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Thanks Gerd. Yes, that's what I feel as well but the timing of traffic drop coincides with the Penguin rollout.

Unfortunately, we didn't have Google Webmasters set up for that site so have missed out on important notifications from Google.

I'm thinking whether sending a reconsideration request to them is going to do any good or not.

Thanks Thomas for taking your time in responding to this. The parent domain hasn't seen any changes and as I mentioned earlier, the parent site is an authority site and a reputed domain so I don't see the links from that domain as spammy. So not sure if I should be removing those links as they are there for convenience of our customer so we shouldn't really have to remove them just because the linking is between two separate domains. I take your point of contacting Google for reconsideration though.

Hi,

The site I'm working on seems to have been suffered from the Penguin 2.0 algorithmic update. It used to rank at position 1 for its top traffic term (which is very competitive) but now ranks at position 12. The traffic seems to have dropped since 22^nd May 2013 when the update rolled out.

There aren't any dodgy backlinks to the site. The only two things that changed just a month before Penguin 2.0 were –

• The meta title, description and H1 of the site’s homage changed
• The site received about 30,000+ backlinks from its parent site which sits on a different domain. These links were as a result of the site being included as part of the parent site’s main navigation which appears site wide. The parent site is a reputed and authority site. So I don’t understand why Google would penalise the site for acquiring links from its parent site (even though they are site wide links). Also, the links acquired from parent's site were not just homepage links but also links to some of its other deeper pages.

Can somebody please suggest if they've had any similar experience and suffered the Penguin 2.0’s wrath?

Any suggestions or solutions, most welcome. Should I be thinking of nofollowing those links? Should I submit a reconsideration request to Google?

Many Thanks

Pri