Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?

[SamCUK]

A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found.

Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend.

my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.

[SamCUK]

Thanks for your reply. I've done quite a lot of link building since the last OSE update so maybe when the next OSE update happens I'll get a better overview of my link profile and see where there could be problems. The only real strategy I've used though is guest blog posts on quality sites. I always run them through OSE to make sure they're authorative and have a good link profile. I've been careful to vary anchor text too.

The keywords I'm after aren't particularly difficult to rank for ( according to the keyword research tool on here they're in the 30% - 50% range) so I thought the amount of work I'd done and the ranking positions were about right.

I think I'll just keep building links I guess and try to keep building the site. I guess that's all I can do.

[TomRayner]

If the penalty is algorithmic, then it could be a penguin or unnatural links penalty.  Alternatively, some of your links that were powering your site could have been devalued.

Just popped your site into OSE and it can only find 73 links.  That isn't many at all, so one may argue that it was quite fortunate for your site to be ranking this highly to begin with.  Looking at your who.is data, I can see the site is less than six months old - there is a "freshness" factor in the algorithm that will promote new content/sites to begin with - it could be that this factor has now worn off.

Having looked at your link profile, I can see that the majority of your links are directory links, with some article directory stuff in there like SelfGrowth.  It's links like these that I imagine the algorithm would have devalued last week.  Incidentally, yours is yet another site with alltop links that looks to have been devalued - I really think Google are going after these directories hard.

Now, just because you have been devalued doesn't mean you have been penalised - you wouldn't necessarily need to remove these links unless they formed unnatural anchor text, which really isn't the case with your site.

I feel for you mate because it's a very hard niche to do the normal inbound/content marketing for, as many people don't want that content on their sites, while other people just blast high PR paid links to their site to rank.  My suggestion to you is to replace these directory links with new ones of a better quality, but in your particular circumstance, this is easier said then done.

Hope this helps a little bit - quite confident this is why your rankings have dropped, but getting them back might be a lot more difficult.