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If the drop coincides with May 22, you were probably hit by the Google roll out of "Penguin 2.0" Supposed to be much tougher on spammy links.

I am in a similar situation although for some keywords, I have just dropped a few slots. I am pretty new to this so I am sure you will get an answer from one of the very helpful experts here, but you might want to take a look at you link profile using OSE. It seems you have quite a few "cialis" links and that can't be good. Also see if you have gotten any warnings in GWMT. If you did, then it is what they call a "manual" action meaning a human at Google assessed a penalty. There is a process for reconsideration if this is the case. It could however just be the algorithm change.

Either way you should seriously look at getting rid of those links. I will be interested in the community responses here.

Best of luck, I know it is a bad feeling!

I looked at the current site and the previous one in the wayback machine.

Just my opinion but the image of the two attorneys would put me off. I liked the one of the happy couple on the old site. I'm sure they are wonderful guys but they look pissed.

Site is very nice and fastest WP I've seen in Pagespeed.

Nice job. I'd change that pic... Respectfully!

Very likely you are just redirecting the penalty to the new domain. This article recently written by Marie Haynes may help.

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2384644/can-you-safely-redirect-users-from-a-penguin-hit-site-to-a-new-domain

Welcome. One thing I find really useful is the "Email Updates" button here on the Q&A posts. When I find a question I am interested in learning more about, I can click the "Email Updates" and then I will receive responses to the question via email. It's a great way to follow the topics you are curious about and tap into some of the expert knowledge here.

I think Jen gave a great response and you should read it twice!.

A couple of things you might consider if you want to do this on your own, RMOOV.com is an amazing tool for contacting webmasters and asking/tracking link removal. Link Detox is another great affordable tool to evaluate links. If you still have a relationship with the firm you used to buy links, you might see if they can remove those links for you. The reality is that most webmasters won't respond to your requests to remove links. So if you can get the ones who created them to remove them, you will have more success.

I don't see why it would be bad to build good, real links in the mean time or at any time! Hard to believe that would be the advice a MOZ  recommended firm gave you. Maybe they were trying to explain that great content is what matters?

Good luck!

Try Screaming Frog if you haven't already. Great tool!

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Agree with eyepaq that Google Webmaster Tools is the starting place. And if there is no Manual Action notice you may still have an algorithmic penalty. There can be many other reasons for your drop in rankings both on page and off page. But if your concern is your backlink profile there are a few other tools in addition to GWT and OSE. Take a look at Majestic which has a historical view that can show lost links. And if you don't mind paying there is always Link Detox.

Best of luck!

I think we will see a lot more about this soon but in the mean time I would have to ask, "Why take the chance?".

Just 301 to the https site. 301s allegedly don't pass all the link juice and you are potentially using two 301s when you could just use one. If it were me I would want to redirect to the https site and be building new links and even updating old ones to https.

Hi Sam. I would advise you to move on with safer SEO in any case! As Chappers states, Google won't notify you of algorithmic penalties. If changes in rankings/traffic coincide with know algorithm updates, that is your clue. Things may change a bit in the days to come as things settle but might as well clean up those backlinks now! Hopefully the next refresh will not take so long.

Sorry!

Hi. I think mememax gave a very good answer.

The only thing I would submit for consideration is making too many changes at one time can be hard to track later. When we did the switch to https, I was super paranoid we would screw something up and lose rankings. So I chose to leave the disavow file exactly the same. It turned out the switch was not as bad as I thought and we didn't have any noticeable effect on rankings. So later when I was convinced that the https switch was not a factor, I could modify the disavow file. I also left the old domains from years ago in there for the reasons mememax points out.

Good Luck!

Also seeing hits from these guys. 9 so far today from Viet Nam, Brazil, India, Turkey and Colombia.

Very annoying. I sent a note to Alex@Semalt.com requesting they remove me from their crawlers. I guess the consensus is they are harmless from what I have read on the web, but it messes up your analytics.

Works now. Thanks

I'll bring the doughnuts.

Assuming your site is cheaptubes.com, run it through Googe's Page Speed Insights and look at the scores.

Looks like you could help those low scores quite a bit just by optimizing the images. PSI even provides those optimized resources for you. Google says site speed is a ranking signal although it may not be a significant one. Still it seems pretty easy to fix the "low hanging fruit" and just clean this up. If you want to do more as to JS and CSS files, have a look at the Wordpress plugin "Autoptimize". I have had good luck with it and it is well supported by the author.

