Can anybody provide insight from the timing in my search history graph?

Here's the history of SE traffic.  The jump earlier this year is improperly labelled Adwords traffic.

4a105WE

Thanks Marie, I believe you're right about needing more help than just the forums.  It's a start.  I'm willing to hire if the right person sees this.  The site itself doesn't make much money, but it's a labour of love.. it's been with me for 6 years.

I think the answer is in the gaps of my own knowledge.  I know enough to feel like I'm covering all of my bases, but I'm not a studied Panda or Penguin expert - reading a few articles over the past year, but that's about it.

The redesign was a vast improvement in SEO over the previous site, but I'm too close to it to know if there was one key strength of the old site that I ignored.

I really think that google gives my competitors a pass on using link test like "zombie games" because it's in their URL, while if I use it, they see it as unnatural.  I've never been warned though, so it's hard to say.  It seems the landscape really favours using "zombie games" in the url right now.  Everyone in the top 20 has this, and I don't.

Some issues I think I might have:

• Too many internal links.  I have 80 games on my homepage and both have both an image and a text internal link - that's 160.. maybe I can join them in the same A tag?
• I don't use any canonical tags - yet I have a lot of "duplicate" content, such as every game has both a regular and "full screen" version, and every category of games has pagination.

Wow, you're a wealth of knowledge!  Thank you so much for taking the time with me, this can be overwhelming and it's easy to make mistakes when you think you're making things better.

Webmaster Tools says that most of my backlink text is for "kill the zombies", but I have spent time trying to create backlinks for "zombie games".  I think it's a legitimate backlink text though because my website is literally a list of zombie games.  All of my competitors get the same backlink text, but the difference is their url has "zombie games" in it.

When these problems happened, I grabbed onto the advice that the best SEO was to create good content.  I hired a copywriter who writes descriptions of games for the inner pages, and blog posts.  She writes new content 3 times a week.  For this reason, I don't expect that onsite text or content would be my problem, because my competitors that outrank me definatily do not do this.

The biggest and most clear drop was September 28.  I also remember that being when my ranking went out of the top 100.  It is likely best to focus on that one.

So, I come back to my first question - why am I not in the top 100?  I would understand not being in the top 5, or even the top 10, but not in the top 100 points to a definite PROBLEM.  Something is wrong with "zombie games".  Google is purposely excluding me from that group.

Hi Marie,

Thank you for your feedback.  It's hard to look at the site as it is today in response to the original issue because I've reactively tried a few changes this past year.

The major drops have been:

September 28, 2012 - organic traffic dropped overnight from 1,500 to 750.  This was the EMD update, and I actually expected my ranks would improve since Exact Match Domains tend to dominate my niche.  It actually seemed to strengthen the value of domains with "zombiegames" in the URI.

June 1, 2012 - organic traffic began a gradual drop from 3,000 per day to 1,500 per day by August 30, 2012.  This could be a Penguin issue, although the change was not sudden.

December 24, 2011 - February 1, 2012 - organic traffic dropped from 4,000 per day to 3,000 per day.  This was around the time I had redesigned my website.

I don't actually see the "zombie games" anchor texts on my pages.  Can you point to some areas that you think should be changed?  The term "zombie games" shows up in my homepage 11 times:

2 - title tag (changed March 23, previously title was "Zombie Games - Kill The Zombies!")
2 - description tag (has been this way for a few months now)
1 - main menu
1 - footer menu
1 - in an <a>tag under the logo image, inside an</a>

<a>- could this be seen as hiding a keyword?

2 - in other headings.  I should use

instead of **..

1 - in the copyright line

Thank you!
Ryan**</a>

Thanks Scott for the thoughtful answer.  I set up http://www.killthezombies.com/zombie-games/ last year for the purpose, but I never figured out how to 301 my homepage to that sub-page, and I wasn't sure if it was very smart to stop using my root directory.

What do you think about it?  I like your feeling that using the word zombie more than once in the url could be bad.

Would 301'ing www.killthezombies.com to games.killthezombies.com be your best advice?  Personally, I don't like it, but that's coming from my heart, not my SEO brain.

Since I'm not even in the top 100, I lean towards google penalizing or sandboxing me in some way.  It's hard to imagine Google thinks 100+ sites are better for "zombie games" , especially when I've got the 2nd oldest "zombie games" site in the niche.

My site is http://www.killthezombies.com.  I have historically ranked on page 1 for the term "zombie games" up until the beginning of 2012, since my site was launched in 2008.  Now I am not in the top 100 at all, since Panda.

Over the last year, I've tried many things to answer and solve this problem.  I've cleaned up onsite issues, and I've tried to be more active in link building since I historically allowed my users to build links organically.

While I don't expect to rank #1, since many of my competitors have the term "zombie games" in their domain, and they are far more aggressive on backlink building than I am, I do not understand why my domain is not even in the top 100.

It's clear I used to rank, and that Bing and DuckDuckGo still think KillTheZombies.com belongs on page 1.

I have reached out to Google to see if I've been penalized, and they actually got back to me to say I have not been.  Google Webmaster Tools shows no crawl issues or warnings.

I have many #1 rankings for terms like "zombie killing games", "kill zombies", etc.

Does Google now think my site is about "kill the zombies" and somehow not about "zombie games", which is clearly my subject matter and something I've optimized for?