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My DA has gone down from 29 in February to 13 today. Since then, my site traffic has increased 43.5% (organic by 24.6%), I have cleaned up citations, and worked on directory listings (unpaid listings for both local & national directories, including industry-specific ones). Why the drop-off? I'm concerned.

Thanks @Textmarketing. The result you got is what we've been able to replicate most often by playing around with geo. But, occasionally, they'll get an individual member listing (see my screenshot), which is what they're trying to avoid.

A non profit in our industry that we support pro bono--the awesome Efficiency First--is finding that individual member listings are sometimes showing up within their sitelinks. This obviously does not sit well with the members who do not show up.

I know that you can "demote" specific URL's within webmaster tools, but I'm wondering if it's possible to demote an entire section. Their structure is www.efficiencyfirst.org/member/member#.

Do we demote the entire member section? Or is there a more structural problem at play here?

Thanks much.

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i.e. crawling a site to identify last date of new or changed content? Thanks.

@AWCthreads: given how hugely damaging it would be to local.com to fess up to getting penalized, I'm guessing your chances of a straight answer from them are slim. Agree, though, that going to the parent newspaper would be a good possible route.

For everyone, an example of the kind of directory we're talking about is here: http://directory.journal-advocate.com/alexandria+va.z.html

We're doing similar research on behalf of a friend who was hit hard by Penguin. A prior SEO had run a link building program that resulted in more than 50% of their total links coming from various repeats of the local.com directory. We're unable to pinpoint anything else that would have caused a precipitous fall in rankings. We've tried some other searches of the local.com directories using the methodology someone on SEOmoz suggested (i.e. searching for exact title tags) and those searches would indicate that local.com was, in fact, penalized.

On the surface, local.com would not appear to be one of the cheesy directories that Penguin aims to devalue, but I'm wondering if that fact that the content gets duplicated so many times (as a directory for multiple newspaper sites) might be part of its devaluation. A service business in North Carolina that shows up in a local directory in Oregon isn't really a quality directory.

We're still in the hunt but have growing conviction that local.com got hit.