My site has been dropping, not sure why!

[OneManBand]

My site has been dropping in the rankings, not sure - my metrics seem better than my competitors. Historically I have been a very stable #2 for my main term, but now it's down to 7!

According to SEO Moz, my domain authority is 32, while my better performing competitors are are 26, 11, and 1! Have more links than they do. Trying to think it through, not sure what is happening. My home page bounces at a low 20%-ish, other Google Analytics are good. I have a company Facebook account, occasionally upload YouTube vids, do online press releases, etc. I do have to target several metros scattered across the state, while my competitors usually focus on one major metro.

I do have some SEO Moz errors, which focus on dup content due to our web editor's naming system. An example would be domain.com/keyword-keyword-i-14 vs. domain/differnet keyword-different better keyword-i-14. 14 would be the actual page number. Our system lets me change the page title keywords, as I've added new links and pages over the years there are some dupes.

The only major change is I've added a password protected section for sales rep materials. The hosting/web guru firm we use has assured me Google doesn't see pages behind the password portection.

Not sure if Google is testing a new SERP formula. All social media or non-website results seem to have dropped out of search for my terms. Just local business sites like mine and some directory sites remain.

Any advice or private consult would be greatly appreciated as I am a ... self taught 'OneManBand' for high tech marketing in our company.

Thanks

[KaneJamison]

Has your traffic dropped, or just your rankings?

Are you going off of your SEOMoz dashboard-reported rankings, or what shows up when you search on your own computer?

None of the stuff you mentioned sounds like it would cause issues. The part in paragraph 3 concerns me - if you've been changing the URLs frequently over the years be sure to make sure you have 301 redirects in place for any pages that are showing a 404 error. Log into OpenSiteExplorer and Google Webmaster Tools to find where those are showing up.

[OneManBand]

Since this happened, my growth in vists has become flat with last year (Google Analytics). I had been way up in visits all year. I see the same new, lower ranking on several different PCs checked at different locations.

And I'm going with the errors reported thru SEOmoz

Can you give me more advice on using OpenSite Explorer and Webmaster Tools?

[KaneJamison]

In Open Site Explorer, click on the Top Pages tab. It should be a list of every page OSE knows about on your site, in order of Page Authority. Under status code, anything that says 404 is a missing file or an incorrect link.

In GWT, on your site dashboard, there will be a Crawl Errors section in the top right. There might be an entry labeled "Not Found." If so, click on it and you'll be given a list of pages giving a 404 error to Google's spiders.

The solution is to either fix the incorrect links if they're under your control, or implement a 301 redirect if the links are not under your control.

• Read more about redirects here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
• More info on how redirects work: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

I'll write a different entry regarding the traffic, but this one hopefully answers how to fix any 404 errors on the site.

[OneManBand]

Thanks for the detailed info, I'm going to check it all out and then post and update.