Ranking Is Going Down Week After Week

[James Peterson]

We have been in our industry for more than 14 Years period of time...we have built very good BRAND reputation also..but from May 24th 2012 (Second Penguin Update) my site rankings are going / slipping week over week, even we have removed MOST of the back links to the website, content updates, removed most of the keyword specific pages, validation changes and contacted affiliates to place "nofollow" attribute to our links as well...even though the mentioned changes also site NOT able to pick it up for State specific keywords, mostly. We are loosing almost 45% of SEO traffic from various keywords.

One of our affiliate websites linked to my website from every page with different anchor text links...so will that be considered as un-natural linking? All of my sub-domains are ranking very well after Panda and Penguin Updates. but main domain website completely loosing its traffic..Please advice us to get our positions back?

Linking to Sub-domains from Main website, will it be considered as Negative? Please advice us.

Waiting for your replies...
Chris Salts

[edited by: tedster at 2:32 pm (utc) on Jul 18, 2012]

[SnowMan68]

even we have removed MOST of the back links to the website

This could be a big reason why. It is hard to know what links Google was counting and which ones it wasn't. By removing most of your links you could have taken a lot of the authority away and this is most likely why your rankings are slipping.

[James Peterson]

But the amount of back links we have is almost more than 50% compared with competitor websites...

[edited by: tedster at 3:44 pm (utc) on Jul 18, 2012]

[aristotle]

You might have to wait for the next Penguin update to see some of the effects of the changes you've made. The update will probably include a "data refresh" of the data underlying the Penguin part of the algorithm. The backlinks are apparently a factor in other parts of the algorithm besides Penguin, so as Snowman68 said, the effects of their removal could already be showing up in other ways.

[smithaa02]

James...if you were affected by Penguin, you should have two rankings.

One is a pre-penalty ranking that is how your site will rank without penguin. You used to be able to access with by using the -amazon.com trick. I no longer think this works, but you should be able to misspell your key-phrase slightly and find out (sans-penguin) where you should be ranking. If that dipped as well, than you probably lost too much page juice. If that did not dip, you probably are still being penalized for some reason.

That you continue to dip...suggests an interesting question. If Penguin has only run twice...then why do you and so many others still see daily (significant) changes in the rankings. It's as if perhaps part of Penguin is constantly being tweaked, but not the whole algorithm.

[Robert Charlton]

But the amount of back links we have is almost more than 50% compared with competitor websites...

Simply counting the number of backlinks is not a good way to determine anything useful.

Quality of the backlinks, relevance and independence of the linking pages, and how they were acquired all enter into it.

[bwnbwn]

Linking to Sub-domains from Main website, will it be considered as Negative? Please advice us

No this is natural you should link to them from the main site, but how many are we talking about?

removed MOST of the back links to the website

This is jumping the gun and should have been thought out with more care.