Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases.
Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now.
Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board.
We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this?
Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms.
In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly.
Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com
Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now!
Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice.
Best Regards,
Stephen
