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I have a website (www.equispot.com) that has been indexed for almost 2 years in Google. I managed to get myself on the first page (average position 6-8) on Google for my target keyword of "horses for sale" and held there pretty solidly for months.

Suddenly, with no changes to the site, traffic from Google dropped like a rock in early May. I slowly fell in position until now I'm sitting at the bottom of page 4.

I have never hired an SEO firm, have not used any "black hat" techniques that Google would have penalized me for in their May update, etc. I'm not familiar enough with SEO to know how to look at link profiles, etc. to tell if there's something wrong.

I've run my site through a DNS checker and it came back with no errors. Google Webmaster Tools shows no messages or notices of any kind, just a drop in traffic. GWT also shows only 2 server errors and 1 404.

Is there anyone who can tell me by quickly checking my domain if there's an obvious reason that my traffic would have fallen so far, something that I can fix?

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This coincides with the Penguinn 2.0 rollout. You should read up on what Penguin targets and then identify what may cause it to apply to your site. Then fix those issues and wait for Google to (hopefully) return your rankings.

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  • Yeah but the problem is that I've created all the links personally (unless there's negative SEO at play which I doubt, I'm not big enough for someone to worry about). All of the links I've created are from sites in my niche.
    – Scott Schluer
    Jun 26, 2013 at 14:31
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As John indicated, the timing of Google's Penguin update seems to correlate with your site's changes in SERP. One of the objectives of that update was to combat "blackhat" techniques like Keyword Stuffing.

I had a look at your website and immediately noticed that your keyword phrase horses for sale appeared at least 10 times in your content, which wasn't very lengthy so the density of that might appear to Google as over-stuffing. I'm sure this was just inadvertently done for lack of a better way to name things.

I would suggest addressing that, and try to learn if other factors related to the update might be impacting your ranking as well. Here's a reference to help get you started: The Definitive Guide to Penguin Friendly SEO

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