One of my sites took a real hit from Penguin 2.0 from Position #1 where it has been for the last 8 years to position #7. In fact, I was ranking so high, I was ranking above the Google Local listings. I have been outranked by some low quality site that uses an Exact Match domain name. The current homepage of this site has hardly any keywords mentioned on the landing page at all. what is my best course of action here?
Here are some possible actions you could take: - check your bounce rate and take action to reduce your bounce rate (this is how very important once you're in the top 10) - Keep going with your link building and emphasize more on social aspect + get some high Pr links if you can You want to try to establish your PR as much as possible as we've found that most sites we've worked with having Pr 4 or higher were less affected by updates.
You have to identify what is causing the competition to rank so high. Obviously you have been an authority for that keyword for almost a decade, so you should have at least some idea of these other sites that have defeated you. Check their backlink profiles against yours. Google prefers more natural looking link profiles. For example, a mix of exact match anchor links with name links with click here type links. If you have links from spammy sources, this is also a problem to take care of. If they don't have good content or links, the EMD is not enough anymore. There has to be more details as to why they are out-ranking a once dominate site.
Before you can clearly tell that the changes were because of an algorithm update by Google, you got to confirm that by doing several tests.Test the web page against Google Webmaster guidelines also check the historic backlink data to the page which was ranking at the top. If it has any links from spammy domains are pointing to it or if you have built any low quality links recently to the site, kindly remove them manually or use diavow link tool and then submit a reconsideration request to Google.