Just wondering if anyone knows why the mentioned website dropped from top ten positions on google to 30-100+ places two seperate times this year. I’ve read everything about the shuffle, bad links, etc. I’m stumped, can you help?
When you say “dropped”, in what circumstances? Is this from typing in certain key words, or the site name, or …?
Hi,
Might be it is because of Google Algorithm (Penguin) which is changed on 24 April 2012. But don’t worry my friend do your work again it gain rank again. Keep it up…
Regards
Amit 
Usually it happens if Google find some bad links pointing to your website or duplicate content. Check your content and backlinks carefully and try to update the content on some important pages. Google may reconsider your site quickly!
Thanks everybody. Ralph, specifically I meant when someone searches for TOEFL in KSA or TOEFL in Saudi or TOEFL in Jeddah, etc.
My positions dropped right around April 24!
Hm, amitacs might be on to something there. All the same, if it’s any consolation, I tried those three terms you gave and here were the results for me in Australia:
“TOEFL in KSA” - page 3
“TOEFL in Saudi” - page 1 (3rd item) 
“TOEFL in Jeddah” - page 1 (6th item)
PS: I wasn’t logged in to Google at the time.
Penguin may have something to do with this. Just make sure you are posting quality content that is unique and I am sure you will hit the #1 spot again at one point.
Thanks Peter and Ralph. My site is clean, with all original articles, focused on my specific and local topics. It is regularly updated, and the content should keep every visitor who is looking for our type of information very interested.
I have recovered from a previous drop in rankings back up to #1 in many of our targeted keywords. Over the past week (after the latest drop), the site has been slowing creeping back up to higher positions in the results. I really hope I’m just going through a quick penguin recovery.
Is there any service that I could use to check my website that would identify any possible content that could be the reason for a google penalty?
BTW I am not using any sneaky SEO tactics. All I do is provide solid, focused content, with good titling and tagging, the old fashioned way that works long term.
Hi,
If you use analytics software like Google Analytics, you should check your stats for the past few days. If your traffic has dropped from what it was since last couple of days and has remained consistent, your website might have been penalized.
However, there could be various other reasons sudden traffic drops so make sure to analyze whether you still rank higher for your best keywords and haven’t lost traffic on them.
Also make sure to check that you are still getting traffic for those keywords for past few days or not. Another thing worth checking is to see whether you have lost traffic from referring sites like Facebook and Twitter too.
A thorough check of these things should give you a clear idea on whether or not you have been penalized by Google.
The full article can be found here.
Regards
Amit
Thanks again, Amit!
Google has always been mentioning stuff about focusing on quality content creation to appeal to the visitors rather than forcing your way up the search result rankings. I know you’re not doing anything shady, but there must have been something that you may have not noticed that has caused your site to be penalized. Have you tried checking your backlinks? I really do hope that your site can recover from the Penguin blast from a few days ago. From what I see, I think you’re not the only innocent site owner that’s been hit by the update. Just keep it up with the content creation, and you’ll be back up to where you were.
I think it is important to differentiate between a site being penalized and losing ranking position because of algorithmic changes. I got hit by Penguin to, and after making some changes submitted for reconsideration through GWT. I have had a reply which included the following statement:
“We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site’s ranking in Google. There’s no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.”
In other words it has not been given a penalty as such. If anyone is in doubt I would suggest taking the same action, as at least they would find out whether or not they have actually been penalized.
Hi SaudiTOEFL! It can be Google Dancing. A mechanism in which Google drops a keywords from its actual position to somewhere and after a couple of days it fetches it back to its normal or somewhere nearer position.
4/25/2012 we had massive lost of impressions and get same answer from Google. At this moment we are going higher, but we didn’t make any changes, new content and some ads as always.
My site also drop from first page to fifth page (but only for one keyword :)) The reason is that , that I had to many backlinks for that anchor and for Google that was unnatural
Really appreciate the help. Slowly creeping back up now…
Sadly, I’m at #14 for the keyword phrase: TOEFL in Saudi Arabia.
I was #1 for months, rightly so - the whole website is about TOEFL in Saudi Arabia, good original content, visitors get what they’re looking for, no ads, no bad links.
The competition for my specific key words and phrases is so low, THIS PAGE comes up #5 in google now, just because it has “TOEFL in Saudi Arabia” in the title! (w/ higher PR of course)
I took a look at incoming links and found that there are at least 30-40 of Russian websites linking to my site, a lot of weird stuff (porn, etc.), but here’s the thing - I didn’t buy any links from anyone. I am the only admin of the site! Could a competitor have gone so far as to pay for a lot of bad links to my site to get me penalized?!
“Referrer spam” is common. These sites send random robots to your site making it look as though they have followed a link from the pr0n site, in the hope that their URL will pop up on your referrer list and you’ll be intrigued enough to click on it. It’s highly unlikely there is any actual link there, and even if there was then you don’t usually need to worry. Bad inbound links shouldn’t affect your rankings (bad outbound links are a different matter), because then – as you say – it would be trivially easy for a competitor to set up loads of bad links pointing to your site and get you hammered. Google is too smart to let that happen.