Hi,
Since June 15 (that's when the dropped happened) 2 client sites of mine which service the same widget at different locations dropped in rankings heavily.
The niche is definitely not spam (nothing like pay day loans, or viagras) but absolutely legitimate family friendly entertainment businesses with high local reputation.
So I'm trying to figure out what exactly caused this and if you can help me here that'd be so great.
1st location's website
Has no bad links (0 link building done at all) all absolutely natural links and from relevant sites.
Well designed content rich website with nice info - almost every business in this niche has this kind of website - nothing more nothing less. Just unique information about the business.
No Manual action given
On Penguin 3.0 date site's rankings skyrocketed to be rolled back to after Payday Loan results in several days.
2nd location
Has some bad links - previous SEOs did some "local optimization" resulting in a bunch of bad links. Some are removed, some are disavowed
There are some thin pages with a picture/announcement or very small text.
No manual action given.
Same situation with Penguin as for the 1st location.
So questions
1. Was it really Payday Loan update - it doesn't make sense to me really but the date corresponds to this update. Moreover as said above sites aren't in these spam niches at all.
2. How can both sites be effected with one being in full accordance with the rules second one - breaking the rules. They are interlinked, hosted on the same IP and so on, but is this enough for a penalty to be passed to another domain?
3. Can we say the Penguin and PayDay loan are somehow tied or not or can we say PayDay Loan is mini Penguin? Asking because of the Penguin update up and downs.
Follow up question. Can local packs be effected from PayDay Loan update or not?
Thanks.
