Penguin issue or wrong linkbuilding strategy?

[smokin_ace]

Quite a few month ago before Google implemented Penguin algorithm I had a great situation.

After 24th of April my ranking and traffic dropped instantly. Here a a screenshot from my GA: http://imageshack.us/a/img15/4717/screenshot20121013at120.png

I have reviewed my linkbuilding strategy and on-page optimisation however some keywords which dropped out of page 5 don't want to come back even close to page 1.

I would appreciate a professional advise on how my strategy, on-page optimisation can be improved.

For those who are interested here is my domain: http://www.desertsafariabudhabi.ae

The keyword which is more interesting for me is "desert safari abu dhabi".

Thanks in advance,

Russel

[MarieHaynes]

This is an interesting case.  Your analytics data definitely looks like a Penguin hit site...but when I look at your backlinks you only have 3 domains linking to you.  Penguin is almost always about GROSS abuse of anchor texted keywords in backlinks.  I just can't see that happening with only having 3 backlinking domains.

I can think of a few possible reasons for your traffic to look like this:

1. Do you have a domain that you are redirecting to this one?  If the backlink profile of that domain was affected by Penguin then this would directly affect your current domain.

2. It's possible that one or more of the 3 domains that link to you were affected by Penguin and therefore, you lost the link juice from that domain on April 24.

3. When did you create this site?  It's possible that the initial traffic on your graph was a honeymoon boost that a new site often gets and you just happened to drop at the end of April.

4. You dropped from about 40 visits per day to about 15 or so.  It's possible that you were holding the #1 position but a competitor came in and beat you.  A drop from #1 to #2 or #3 could result in a decrease of traffic like this.  Mind you, you mentioned that keywords dropped to page 5 so this is likely not the case.

5. There could be some other issue that has caused you to drop such as malware, a bad robots.txt problem, etc.

Edit:  I see that ahrefs reports 75 backlinking domains with your keyword being the most prominent anchor so it is possible that you were directly hit by Penguin after all.

We haven't seen too many credible reports of Penguin recovery yet.  The general thought is that if you can remove all or the majority of your spammy backlinks then you can recover but seeing as there were very few reported recoveries after the refresh Oct 5, no one really knows if that is possible.

There is a way to recover by migrating penalized pages to new pages though...but it's complicated and you would have to start fresh with a clean backlink profile for those pages.