Best!

I have noticed the same thing. Original Disavow file was acknowledged with an email. I updated that file and no message was received. Although the file was displayed clearly in GWMT. Updated it again about a month later and received a message acknowledging.

So what I have observed, Peter seems to be correct on their inconsistent messaging on this.

Paying for link removal is a conundrum since as you state the site owners probably feel violated and that you essentially got what was coming to you. I have chosen to pay a couple that had been de-indexed from Google and even so, one did remove the links and the other has not.

As to your other question on removing sites from your disavow list that have been cooperative and removed the links, from what I have read there is no harm in disavowing them anyway. The risk is that some site owners may not have properly removed the link and it may come back. They may have temporarily redirected it to hide it or they don't know how to remove it possibly due to an older platform. I would be interested to hear from experts such as Marie on this point.

Also experiencing same problem.

Figured it was a Google Apps conspiracy...

Also in addition to what Gazzerman sees, looks like the WP template files that probably came as a demo with the theme are still there and indexed with the WP Latin boilerplate. This needs to be cleaned up. Use the site: operator in Google search and you will see them. I don't mean to be blunt but Backlinks look pretty spammy to me. If you paid for links like a lot of the comment spam and profile spam, you need to clean those up as well.

Best,

Take a look at this thread a few days ago:

http://moz.com/community/q/seo-best-practice-http-to-https

I think Moosa hit it when he mentioned the need for 301s. Also have you set up GWT for your now preferred https site?

You might contact the firm that placed the links and see if they can remove them. If they were done in profiles or by creating accounts with passwords, hopefully they can remove them. It can be very difficult to get links removed and time consuming if you must do it by contacting the webmasters. And most of them will not respond. But Google does state they want you to attempt to clean up the links. Have you checked GWMT for warnings? Even without warnings you can be penalized by algorithms. A lot of info on that here on Moz worth reading.

I am sure you will get great advice here, but those links are not doing you any good and should be removed and disavowed. You are correct that the nofollows won't hurt, but I would want all the spammy links gone if it were my site. It is not so much that links on sites unrelated to your business are necessarily bad, but those that are clearly manipulative (like anchor text) are pretty obvious to Google. Nuke 'em all.

Hey Patrick not sure if this is an issue or not but I notice if I enter http and your urls, your site serves the http version. Clicking on any menu item goes to https, but I would think the http should be re-directed to https?

Well if the site is new and you are not greatly tied to it in any way, I'd start over. Not that you can't recover but it can take quite a while and will be some work. You have come to right place to learn though and that is to your credit! Check out some of the beginner guides here:  http://moz.com/learn/seo

Wordpress is great and I am a big fan of Genesis and the Studiopress themes. Get a good host like WP Engine or Websynthesis just to name a couple. But most of all read in this forum.

Welcome and good luck!

GWT = Google Webmaster Tools. In there you can tell Google your preferred website and now you can add the https version as the preferred site. I'm not real clear on the format so hopefully someone will jump in here and MOZ will have more info soon. It is another way to avoid Google seeing the http and https as duplicate content and penalizing you.

Sorry I can't answer more directly!

Just from my own experience having also been through an "algorithmic" Google penalty, it took 6-8 months after uploading a disavow file to see any recovery. But good news is it does work. I agree with the responses from William and LJD but wanted to mention Google does not remove the links you disavow. That will have to be done by submitting requests to the website webmasters. Actually Google wants you to do this first before disavow, but it doesn't seem to hurt not to or do them at the same time.

I used RMOOV as a tool to do this. Great tool and very helpful folks who will talk to you on the phone! Although disavow may get you there with Google, I think it is worth the effort to remove as many bad links as possible since it just looks bad and other search engines will not know about the Google disavow. It is a lengthy process but tools like RMOOV and Detox can help.

So no reconsideration request is required unless you have a manual action. Going forward I keep looking at my link profile using OSE, GWT and Majestic and when I see something I don't like, I update the disavow file. Important to "append" that file so as to keep all the original links and just add on the new ones.

Nice find EGOL.

