Rankings dropped with no noticeable reason for a good site

[aivaras]

This post is deleted!

[RobertFisher]

Hello Aivaras,

First, it is helpful if there is a better timeline, something like this: Site went live in February. PR 2-3 as of Aug. 2, then PR = zero as of Aug 3. We can then compare it to updates from Google, etc. Also, what pages were ranking?

One thing may be impacting you and that is your being a relatively new site. Often we see newer sites jump up in the rankings and sit for a short time only to fall quickly thereafter. The reasons I am aware of are anecdotal, but consider it the Google test.

The vertical you are in is highly competitive. I did non personalized searches on "online coupons" and "promotion codes." I attached a screen shot of the first showing that the top ten are all PA=70-80 with the exception of one that is in 60's and one in 50's. That is a lot to push out of the way.

When you say your main pages, I chose home page and top stores. interestingly, when I clicked on top stores, I could not use the back button and I went to screaming frog to run the site. All looked normal with one exception: The url did not show... Then I ran hellcoin.com/topstores: returned as a 404, I also ran top coupons and got another 404. (the back button/forward button is likely an Ajax issue - here is a helpful link)

A question I would ask is have you looked at your analytics to follow the traffic funnel? Do you have any error reports in GWT? etc.

I hope this assists you in finding the issue(s).

Robert

[aivaras]

Hi Robert,

First of all big thanks for spending time on our issue. I will go through the timeline in more details:

The site went live on May 2012 and started doing SEO from June 2012.The main pages are index page which we target for all main keywords 'coupon codes',' promo codes', 'online coupons' and 4 store pages which are macys, kohls, amazon, barnes and noble. After doing SEO for 2 months we got all these pages with PR2 and barnes and noble page got even PR 3. You are totally correct about ranking for index page, it never ranked for us as the competition is tight on that and requires time to get into, but we started to rank on all store pages with barnes and noble fluctuating in 11-20 position, macys 3 page, kohls 3-4 page, amazon 9th page (also very competitive one). Also we saw that plenty of other store pages started to get some visitors and ranked in page 1-2 which are less competitive ones. It stayed for few weeks like that and suddenly everything dissapeared up until now for ~2.5month.

During that time we found many issues for inner seo and rectified them all, with few worth to mention:

1. There was a duplicate of JS code in footer content on all pages so we moved this whole JS part to external JS file to avoid duplicates as now google seems to read some parts of JS.

2. We found that somehow over 120 pages including index page got a duplicate of 50.22.226.90/pathway indexed which started to appear on search queries so we put canonical on index page and 301 redirect to all pages and now IP addresses are down to 15 in google search. By the way this IP is our dedicated sever IP address.

3. We found that there was some parts which goole saw differently than the user in store pages and index, we corrected them all as well and now the content is identical to google and user.

4. Did a sitemap for google so it could crawl whole site easier since it has 900 store pages and plenty of categories.

Also you are correct about the issues with top stores and top coupons pages, we still didn't rectified the issue with these pages but they are not very important at the moment.

Also another person stated that 'You appear to have a slightly but not significantly different take on an old business model which search engines tend to dislike, not least when not part of a site based on unique, vibrant content. As it stands, don't think you will see much support from search. Other marketing, or a change of model may be needed. As for making the model good for users, not with your current popup/modal system.''

How near to reality this can be? Since we offer good savings content for people who are looking to save money which I consider a very healthy and good niche for consumer.

We are really confused which road we should continue to look for the issue, is it that we should continue building quality backlinks to the site or look for inner seo issues.

[RobertFisher]

Aivaras,

Where to start???

First,  Also you are correct about the issues with top stores and top coupons pages, we still didn't rectified the issue with these pages but they are not very important at the moment. I don't see how two of your top three pages being 404 responses can NOT be very important at the moment? You want to rank for these pages and yet if I link to top stores, the link has ZERO value. The fix is fairly simple, why would you not just fix it?

Now, as to business model comment, I would agree that there are a ton of affiliate sites that are based on promos and coupons and that the content is thin, thin, thin. But here is your question:

How near to reality this can be? Since we offer good savings content for people who are looking to save money which I consider a very healthy and good niche for consumer.

My opinion on this is not an SEO opinion but a business opinion based on having owned a few businesses in my life. My answer to what you say is, "so what?" lots of businesses offer consumers savings and while it may be "healthy" or "good niche for consumer," the real question is: Is it a good business for the business?

Restaurants are the business with the highest failure rate. They start with a premise of: We offer great food to people at a fair price which we consider a very healthy and good niche for the consumer. They still fail due to high competition, poor management, and lack of adequate capital among other reasons.

I would suggest reading a highly valuable book that speaks to what you are doing in a very competitive, older vertical: Blue Ocean Strategy by Renee Maurbogne and W. Chan Kim. 

I hope you find something that will assist you in what I have provided.

Robert