| If this site used to rank well for things like "photo pillows", it's not because it was the best site to show users, but rather, it was because the site was being propped up by self made backlinks. Here are some of the links that are all anchored with the word "photo pillows": http://www.bobmarketing.com/links/page_Business_Marketing_17... http://stardir.info/stardir/subcategory.asp?IDsubcate=494&of... http://www.cyberpathway.com/cgi-bin/recip/internet/recip.cgi The majority of the backlink profile is made up of self made low quality directory links. It's possible that the Penguin algorithm has realized this and as a result is not trusting links to the site. But, it's also possible that Google has just gotten better at not counting this type of link when it comes to ranking. It's also possible that the site is under a manual penalty (which would be evident by looking at the Webmaster Tools manual spam action tool.) When I look at the site's keyword positions on semrush.com, it appears that the rankings started a gradual decline as of May 2013. There was a Penguin refresh on May 23, so this is certainly a possibility. If the site is affected by Penguin, then in order to make the algorithm trust the site again, she's going to have to disavow each of the links that are self made. If there are good, truly natural links in the profile then she stands a chance of ranking well again. But, the likelihood is that the site won't get back to the previous rankings by just clearing up the backlinks because those rankings were not deserved in the first place. It's not Google's fault that this site is not ranking well now. But, one could argue that it was Google's heavy reliance on links and on a system that could be scammed that allowed this site to reign for the time that it did. |