticed the stats drops? Either way, its a very sudden drop and indicates something rapidly changed.

Lots of fresh new content and not something which clearly focuses on gaining back links is the way to go, whilst getting a few high authority links will help even out your link profile.

Here is the relevant Matt Cutts announcement about it:

http://www.webpronews.com/google-duplicate-content-2011-12

Hi, I assume the 118,000 links are from 118,000 pages which feature the footer-wide link?

I have read many times that these links are "bad for SEO", but in all honesty all major content networks have to do this, because how else will they link to their parent company, or other sites in their network.

It does of course help if the other sites are on the same domain, and just subdomains or subdirectories, but I understand in most networks this would not be the case.

Many large publishers do this, especially in the UK, with companies like Future plc, Newsquest, Immediate Media Co etc. They all have footerwide links on all pages.

Whilst they may be rather saturated in providing link juice, they should provide a better user experience and not be bad for SEO, but I always read conflicting information about this kind of thing.

Be sure to create your sitemap so that one individual URL has it's own content, and there is not another URL on the domain which has 100% of the same content.

You can set it so that Ajax loading pages have their own URLs and change as they load, and also have their own page title. This is used by sites such as USA Today. Click any news article for an example:

http://www.usatoday.com/

Is that the kind of loading mechanism you mean?

He means when you click an image on Google images, that it navigates to the website instead of opening in Google Image's search. (I think)

If Google catches you doing the frame breaker, you will be blacklisted.

You can use a service such as Babelverse for cost-effective human translation if you do decide to go down that route.

The problem with holding a competition for reviews is that people will usually send low quality and false reviews just to earn entries, whereas if they have an opportunity to increase journalistic exposure, they are more likely to provide a high quality review for free, but that's just my opinion and your suggestions are great.

Pretty much. This from research and statistics that I have read over the past years, but of course it is just an estimate based on different variables.

For more info, Moz did actually do a a great blog post which should help answer your question:

http://moz.com/blog/how-unique-does-content-need-to-be-to-perform-well-in-search-engines-whiteboard-friday

Magento can sometimes be tricky. If you don't have a lot of pages, you can also create the redirects in htaccess.

The Helvetica font family is usually known for being the most user friendly, and easy on the eyes font for most types of website, for example, Moz is using the following for this post:

font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;

Yes, absolutely adding more content should help keep freshness - just be sure you have a sitemap in your Google Webmaster Tools so Google is kept updated on how often you are updating the pages on your site.

Also, just as a side-note, making visual changes to your site that changes the source code by a large amount can sometimes have a negative (temporary) effect on your search engine rankings. As you have done this multiple times this year, this could also be the reason for your traffic drops. Find the optimum design and stick to it, and focus on content.