Page Over-optimized?
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Unfortunately, it's going to be difficult to tell what the problem is just by eye balling the site. Hopefully these questions will give you a starting point.
Have you checked your back links to make sure your site still has strong link juice coming in or any at all?
Was there any competitors who recently entered your target market that might have pushed you down?
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Theres a few possable things here.
First the page might have recived a 'freshness' boost, as it is an offer. Which would explain an excellent ranking with few links.
The page also has a /lot/ of html errors which could cause serch engines to misintuprate the page if their bad enough.
The overlay ad might be seen as spammy, and the content could be seen as thin.
As for over optimisation, it seems within tollerance to me, but theres to meny on and off page issues to be sure.
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Your page is either otimised, or it is not, it may be at its optimum, but it cant be over the optimum.
unless you have keywords stuffed it and gone un-natural i would not worry.
I would be more worried about the delayed pop up you have, it would seem to me you are trying to show one thing to google and anouther to everyone else. It would also send users away. I would simply go to the next site in the search after seeing that.
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Thanks for the response! I have tracked the backlinks & haven't seen any major drops overall? Is there any tools available that would show an overall link count for a particular site overtime? Also I wouldn't say this was a competitor move, as much as something happening on our site.
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This page http://onefrugalchick.com/2011/03/22/free-mio-drink-mix-sample-new-product/ ranks higher for the term & was posted around the same time as ours. So I'm not sure if it would just have been a freshness boost?
What tool are you using to crawl this page to find all the html errors? That would be helpful to find them & to start fixing them.
Do you have any resources/articles you could send about a page having an issue because a popup promoting the site? I'd be curious to look into this to see if there could be any issues.
Thin Content: This was my original impression, but after the Panda update we stuck around for at least 2 months, before anything happened. I wouldn't have suspected an update like that to take this long, so I'm suspicious about it being something else? Do you know if it could have delayed by two months?
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Hmm...you're the second person to question the popup promoting our eBook. Can you provide any articles that discuss how this would affect our Organic rankings? Could this really cause that much of an issue?
If I turned it off & waited to see how long it would take to get better search results, how long do you think I would need to wait to see results? I'd be fine running a test on this. At the moment, we do get a good amount of subscribers, so it would be a loss if we lost it.
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Actually I just pulled up my notes to find out when we added the popup to the site & it was on May 19th, which would have came after the traffic had dropped for these pages.
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I am not saying rankings or traffic will drop, but it will turn people off. it turns me off, people do not ask for a pop up, so it is a turn off when you get one.
but honestly, i thought it would be obvious to everone that blocking someones screen with a pop up is annoying, i didnt think you would need an article on it.
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K, thats a good opinion, but not the question at hand. I understand that it turns off some visitors, but we do it because it works
If it was in some way affecting our SEO, we would look into other alternatives.
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I am suprised that it works, but then not everybody thinks like me.
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Of course it does...we have people coming to the site looking for coupons. Our popup is a free eBook on how to save money using coupons. It doesn't popup every time, only for first time visitors.
Do we get 100% of the people submitting an email..of course not. Does anyone get annoyed, of course. Do we get higher conversion rates than without out..of course. That's why we use it!
If we judged everything by the cover, we'd never get anywhere. All the decision made on a site, need to be tested & measured. Hence what I was asking above in the article. If someone had data & ran some tests to suggest that a popup would have an effect on a popup, then that would be helpful information to have as I'm trying to address the drop in rankings.
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If you have done your homework, then so be it, but i am surprised.
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On the html, I personally just checked your source. I also use a Firefox extension that auto-validates it while I look at it which is great for an eyeball. You can find it here http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/
On Panda, it's run on a regularish basis, often with a change to the algorithm, so it is possible your page was re-classified.
As for on-page ads, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/just-how-smart-are-search-robots, this article points out the the crawlers take into account above the fold content, and are rendering the page to determine this.
My greatest suspicion would still be that you lost some kind of freshness boost, especially as it's a page detailing an offer. Or alternatively lost a few very powerful links to the offer (knocked off the page of a list of offers e.t.c.)
Also on the ad, I'm with everyone else in surprise that putting up that ad didn't massively increase your bounce rate of the page and reduce the conversion rate of the page for the offer (as opposed to the e-book). There was an article recently pointing out that Google may (as in it's the subject of debate) be taking bounce rate into account, though that would only explain why it's not recovering as opposed to the initial drop if you ran the ad after the drop.
Generaly, you would expect your first time visitors to be leaving the site and never returning when you use such an ad, which could trigger such issue. One such article is here -> http://www.searchenginejournal.com/actual-bounce-rate-vs-bounce-rate-and-why-the-difference-matters-for-seo/31852/
I would try improving the pages html, fatten up the content somewhat and disable the ad for the page, then wait a couple months to see if there is any change. If not then it at the very least rules out the most likly culprits.
Other avenues you can explore are to investigate other sitewide changes, see if you can check historical link data for the page to check if you lost any powerful links, and to ensure your not just being legitimatly reduced in rankings by better competitor pages.
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Awesome..thanks for the actionable items, I'll jump into them & see what I can find. Thanks!
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