Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Wow, definitely helps, Marie! Didn't expect to receive a helpful hand from such an SEO expert as you Thank you so much!

First of all, on Webmasters there is no manual action.

Thank you for bringing attention to on-site issues, that's actually what I am doing now, over 8 years we had more than 2000 published articles and right now I am cleaning them out after seeing that 20% of articles receive 80% of the traffic.

By any chance can you suggest the best way to deal with deleted posts? Right now I am redirecting them all with 301 Redirect to related similar post, or if none is suitable I redirect to home page, trying not to leave 404. What would you recommend doing?

Really good points, well, I never syndicated posts, lots of link building included submitting it to related web design news websites (pligg, digg voting type sites or where news appeared in sidebar).

I did exchange blogroll links maybe with 10 max friends sites, but nothing massive.

And regarding May 20, it indeed happened then. Comparing Tuesday, May 20 to Monday, May 19.

Actually after research..and following your disavow article how to work with massive amounts of links in spreadsheets and trying out Detox tool, I found, there are certainly links i would want to disavow, but it's not as significant as I thought. I really think, that what you are saying is right - that simply Google stopped counting some links and that' why rankings did drop.

Action plan is clear at least, first focus on fixing everything possible on-site before touching Disavow tool. Really, really appreciate your helpful reply and taking time to give such an insightful feedback to simple guy like me

Thank you again, Marie!

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@Peter - I read everything and was in the process of doing the audit, but Google Sheets keeps crashing, site has around 1 million backlinks and formulas just keep crashing when working with even 100,000 links from only webmaster. Any tips?

Thanks Peter, on my way then, excellent help, really appreciate it..will let you know how it goes, if you will be interested

• Thank you so much Peter for your helpful reply. PSD2HTML is a new for me, already read about WPMU crazy moves and disavow guide..started working on it yesterday..just friend of mine who works at Ahrefs still convinced that I shouldnt go Disavow path.

  Alright, working on audit then, thank you for links already!

  What other tools you would recommend, if you say it isnt enough with Ahrefs?

Hello, really hoped for your feedback here.

So my site is http://www.1stwebdesigner.com

I just used http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ - and came to realization, that indeed we might have been hit by famous Panda 4.0 update. Here is screenshot from Barracuda tool - https://www.evernote.com/l/AELGaZ6nyxBE1aK7oQJVHBPKJuwjUh5JWk8 and in attachment there is Google Analytics screenshot for that time - especially May, 2014.

Can you please help me confirm that we indeed have been hit with the Penalty? It has been 1.5 years already and since then, the traffic never has grown more.

Before May, 2014 our site received 1.5 million pageviews/mo, after it..until this moment traffic has never been more than 600,000 pageviews/mo. Now if I look back even more with Barracuda tool, I can see it was also affected by Top Heavy 1.0 update,Thu Jan 19 2012. Even back then before all these updates site grew to 2.5 million pageviews/mo.

What is the painful part I always focused on time-consuming link building. Submitting links to design news sites, leaving quality comments under related articles and always have written unique quality content on site for years.

Can you tell based on screenshots and confirm we indeed have penalty. And maybe suggest what are the actions to take now? I have ahrefs pro subscription and started using Disavow tool to prepare for submission to Google. Would love to hear feedback on this..it has been painful throughout years.

Update: here is one more screenshot from Barracuda looking from 2012 year to traffic - https://www.evernote.com/l/AEIX6iP4USBGtbyRLZ1oTmcACgBtXHBP2rw

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