Penalized?

[jenadams]

In late November, our site experienced a dramatic loss in serps across several pages.  Since this time, we have been trying all sorts of recommendations that included adding the +1 button, adding Facebook like button, differentiation link types and so on.  At the time that all of this happened we also noticed a few problems in GWT concerning inaccessible pages, pages not found and other problems.  We have come really close to fixing all of the technical problems, our pages load quickly and have even added the +1 buttons.  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any improvement.  Now people are saying that when our site was built, about 5-years ago, the url's had keywords stuffed into them.  Admittedly, they are long but from what I have read making a series of redirects may not be an optimal solution and will take a long time to see any potential benefits.

All of the listed url's in the image below have been on the first page in google for the listed search phrase.  While they are still indexed, they are very difficult to find.

I would like to solicit the help from people with real world experience in diagnosing a problem like this one?  Is this an offsite problem, onsite problem, hosting issue or something else?

Thank you

Untitled-1_1329083648.gif pages_1329084893.gif

[Kotkov]

Don't worry about facebook or g +1's, you have a major problem with website. It looks like your traffic droppped big time right after one of panda's updates.

You have a lot of duplicate content pages, links are very long, some pages have very high keyword density and so on.

I would suggest to order a full technical and seo audit from professionals.

[jenadams]

But is this is true then why aren't all of our pages affected?  Furthermore, the seomoz tools for suggest that the French page earns an "A". Furthermore, from what I have read, it doesn't make much sense to change up a URL because the improvements are very substantial.  Any thoughts?

[Kotkov]

I don't think that the problem is only in url.

What do you mean only several pages were affected?

graphs.php?domain=themarketinganalysts.com&db=us&type=1&w=300&h=200&lc=e43011&dc=e43011&l=en

[jenadams]

We have a lot of other pages that still maintain top 5 listings. Here is one example:

http://tinyurl.com/n687b8

[jenadams]

By the way, THANK YOU for helping.   What else do you think it is?  I realize Panda had a freshness update, but the other sites that we compete with never change their content.  We had some technical problems but for the most part, they have been fixed.

[jenadams]

Here is a link that still maintains good positioning.

http://tinyurl.com/n687b8

[jenadams]

Here is a link that still maintains good positioning.

http://tinyurl.com/n687b8

[Kotkov]

Jenadams,

I see some issues from the beginning but I don't see that they would drop traffic like that. I can take a closer look next weekends when I have some time. If it helps my skype is in my profile.

Regards,

Serge

[jenadams]

That would be great!

Thank you

[JarnoNijzing]

@serge: does a high keyword density penalise your rankings? I used to make sure i was at 2-5%....

[JarnoNijzing]

For starters i would suggest redirecting those very very very keyword spamming url's to more user friendly urls:

french-translation.html or something.

From you analytics picture-> all out of nothing your visitors dubble and out of nothing they drop? Something you did prehaps?

[jenadams]

It wasn't really all or nothing.  Most of these were near the top of the second page or somewhere near the middle of the second page.  They all sort of entered the first page one after the other.  I'm not really sure if anything was done off page to cause this sort of penalty.  We do try to build links but I don't know if some of these were looked at as bad links or if some lost a lot of value.  I know that at the time the drop took place we did have some technical problems with our site that took a while to fix.  I can't say for sure if those problems cause the penalty either. Aside from doing a lot of SEO in-house we also have a low cost provider and they assured us that all of their activities were legit.

I know we have some bad links that were mostly due to scrapers who stole some of our content, re-wrote it and left a portion of our URL on a page.  I think this sort of thing happens to all sites.  The vast majority of our links should be good though.  WMT tools shows that we have a little over 220,000 links to our pages.