Hit by a penalty? But which one?

[Cary_Forest]

Hi guys,

First off, thanks for reading my post! My site, www.doctorloanusa.com suffered a massive drop in Google rankings and traffic on September 27. For the past 4 years, I've ranked in spots 1-3.

My main keywords are physician loans and doctor loans.

1. I had a competitor copy almost ALL my text. In early October, I filed a DMCA takedown and had the infringing site removed from the SERPS. I also made text changes to my site. I thought this duplicate content was the problem, but I have yet to see any improvements 2 months later.

2. My site isn't particularly deep content-wise, but it's competitive with others in my niche. I have relatively few links but others in the SERPS have very similar link profiles.

3. I tried to clean up a few questionable links and used the disavow tool.

4. I have used the SEOmoz on-page tools to grade my site. Typically, I receive grade A reports.

5. I still rank for my website URL, and still rank 1 in both Yahoo and Bing.

6. My bounce rate is 43%.

If anyone could provide insight, I would be very grateful. I need to get this site ranking again, as this property is my main source of income.

Is the site over-optimized? Is it my anchor text profile?

Thank you very much in advance!

[Cary_Forest]

Hi Moosa,

The only thing is, I don't rank at ALL on Google for my keywords. Not even in the top 1000. That leads me to believe it is some type of penalty.

What were the small problems you saw?

Thanks so much.

[Cary_Forest]

Thanks!

[Cary_Forest]

Thanks for your response, Hampig! See below for answers:

1. where do you rank currently for Physician Loans and Doctor Loans on google? Not in the top 1000!

2. when did you use the Disavow tool. The day after it came out.

3. Did you get a questionable link email from google webmaster tools? No

I'll look into the citations, and I know I need a blog. I have one but it's on a different domain and honestly it's only 4-5 pages. I plan to write more content for it. I also plan on doing some social media, I just haven't had time yet.

[Alex-Harford]

Google rolled out Panda and Exact-Match Domain (EMD) updates on September 27th. As one of your keywords almost exactly matches your domain the EMD penalty could be a possibility. I don't know enough about the EMD update to be certain, but your link profile still doesn't look perfect either - it'd look more natural if more of your links had your URL as the anchor text, but be careful about where you get links from.

I Googled some of your text and it was duplicated on other sites (e.g. experts123), so Panda could be a possibility too.

The homepage doesn't look too bad; perhaps the title tag looks a bit spammy and you use "doctor loan" an awful lot in alt text; including the alt text there are 17 occurences of "doctor loan" on your homepage, so I would definitely reduce that. I'm not sure if that sort of keyword usage ties in with EMD, so have a look if some trusted resources have advice on it. I haven't read through it but this looks useful: http://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340

[MoosaHemani]

I checked your site and see some really small problems here and there and i don’t really think this is any penalty or something... I think all you need is an in-depth on-page analysis and with time you might receive everything back at least in terms of rankings...

[EGOL]

I would do the quiz at http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/

[BizDetox]

A few questions.

1. where do you rank currently for Physician Loans and Doctor Loans on google?

2. when did you use the Disavow tool

3. Did you get a questionable link email from google webmaster tools?

I would try to put more content on the page. you dont have much . ie: Blog.

A few things missing:

* Citation on every page. You need to make sure you have your address and phone number on every page. ( Site wide footer can do the job )

* Citations across the web. Check out Getlisted.org and make sure all the local search directories have all your information. You can also use yext.com ( The best tool out there right now but it will cost you )

* No Blog? why?

* No Social Media . why?

is this your facebook page

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Doctor-loan-usa-reviews/103958646433000

After you get that in order and rankings don't improve my best guess is there is a link that is pointing to your site thats  bad link and you havent removed it. I would contact Webmaster tools and try to get more help from them ?

But let me know the answers to my questions

Best wishes,

Hampig M.

BizDetox