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Hi Stephen. Google try their best to serve up relevant results to everyone (or at least that's the assumption we make. Whether it's true or not is, I'm sure, something people could debate for hours) and have a very complex algorithm for doing that. The algo' changes that make up Penguin and Panda may have had the effect of pushing other sites above yours because they are more authoratative in other areas than <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">thomassmithfasteners.com</a>. I would definitely back up your disavow requests with the information you suggest; I'm not sure how much of a difference they make but if they do then they're great to have and if they don't then at least you're keeping a record of your activity. Here's Google's instructions, which do contain comments on when attempts were made to contact site owners. Good luck! Ben P.S. I've just found this ebook at Hubspot. If a file storage company can produce good enough content to be featured on Hubspot then Thomas Smith Fastenings should definitely be able to create something!

Thank you very much for the responses, much appreciated. That's what's confusing me. I haven't built any links in 1-2 years for that domain. All I do is post on the blog, Facebook, Twiiter and G+. I've sent some removal requests to the more obvious ones with names like seodirectory etc. Should I wait or would you just send a disavow to Google now? Best Regards, Stephen

OK, it's now a few months later, with nothing linkbuilding-wise except posting blog posts on Facebook, G+ and Twitter. I've tried to make the site more accessible - we now have a simple, responsive design and I've tried to make the content clear and concise. In short, written for humans rather than search engines. As of the end of November, 'nuts and bolts' has now disappeared completely, and 'bolts and nuts' is page 8. There are many pages much higher which are not as relevant and have no links. We still rank highly for more specialised terms - ie 'bsw bolts' and 'imperial bolts' are still page 1, but not as high as before. We get an 'A' grade on the on-page grader for 'nuts and bolts, and most above us get F. I was cautious about removing links as our profile doesn't seem too bad but it does seem as if it's that. There are a fair few questionable directories in there, no doubt about that, but our overall practice in recent years has been natural building and link earning. So - I've created a spreadsheet and identified the bad links - ie directories with any SEO connotations. I am about to submit removal requests, I thought two polite requests a couple of weeks apart prior to disavowing with Google. I am also gradually beefing up the content on the shop pages in case of any 'thin content' issues. I noticed 100s of broken links in webmaster tools due to 2 broken links on our blog and have fixed those. I have also been fixing errors W3C compliance-wise. Am I right to do all this? Can anyone offer any suggestions? I'm still not 100% sure if this is Panda, Penguin or something else. My guess is Penguin, but the decline started in March 2013, which correlates with Panda. Best Regards and thanks for any help, Stephen

Our rankings on the two main keywords have recovered slightly.  We've gone from page 5 to page 3 on 'nuts and bolts', and are page 2 on 'bolts and nuts'. I think what's happened is that, rather than us being penalised directly, sites that link to us have been penalised, resulting in a knock on effect.  Does this sound reasonable?  I don't think we'd be page 2 on such a competitive term if we had been penalised. I've been slowly building relevant links with prospective customers (ie a few classic car sites have linked to us, our old imperial bolts are very useful for them) and kept up a very basic social media profile - just the odd blog post and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Regarding links, looking through my link profile <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> we do have links from directories that don't look fantastic, more are shown in Webmaster Tools than are listed here.  Some of the directories no longer seem to exist, I take it I don't need to do anything and Google will catch up in those cases.  For the others, should I attempt to remove (or disavow) all links with names like best-directory etc? Are most directories bad these days?  Or should I just concentrate on building better links? Again, any advice is greatly appreciated. Best Regards, Stephen