I have a general rule if they are cold calling me, I won't do business with them. There are tons of these scams out there using spyfu to generate leads among other methods. On the other hand Moz has a list of recommended service providers yo can check out:

http://moz.com/community/recommended

As for Multiview Run Away!

As Richard says you can use OSE right here! Also you can see links in GWMT. Ahrefs and Majestic are also great resources. Tools like Link Detox or Link Risk are also available and claim to help you determine if the link is bad. Although the best resource for that is you. Because you will know if this was a "manipulated" link. These automated tools may have false positives for links that might actually be helping your site. But again, you will be the best judge of that.

You can't really delete a link but can request it be removed through the webmaster or disavow it in GWMT. I think Richard gives great advice however when he points out that if you haven't had a penalty in the past, you may be better off not worrying about using the disavow tool. If you are in the group of us who have been penalized in the past, you might consider proactive disavow with Google.

Best!

I like your checklist approach and think it adds value for users of your site. Could you use it to generate leads? A "call to action" widget of some type that would send your checklist to users who leave their email. It's a pretty common scheme and maybe worn out, but I still go for it if the information sounds intriguing enough.

I know that doesn't answer your keyword question but I tend to agree with Chris that too much text on a home page can be overwhelming and cause a viewer to check out. I think you use the homepage as an overview an to "set the hook".

Nice site!

That's highly unlikely. Sure you can capture an ip and see who it belongs to but that's a real stretch. If someone is at their desk behind the corporate firewall and you get the ip belonging to a company you have no way of knowing who in that company was on your site.

Why is that valuable anyway? If they are interested they will contact you. Your efforts would be better spent closing them while they are on your site with good copy. Move on from these guys with their promises or I fear you will regret it.

Best.

Hi. Hopefully MOZ team will respond but I noticed if I type "http://www.kuzyklaw.com"  I get a 301 to "https://www.kuzyklaw.com" and then another 301 to "https://kuzyklaw.com/".

One to many redirects I think. Noticed you are WP. Did you use a plugin for the https change?

If you did not receive a manual action you cannot submit a reconsideration request. If you properly submitted your disavow file all you can do now is wait. And the consensus is it is as you stated related to the next refresh of Google's algo.

Hang on to the Google doc though just in case you get a manual penalty in the meantime. It sounds like you have done a good job removing links but one of the biggest mistakes is not to remove all the spam links. It is a good practice to use multiple sources to review your back link profile. In addition to GWT there is OSE, ahrefs and majestic. Some like Link Detox and I had good luck with their tool. You didn't mention how they got there to begin with but hopefully you have fixed that as well. Now just focus on building good natural links going forward and wait for the refresh.

You might search "disavow" here as there is a great deal of info.

Good Luck!

It would help to understand why have you decided to disavow links. Have you received a manual action or think you may be subject to algorithmic penalties? Has traffic to your site dropped?  Just because a link comes from a site with low DA, it is not necessarily bad. Google is looking for manipulation.

We went through the same thought process and decided to self host a wordpress site and dump the wordpress.com (in our case) blog. There are many advantages of having the blog on your own site. You will be increasing the number of pages and adding fresh content. Google likes that and you can compete for more keywords. Also creating content in your blog that other people will link to because it is high quality will get you links naturally. I don't think it can be overstated as to how important this can be for SEO.

I can't really speak to whether or not the 301 is a good idea. In our case it wasn't possible anyway.

Hope this helps!

Some really thoughtful responses here that I agree with.

I noted your average sale is $125, so I would call this a high-ticket item and your customer is probably buying because they seek the quality of the product, not the discounted price. It is reasonable to assume the retailers are the ones who have been recommending the product and if you start a war with them, they will recommend something else.

I think the first commandment of wholesale manufacturing is "Thou shalt not compete with Thy Retailers". They are your most valuable partners.

Also understanding the demo of the client might help as Dana points out, some products just don't make sense on-line and you may have one here. Also if the customer skews older, they may not be comfortable buying on-line. You might even decide to launch the product in a new look and name just for on-line sales.

So I think Lesley has given great advice and insight. Seek out new customers and don't worry about those the stores already have, rather, be grateful for them as they will finance your pursuit of new markets.

Best!

We also saw an increase in traffic and rankings around 10/17 and were feeling pretty cocky. One tracked keyword jumped from 7 to 1 and in the last 3 days has come down to 5. Traffic also reduced and I think it coincides with the 3 day thing Dennis mentioned. I just attributed it to the Penguin update "settling". But now Dennis makes me want to do better on page!

