Possible Reasons for 40% Drop in Google since January?

[holdtheonion]

Hello:

I know this is long - but I kept it as succinct as I could to explain the situation - but everyone of the brilliant people on here insight is so greatly appreciated in advance.

There has been more than a 30% decline in traffic mostly from Google on a site with an 11 year presence on the web, 5 page rank (historically 6), fairly good quality backlinks (but they are old).

I cannot pinpoint a smoking gun (such as a specific penalty) - if it's just not attrition in demand for the product itself which there is plenty of evidence for.

But I practice only white hat, so I don't know what it is.

I do not engage right now in link building because my time to work on SEO is very limited.

We have a few common keywords that cannot be avoided (because there are no good synonyms) so there is a high density for one word especially all over the site.

From some websites (like tidbits) we have in Google Webmaster account tens of thousands of backlinks. How serious is this (FYI - they're not new though)

Because of some unflattering reviews from sites with strong authority, the number of click throughs vs. impression in Google Search has dropped dramatically - I think a big part of it is that because the reviews drove down CT ratio.

Interestingly, the number of CTs from Adwords has also dropped off significantly, and I was told by Adwords specialist that declining organic traffic does affect the Adwords traffic to - in fact, they're not even using our daily budget for Adwords as they used to.

The site also doesn't pick up quality organic backlinks as it used to, and the anchor link text is almost always the same - a product name.

Plus, the site was banned in 2008 by Google (from a black hat keyword stuffing that I discovered happened in another dept.) and only after really working hard was it reinstated by reconsideration request.

Site traffic from Google has never fully reached it's potential since then.

Also, text prices were removed from Buy Now buttons even though the prices were textually part of the buttons for years (could this be some penalty?)

**Is it possible that Google is taking the ban history, the poor reviews, the decline in CTs to impressions on the site, the huge decline (75% over four years) in "search volume" or "search interest" (according to Google Trends) for the site's main product name and just using all of this to keep downgrading the site? If true, wouldn't the page rank be diving down to anywhere from 0 to 2 (or is that not relevant at all?) **

There are no messages of a penalty or anything else in the official Webmaster account for this site.

Any insight anyone is able to provide is much appreciated.

[loopyal]

Phil,

This is the $64,000 question.

without the URL, it is hard to tell.

Do you have a lot of pages?

Does SEOMoz say you have a lot of duplicates?

What does Google Webmaster Tools say about duplicates?

SEOMoz and GWT said my site did and I was fixing them, but nothing improved rankings.

So I wrote some programs and did my own tests.

I found 30,000 duplicates. (It is a big site)

I have fixed almost all of the duplicates and I'm working on preventing that happening again.

Also, we had a lot of pages that initially had value for readers, but now don't, so I have deleted them.

I can't tell you if this helps yet, because I haven't finished the work

• I've been working on this part for 200 hours, so I will be very glad when it is finished.

Also, if you have very old pages, as I have, you should check to see if there are links out to other sites that are no longer out there, or are not what they used to be - and remove them. I found 3500 of them, just from 2005, so I have quite a way to go, to clean them up.

[loopyal]

One more thing - separate to the other note. It is likely that google has already destroyed some of the sites that used to link to you, so that is another reason you could have less power.