50% drop in search, no changes to site over 2 days, no notifications, A rank...

[applianceassistant]

My URL is: http://applianceassistant.com
With no changes to my site, I suddenly experienced a huge drop in search queries on Aug1. Your company has still given me an overall rating of A. I just thought you may be able to help or be interested in my case due to it's strange nature. Due to some suggestions on the webmaster forums, I have disavowed all low quality back links to the site, and I am currently working through each page trying to make the key words a little less spammy. Here are some screen shots of the action...
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-WgXUf-lvUyg/U-nrWNgspPI/AAAAAAAAAEI/imoI190LUns/s1600/Analytics_081214.tiff
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-srmvn288rr0/U-pxlwoycVI/AAAAAAAAAEg/ckmyX_2Sl_Y/s1600/PAGES_AUG.tiff
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-DVCYxhkutbQ/U-pxpQVfYfI/AAAAAAAAAEo/MN9PiLFT-zs/s1600/pages_july.tiff

This appears to be almost a 50% 2 year set back. Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated

[alecfwilson]

Sorry to hear about that. If the problem is spammy back links, using disavow is a good start, but you need to wait for Google to recrawl them all. Also, make sure you use multiple tools to identify the back links, different back link checkers behave differently, and using several will make sure you identify the maximum number to disavow. Also, even disavow isn't going to address all the losses (SEO ranking is somewhat of a king of the hill game, getting knocked down will mean you still have to climb back up once you address the penalties). You'll want to reach out to as many of the spammy links and see if you can get them removed (frustrating, and many simply won't respond, but actually removing the links is the most effective version of disavowing them). You can also ask for a reconsideration if you feel the penalty was unfounded (see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en). Finally, while it doesn't directly address the drop in rankings, you should consider investing in improving SEO signals. As mentioned by other searchbuzz, adding a blog that updates your page content regularly will help your SEO, as will updating your sitemap so that Googlebot doesn't think you are misleading it about the freshness of your content. You could also consider periodically going through your site and updating parts of it outside the blog to keep page freshness up a bit. Adding structured data will help search engines find the right content on your site, and right now you haven't added any (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fapplianceassistant.com%2F). Google PageSpeed Insights have a lot of suggestions for increasing page speed (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=applianceassistant.com). You may also want to consider moving to HTTPS, since you're dealing with a penalty and should be trying to maximize all the other SEO signals to compensate.

Unfortunately, getting hit with a penalty for algorithm changes not meant to specifically address your site (but to address those being extraordinarily abusive) doesn't have a quick fix. You just need to start practicing more sustainable SEO and mitigate the damage as best as possible.

[Kingof5]

Moz on-page grader results mean nothing, they're a joke.