Panda or Penquin -Website Fell - Shouldn't this Recover?

[Force7]

On March 23rd our site fell 47% in one day. www.TranslationSoftware4u.com  but we still held quite a few #1 to #7 rankings on Google and thought it would just recover.

Our top keyword "translation software" was #4 , now we are #19

Over the next week I waited to see if it recovered. We have been online 10+ years and always stayed with white hat.  I admit to learning as I go over the years but always felt content was king so I focused on information. I really do not see my site as using spam techniques but maybe I am missing something on the way I have it.

March 23rd, major drop -47%

On April 2nd  I started with SEO MOZ and the Research tools showed we had duplicate content warning. This was from a blog we were trying to start that only had 7 posts but it had about 20 tags per post. I did not realize that tags actually created that post under that tag. I went in and deleted the tags again being stupid and not realizing it was then making that come up 404. The blog was so small we do not get hits on it anyway so hoping it just clears itself up. ( still get duplicate warning on our directory due to using "php Link Directory", but it's due to how it reuses the title tag and description, 2 instances per category page"). Still trying to fix the php directory issue. Seems many others are running it and did not have a drop.

April 24th, we dropped another -10%

It keeps falling -70% now.

I have gone through the site and tried to clean up any warnings like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions.

With regards to links I put up a small web directory with some reciprocal linking. Our product translates languages but software is not the same as a human so we often set clients up with human translators, the directory is a nice place to help our customers find a translator or see online tools that can help. The links were not excessive, there were maybe 100 links. After the fall I went in and found some translators had gone out of business so I deleted those, I am down to 65 links now, about 45 are exchanges.

I have submitted to some online directories manually, but looking back through the links there is not really anything that makes me concerned. The link back to my site was really the most neglected SEO thing I did. Again concentrating on content. I did find a few links that I was not happy about but I did not put those links so had no control.

I have been working on cleaning up my title tags, and making sure the content just reads better.  I have been hoping that my site would just start recovering but it keeps sliding.

Has anyone seen recovery from the updates. Should I see anything yet? I cannot seem to get Google to return to the site and reindex.  Am I doing somethign spammy on my site and I do not realize it?

Thanks for any advice in advance!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Force7

Unfortunately, it looks like Google threw a little bit of everything at you, so untangling the mess may be a little tricky.

Thanks for including the exact dates of the traffic drops. From these we can clearly see you were hit with two different penalties.

March 23 - Panda
April 24 - Penguin

http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Panda - This is a tricky one to pin down, but you may be going in the right direction by fixing the duplicate content. I don't quiet understand what you mean by the "php Link Directory" but if you can get it fixed, I highly encourage you to do so.

Recently however, we've seen instances of Panda targeting link profiles, and if you've been double hit by penguin as well, that's probably a good place to look.

Looking at your backlink profile, it's obvious there's a lot of low-quality directory and article type links in your profile.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?no_redirect=1&page=1&site=www.translationsoftware4u.com%2F

This could easily explain both penalties, and when we look at your site's distribution of anchor text terms, there is large proportion of optimized terms

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?page=1&site=www.translationsoftware4u.com%2F&sort=domains_linking_page&source=term&target=domain

Which helps explain the Panda penalty. Have you received any messages in Google Webmaster Tools?

So what can you do? Unfortunately, cleaning up a large link profile is hard work, and so is rebuilding it with clean, high quality links. I highly recommend reading Dr. Pete's article on the subject.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

No easy answers. It's okay to have a few spammy backlinks in your profile, but you want to look at the entire balance of your links, and make sure you're earning the majority of your links in a natural looking manner from high quality sites.

Regardless, hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[Force7]

As of today 42 views of this question and no comments. I would have to guess that some looked at the site a little and did not see anything. The reason I even posted this question is because I saw someone else post a similar question and there were a lot of quick comments stating that the person's website had obvious spam techniques on the home page.

Still hoping some experts at least throw in a comment.

Thanks!

Force7