My site is only just scraping it on to the first page for a high volume search term and I think it's because of penguin - and it's annoying that my competitor is still ranked at number 2 for this term. I remember chasing this website as my primary competitor in the old days and eventually I got my site to rank for 3 separate pages, all above this competitor. But it’s like I have been time warped back to 3 years ago and suddenly I’m at the bottom of the pile again. I know I am biased towards my own website but I cannot understand this. My competitor’s website is largely neglected and should frankly be taken offline as it does not offer any value to visitors – it’s broken and has not been updated since the 'provider' it uses started blocking free SMS robot sites.
It is ironic that I actually made content changes to my website to reflect the change in the availability of SMS from the provider on my site, though I think this was not the major reason for my plummeting search position as I have since reworked a lot of the old content back with very little effect on my rankings. I have to unfortunately suspect that the primary reason for my drop is the Google Penguin update, though frustratingly I don’t really understand exactly why it is affecting me (I did not receive any warnings or recommendations in Google Webmaster tools).
I have never paid for any links and I have close to 4000 followers on Twitter (hundreds of whom are genuinely engaged); 200 Likes on one Facebook page and another 82 likes on another Facebook page; I have more than 60 genuine +1s on Google. My competitor has zero social presence and is on the same domain as a blog that was last updated in 2009 – This makes it hard for me to believe that social media is a really important factor in SEO. Never mind the fact that my site actually works, but also looks much cooler than my competitor’s, loads faster and provides a much better user experience (I have received compliments saying as much from several users over the years).
This is a rant mostly I guess, but if anyone would like to add anything I would appreciate it... I would basically like to know how I can identify if penguin is responsible for the drop in my rankings and what can I do about it? Clearly something was working before that isn't working any more...
Thanks
