My site disappeared in May 2013 & disavow didn't help

It has been more than a year. You should move on.

Then again it depends on what your site was about and how long you have had it. I would not leave my 10 year old site just because google de-ranked it or a new site with 100s of original articles.

Cheers.

This question is pretty much impossible to answer without seeing your backlinks and your site. Please ignore all the "yeah definitely do this" kind of one-liners on this forum, there are too many users who have no clue.

Panda could mean thin or low-value content. This is often the case with sites that don't rank in Google. The content could be copied from somewhere (as is the case with many Amazon affiliates), or it might just be very generic and bland. It's increasingly difficult to come up with your own content and voice in the English-speaking part of the www. People spout about "uniqueness" like it's the ultimate goal, but having the same old rehashed stuff with slightly different wording isn't likely to fool Google any more.

You might've actually disavowed links that had nothing to do with it, making the situation worse.

If Google did not message you, then your website did most likely not get directly penalized or flagged.

If all your back links were garbage, they likely all got devalued to the point where they were no longer passing you any PageRank.

A lot of things changed in the last couple years with Google, our websites WEB search went from about 600 visitors a day down to 30 around that time, and never went back again, thankfully our image search is still about 700 people a day. This is the new norm for us, what we did to compensate was a very careful advertising campaign, which pays for it self. 40% of our visitors are customer referrals these days. Profits are up.

If your website has good content, you might want to find other ways to promote it. If you can not make it worthwhile, you may need to move on.

Clone your website to a new one, change titles, images and content a little then 301 old domain to new one. This should do the trick. Get some high PR links to new domain and you should strat ranking again quite quickly.

Wow! thanks a lot for the responses.

The site has about 80 pages of content. 40 are very well written and all unique. I was always careful with what I did for seo, but when I outsourced it I couldn't be sure what was being done re backlinks and not all the links were good at all.

It's an interesting idea @Danny Shaw. Do you think that would work? I have considered that.

The site is Isabel's Typing Services

Here is the disavow file and my site is Isabel's Typing Services

Your site is fine, relax. Fine as in its still recoverable.

It does need a complete redesign and don't use the old urls again. In fact, i'd suggest using a different platform for your site.

I know this from experience, i run forums and back in 2011 i ordered a WSO from here to rank a few posts, it wasn't a good experience my site PR dropped from 3 to 2 and sp i stopped all seo completely. My site did bad a couple months after that but i continued and fast forward to today its stronger than ever. The posts i wanted to rank are deindexed from google, they don't even show up anymore. It was a softer slap i guess. And i have not disavowed a single link, i couldn't be arsed honestly.

So seems to me its the same case with you considering you have a PR2 still. I haven't checked your backlinks though but the fact it shows up fine in google means you're good. Just build high quality backlinks and change the whole site structure and urls.

Starting over may not be as difficult as you're making it. Why don't you go out and buy an expired and nicely aged domain and take all the information on your old and site and place it on your new site.

But you must be careful you have to make sure all of the pages from your old site are deleted from Google results.

Then you need to high an seo company that knows what they are doing in helping you rank your website.

Disavow takes time to work especially when it's a severe penalty.

If it's not a manual penalty one of the things you can do is:

1. Neutralize the links by spreading your domain name and URL over your main keywords.

2. Build top quality links that are relevant to your niche.

Google never sends out warnings if you are caught in an algorithmic filter. Penguin 2 launched in May 2013, there's a good chance that's what hit you. On what date did the decline start? See if it matches with known update history.
Those links might've been helping you rank before you were slapped. Then they started hurting you. Now that you've disavowed those links are essentially treated as nofollowed by Google you need better quality links to replace the old ones. Simply disavowing doesn't mean your ranking is going to come back. It only means you've suggested to Google to ignore those particular links in your profile.

When was the disavow placed? You would have to wait for a Penguin refresh to see any benefit if at all. The last Penguin was last October, should be another one soon.

Do you have lists of login/pw of sites that these SEO companies used to build your links? Have you e-mailed any web masters asking them to remove your links?
I don't think all is lost here. Google's statement is always the same old same old "write quality content". Course of action is to write every webmaster you can ask them to remove your links, make sure you haven't missed anything on your disavow, update with anything new you find, build new higher quality links, and then wait for the next refresh.

Hello
I analysis you website and found you website is ok, 252 pages are indexed in google, latest cached date is 23 June ( Home), found XML sitemap, solve canonical issues. I suggest re-optimize the website, and optimize the content, and resubmit the sitemap in search engine.

In off page, create video, and infographics and submit in respective sites, its help you.

Find dead, broken links and remove it. it will help you.

Judging by some of the other posters, I sometimes I wish you had to be vetted before you could post in this forum. However, I'm often wrong with my facts as well so I guess I can't have it both ways.

Looking at your anchor cloud in AHrefs nearly 50% of your anchor text is "Transcription Services" it's really no surprise the site was penalized. There's nothing that stands out in your link profile as particularly strong.

There are some SUPER spammy blog network blogs linking to you with exact match anchors as well. It looks like you purchased these links back in 2010.

I would get every link I could removed. Disavow everything I can't. Start diluting the anchor text with long phrase/sentence fragment anchors that contain related words, raw URL anchors, etc.. just a whole variety.

@twilightofidols Is this correct? It would be good if the update helped me again.

@hitaseo I do need to do this and have the list. Thanks

So, of all the options people have offered, which would be the top 3 actions I should do?

Hi Silver007A, your website was definitely hit by Penguin, not Panda. I have strong experience about this with my websites, don't waste your time and money with SEO companies, don't try to remove the links and disavow tool will never help, please give me a few days and I will give you solution

When people say "build quality links" how do we do that now that even guest blogging is frowned upon by Google?

I was wondering,

I have a second site with approx 80 pages of unique, good content that is positioned quite well and doens't have lots of spammy backlinks.

Both sites offer the same service and the keywords and content are similar in subject matter (not duplicated). In fact the keyword structure would be the same.

My question is, do you think moving all the content to the 1st site and setting up 301 redirects would help the seo and drive the site that was dropped last year back up the rankings?