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If you are moving down consistently then it is most likely not all of your competition suddenly started to work for that keyword.  How to fix your site is complex but you should start with looking at the page that was receiving the traffic and check for changes that were made recently, make sure that you are following best practices for your content and technical pieces.  You should also check your back links as recently many people who had used certain link building tactics have seen decreases as Google updates.

Thank you for confirming Monica, we've been doing some high quality link acquisition to the domain in order to get a bolstered profile.  I strongly suspect this is some Penguin trails still going on.

That's really interesting - I hadn't thought of the impact to the Ukraine, but that definitely makes sense. I think as you've highlighted, Google and Europe more generally is a tricky issue at the moment, what with the recent issues in Spain and the not-very-helpful suggestion that Google should 'break up'. In the UK, the chancellor has just announced a 'Google Tax' which will no doubt go down as well as the legislative changes in Spain. This article has a kind of doomsday scenario where Google pulls out of Europe, but I can't really foresee that happening. What do you reckon? It does worry me the way Google and Europe are colliding so much at the moment.

Haha! No problem.

Re-launch s directly proportional to traffic loss but proper planning and launching strategy can help you keep this drop to minimum. If you are relaunching with keeping everything document, redirections, 404, content updates and more than this temporary dip can be minimum for a small amount of time. Whenever relaunching it is important to keep few things in mind -          Get a PR for the relaunch -          Get new quality links back to the profile -          Update new content more actively. This will give Google a hint that you are serious about your business and people wants to see you more in SERP results. Hope this helps!

Hello David, What if your website allow people to post but they may have posted those ads on other websites also, would that affect an website ? What do you suggest ? Regards

FYI...my sitelink search boxes now take visitors to my site results page and no longer a secondary google serp.  guess I just had to wait a bit longer for them to update their index.

Another thing to consider is how having your brand in all caps takes up more of the allotted pixel space for the title, even if it's just a little bit more. I'm seeing a lot of titles (in Google SERPs) have their brand name moved to the front, regardless of the actual title tag, so  think about how "MOGAS: Title Tag" vs. "Mogas: Title Tag" might push important terms out. You might even consider having your titles start with the brand name since Google's adjustments seem to indicate a preference. I hope this helps!

Traffic decreased about the same on all pages. I was however surprised that the thin pages was 40% of all landing pages. This might actually be one explanation. It still doesn't explain the extremely sudden drop however, since I've read content-related algo hits are usually more gradual (over one or several weeks). I might be wrong however. Stats: 75% decrease in traffic on thin quote pages (40% of all landing pages) 80% decrease in traffic on all other content rich pages (60% of all landing pages) My plan now is to hide (NOINDEX) the thin pages.(http://moz.com/community/q/noindexing-thin-content-pages-good-or-bad)

Yes, in an addition to the canonical tag you will need to setup the redirects. But am not sure how you would do that on microsoft server.

The cache info box shown in Google's cached pages is actually present but is being hidden by the website's design, specifically the div element with the classes "wsb-canvas body".

Your welcome regards

And to you as well! Sorry if I was blunt and no disrespect intended. If you decide to keep the url then you will need to build new quality links. Even after disavowing the bad links you will not rank if you don't get good links going forward. Check out these guides http://moz.com/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building  http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies   http://www.makemoneyninja.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-link-building/ The good news is you can save the url but it will be more time consuming. Good luck!

Am guessing the easier way out of things is just to say build a blog, which in a sense means more content, fresh content, involvement from the company and maybe new links. It also allows you to attract new keywords.. so blog is not such a bad idea. I just hope that you could find more people that would devote their time on their content and website rather than just say "ohh I have an seo to do that, he does everything and we don't wanna get involved" but yes there is tens of other things other than a blog that are more important..

I've had SEO consultants swear that you should still fill out the meta keywords tag because some search engine in a galaxy far, far away is apparently still giving it some clout. I say leave it blank. The search engines that matter won't give you anything positive out of it, and you never want to find yourself in a position where you're actually getting dinged for having that field stuffed with too many keywords, or having the same keywords duplicated across every page. I also agree with Donna that it's making it easier for your competitors to see what you're targeting. If you ever have a client who demands to know why you're not including meta keywords, you can show them this blog post directly from Google that pretty definitively states that they have no ranking value: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Reviewing your client's backlink profile, I simply don't think the site has enough inbound links to trigger a Penguin hit. Sites that get hit by Penguin usually have very obvious patterns of link/anchor text manipulation, and I just don't see it. When it comes to Penguin-impacted sites, I usually see tens of thousands of inbound links coming from just a few hundred domains and an overcrowding of money keyword anchor texts. Looking over the anchor texts, I see very few money keywords (what Penguin typically goes after). I would be very surprised if this was a direct Penguin issue. Perhaps competitors that were previously held back by Penguin have recovered and are now ranking above you? I find that the Google penalty checker by Fruition.net is very useful for detecting whether a site was positively, negatively or directly impacted by a particular Google update.

Hi Andy I'm also seeing this on one of our own sites, as well as a lot of other websites in our own sector. From what I can see in webmaster tools, there was a big drop in the crawl rate around 21st of October for a few days and then the crawl rate picked up to normal levels within a few days. However, looking at the cache date of the homepage as well as other category pages, the date of 20 to 22nd of October seem fixed. But, newly added pages are being indexed. This is strange to say the least! Maz

I have extensive experience auditing sites of all types, including with and without unique URLs. I can tell you for a fact that if you fail to include a unique URL for each "unique" section, slice or "virtual" page, you will suffer regarding SEO and that will directly hurt your ability to have those "unique" variations of the site being found in search engines. Best practices dictate that if you use "infinite scroll", "window shading", multiple tabs of content within a single URL, search engines need to also be presented with the alternate "individual URL" version of each in order for them to properly identify the complete unique focus of each. This includes not only having a unique URL assigned to each "view", but also the related unique page Title, unique H1 headline tag and clickable navigation methods to reach those.

Absolutely! I will dig into this tonight and give you my honest feedback. Something I did notice that I would make a top priority is the load time of the page/site. Upon opening the page, I noticed it took a quite a bit to load. After running through Pingdom & Page Speed Insights (links below), I'd make the load time fixes a top priority for your developer. Pingdom Test Results Google Page Speed Insights I would jump all over these first and foremost but I will look through the html errors tonight and get back to you!

I can only think of 2 real alternatives that would do you any good: Create separate pages that show only the content in your click-to-expand sections (being sure to add canonical tags where appropriate) and have those pages linked to from the footer, a sitemap, or whatever section you see fit. Place the content from the click-to-expand sections in alt-text for whatever buttons / images / etc. that you're using to guide users to the content. This should, in theory, still be crawled, and would act as any other alt-text does; meaning that it would allow those who can't view your content to still see a text version of it. While it's odd that Google would denounce click-to-expand content, they've always had a weird distaste for javascript and other useful codes on occasion. Whatever you do, I think it's always important to place the value of UX over SEO. But that's just my insight. Good luck!