My website lost most of his ranking on 12-13 September in 2014. One keyword is still ranking on position 5 for a 210 searches keyword. The website is a picture quote website with not a lot of text. Was there a Google update around that time? If there was what can be done to recover from it. The website has more then 550 unique picture quotes. Any feedback would be great as I spend a lot of time and money in this website. I appreciate if somebody has time to do an SEO audit to see what is wrong. PM me for the url.
Yes, you were hit by one the google update. Picture sites lose ranks easily due to low text content. Did you hired anybody to do seo?
I did all the SEO myself. Did not do a lot of linkbuilding. People share the pictures on social media and did get some backlinks from there. But I think back links are not the problem here. Is there anyway to recover from this or can I give up on this website? I did paid somebody to build a custom wp theme and hired somebody to create custom picture quotes and upload them.
As per my knowledge most of the image sites receives 80% of traffic from social media sites. I don't know whats your goal but you can focus on improving social media along with seo. Keep a check on your competitors backlinks and add more text content wherever possible in your website/post.
No message's in Google webmaster tools. I think the problem is the low text content. But I am not sure how to solve that. Websites like brainyquote are doing very well but they are an authority website.
I would recommend exploring popular SEO blog sites to keep you updated in the behavior of the search engine and determine the possible cause of the problem by analyzing the website's history of acitivity.