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Traffic decreased about the same on all pages. I was however surprised that the thin pages was 40% of all landing pages. This might actually be one explanation. It still doesn't explain the extremely sudden drop however, since I've read content-related algo hits are usually more gradual (over one or several weeks). I might be wrong however.

Stats:

75% decrease in traffic on thin quote pages (40% of all landing pages)
80% decrease in traffic on all other content rich pages (60% of all landing pages)

My plan now is to hide (NOINDEX) the thin pages.(http://moz.com/community/q/noindexing-thin-content-pages-good-or-bad)

Yeah I've heard this as well. Some still seem to think Penguin only happened on the 17th of Oct, but I find that hard to believe.

I manually looked into all domains with more than 20 links to my site and disavowed all spam and low quality sites. Did you mean something else?

I assume you mean the detail pages with just a single quote on? Like http://coolquotescollection.com/1/
Do you think I would see improvements if I removed these pages completely? Or is there another solution I can try?

So I've been running coolquotescollection.com since 1997 (!) as a hobby project. I lost about 75% of my organic search traffic on the 25th of October, literally overnight. I've been doing a lot of research but I still don't know why I was penalized. Image attached.

I naturally thought this was because of Penguin (Oct 17, my drop was Oct 25). However, after checking backlinks I only discovered 11 domains with about 100-400 links each, the major ones were forum signatures and blog sidebars, 6 domains were spam sites / directories. They almost exclusively used the same anchor text (domain name or similar), so this doesn't seem like a black hat attack. Some of the directories used keywords in their urls however (like "funny quotes").
1. Is this really enough for such a heavy penalty?
I added these domains to be disavowed today, I'm aware this might take weeks or months to change.

I've automated so that pictures gets uploaded to my Facebook page with a link to my page. This started in early 2014.
2. Can Facebook links be considered link spam?
They don't even show up in webmaster tools.
Example: https://www.facebook.com/CoolQuotesCollection/photos/a.510328825689624.1073741825.326096120779563/615403025182203/?type=1&theater

I analyzed keywords and the major ones dropped between 2 and 6 positions. Notable exception: I seem to still rank nr 1 for "cool movie quotes" even though page is not optimized for that keyword.

Moz warned about over 5000 pages with duplicate content. It was a single page that used a querystring url parameter I have excluded in webmaster tools. I have now entered a canonical link on these pages. Example:
http://coolquotescollection.com/Home/TShirts?url=http-url-example...
http://coolquotescollection.com/Home/TShirts?url=http-another-url.......
3. Could the Google algo penalize this even though I have excluded the "url" parameter?

I have a lot of internal links in the page navigation. Can this cause problems? See the absolute bottom of this page where I have 94 links for example: http://coolquotescollection.com/laughs
4. Could a lot of internal links (navigation to page numbers) be the problem?

Some more facts:

• Site is http://coolquotescollection.com/
• Domain is 14 years old.
• The web site launched in Sep 1997, a year before Google! (Not relevant but you might understand why this is important to me).
• I haven't done any SEO work for at least 12 months, probably closer to two years.
• The only SEO work I've done is to optimize the pages, no link building at all, no black hat stuff.
• I'm automatically building a sitemap that contains all pages, see here: http://coolquotescollection.com/robots.txt
• I've used webmaster tools for years, haven't gotten any warnings. I checked backlinks there, also here from moz and ahrefs.

I'm annoyed that a quality content site can be penalized so hard (75% drop) when there are no, or just smaller issues. I'm just lucky this is not my business site, if so I would have gone out of business.

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated!

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