Sudden Drop in Google

[BoatOutfitters]

This post is deleted!

[AlanMosley]

I c ant tell you why your rankings have dropped maybe Google has found a load of doggy links and dismissed them, I don’t know.
But I can tell you have a lot of problems in your site that are not helping your rankings.
You have 40 pages excluded by robots.txt, you have links pointing to them pouring link juice into a black hole. If you really don’t want that indexed, you should add a meta “no-index, follow” tag to them, then the link juice will flow into and back out of the pages.
You also have over 800 un-necessary redirects, each one leaking link juice. I say un-necessary because the links are internal links and you could point then at the correct destination and avoid the redirect and the leak. An example.
The link to "http://www.outdoornativitysets.com/store/p/519-Nativity-Angel-2-Piece-Set-.aspx" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.outdoornativitysets.com/two-piece-nativity-angel-figures.html".

You have over 800 broken links, I did not look at all of them but most looked like they were to images, not as bad as links to pages but still not good.

There are various other problems but these look like your main ones

[nvs.nim]

Like Alan said, there are some on-page errors that you should fix as soon as possible.

Other thing you should do when optimizing your site is to record all actions you take to (try to) improve rankings:

Make annotations in your Analytics suite, that way it's easier to get a starting point when you see sudden increase or drops in traffic.

[virtualhandshake]

Hi Erinn,

I think you should also take care of some pretty basic Onpage factors such as:

1. Add some content with 5-6 instances of your main keyword.Also, use synonyms of your main keyword in your content. Most importantly, write content that is very useful for your website's human visitors sprinkling keywords in the right amount.
2. Add a h1 tag (not more than one per page). Use your main keyword in h1 tag.
3. bold/emphasize and/or italicize keywords where necessary.
4. Use subheadings with h2/h3 tags.
5. Add product description to your products (it's not directly related to your question,though)

My two cents worth.

wish you luck!

P.S. I am from India and I did a search on google US with "outdoor nativity sets" and you are at 2nd position on page 2.

[BoatOutfitters]

Wow thank you everyone for your suggestions. We're going to take all of this and factor it in to our next steps. We really appreciate your help!

Thanks again,

Erinn

[BoatOutfitters]

Hi Alan,

Hope you don't mind me asking another quick question. I'm not quite sure how to fix the un-necessary redirects. We read that clearing up your URL without the "store/p/519...aspx" is better for SEO - so we created custom URLs to avoid that. Is that wrong?

Also our SEO Moz report says we only have one 4xx error (this is a broken link, correct?) I'm sorry - again we are brand new at this and trying to figure it out. 800 seems a bit overwhelming and I'm not sure how I can find those.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you!

Erinn

[AlanMosley]

The links were to images, as I stated thats not so bad, but not the best.

i see a lot of redirects like this

The link to "http://www.outdoornativitysets.com/store/p/519-Nativity-Angel-2-Piece-Set-.aspx" has resulted in HTTP redirection to http://www.outdoornativitysets.com/two-piece-nativity-angel-figures.html.

you have a redirect from aspx, to html, there is no difference or advantage between the 2.

what you want is not extention at all, somthing like this.  '/keyword /another-keyword' to gain an advatage.

This is very easy to do on IIS7 server, unfoutunatly you are hosted on IIS6, this document shows you how , about half way down the page , URL-rewrite
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/microsoft-technologies-and-seo-web-development

What the main problem is with how you have done your url-rewrites, is that you have internal links pointing to the old urls, causing a 301 redirect to the new urls, this leaks link juice every redirect leaks link juice.

Since the are internal links you should make sure that they point to the finaly destination directly without a redirect, and without a link juice leak.

in the document above, you will see i listed 3 thinks needed to do when creating a url-rewrite,

1. create a rewrite rule

2. create a corresponding 301 redirecte for any external links that may point to the old urls since you can not correct the external links

3. you need to either correct every internal link, or create a outgoing urlrewrite so that visitors only see new urls, and therefor any new external links will be to the new urls.

I would look at moving your site to IIS7 server, as it is a lot easer to work with than IIS6

[BoatOutfitters]

Thank you so much! We're adjusting and taking everything in. We appreciate your help.