Impressions are up looking prior to 10/17 so I think that is a good thing overall. Have not had any similar drops on social or Yahoo/Bing.

Except that the bad links may have been disavowed in their GWMT.

Do you see links reported in GWMT for both versions? In our case there are no links reported for the non-www site. (www is canonical). If you see links on both sites, I would disavow both just to be safe.

Thanks Dan,

I will be moving to the new url structure, probably post name as I don't have a lot of "juice" to pass anyway. Thanks to Dana for bringing this up in her answer.

In fairness to Synthesis, I believe my question was not clear and on a follow up they gave a very comprehensive response to my question and actually recommended this forum!

As to the htaccess issue, I may not understand this but I believe there is no htaccess file since they don't use apache. Quite a bit on them here <a>http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/</a>

Hi Kelly,

I didn't see Yoast on your site and not sure if you are using another plugin to help manage SEO issues. Yoast is pretty well respected and the plugin can help manage some of the duplicate content issues in Word Press. (tags, categories)
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

Also some good reads on the Yoast site on optimizing a Word Press site.  HTML5 and Schema should also be considered. There are some Word Press Gurus around here and hopefully they will chime in.

Best!

The problem you must be aware of is Duplicate Content. This can hurt your rankings and result in a Google penalty.

Creating one page with the variants and options is generally preferred and safer. If you want more content and that's a great idea, consider a Blog to give your users a better experience on your site and help establish you as an expert in your field. Sure it's more work, but it can really differentiate your site.

Do a search here for "Duplicate Content" as this is a common question for eCommerce sites.

Best of Luck!

First check GWMT and see if you have received  a Manual Penalty. You cannot file a reconsideration request if you have not received a Manual Penalty. I don't think you have since using the operator site:http://www.aquaspresso.co.za/ you show up indexed for 5240 pages. That seems like there may be some duplicate content Panda issue. Wordpress may be causing duplicates with incorrect category/tag settings. I see you have Yoast and this is a good way to manage this. Also Woo Commerce and I think Yoast has a plugin specific to Woo Commerce. Hoping someone with more knowledge chimes in, but 5250 pages seems odd.

Moving my site to WP and the old url structure pages end in ".html".

I have seen there are plugins that allow you to add .html to the WP pages to preserve links.

I am hosting on Synthesis and they do not support htaccess, although you can submit 301 re-directs through the help ticket system. My question is what is the best way to proceed? I have read that 301s "leak" some link juice, but I sure do like those pretty urls.

Advice appreciated!

From your WP dashboard go to Appearance>Menus and you'll see the navigation structure. It can be a bit challenging to get the hang of so go slow. You might be better in the Wordpress.org forums looking for help on this. Cool site! I want a nanotube.

https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Menu_User_Guide

Yoast SEO plugin will do it.

In my experience it takes a couple of days to show up. And generic keyword search will "trigger" (you'll see the rich snippet)

Best

If you are concerned about "link juice" following to the new pages, you will need to set up 301 redirects.  I  don't know much about web.com but some of these services don't have a way to 301. It looks like some of your pages have different urls now but Google still has the index from the old site. The pages that have exactly the same names will be OK.

If there is no "link juice" to worry about, you may be all right just waiting for Google to figure it out. They will eventually re-index the new site.

You might also consider a different solution for your site using a CMS like wordpress and self hosting. That may give you more flexibility in the long run and a blog on your site would be good as well. Do a little reading here as there is a great deal of good advice. Congratulations on finding MOZ!

Thanks Tom!

As always, an amazing response.

Best

I am noticing Google Shopping Ads are showing up for really irrelevant keywords on some of my products. This quite predictably causes a high bounce rate when a user comes from these ads. There is very little control over what Google Ads seems to decide are relevant keywords from what I can see. Only control is by viewing search terms and setting as negative keywords, but his doesn't help much. Negative keywords are often ignored or they come up with some other really irrelevant new keyword.

Seems this high bounce rate could hurt ranking? Any experiences shared with Google Shopping ads appreciated!

If your content permits, Rich Snippets is a pretty obvious way to look more appealing to folks.

Check out this MOZ post :            http://moz.com/blog/a-visual-guide-to-rich-snippets