Sudden drop in ranking for major search terms

[catfree]

Site bumpbabyandbeyond com au. Help! We have been operating for six years and had steadily built up our ranking for major terms like maternity clothes, maternity clothing, maternity wear, reaching highs of 6, 8 and 10 respectively for AU sites AU wide about six months ago that we have steadily maintained. All of a sudden we have dropped away. A week ago I noticed we had dropped from 6 to 12 for maternity clothes. This morning we are 21! I can't see any obvious reason for this, but believe the eCommerce module of our inventory/pos software has had a recent update - I'm awaiting answers on this. We haven't actively had anyone link building or working on SEO after being badly bitten and shelling out a small fortune for an AU company to do very little over six months - rankings improved rapidly when I sacked them and did some on page minor work myself. But I don't have the time or knowledge to look after the seo, and am on the hunt for reputable white hat assistance. Is there anything obviously wrong that I need to fix ASAP? Any help would be much appreciated

[MattAntonino]

Hi!

I'm attaching a screenshot from Melbourne, just now.  You're in the Local results.  That means many ranking trackers will give you the wrong results.  I see you 21st for the term in organic results but because you show up in the 7-pack you are pushed down a little more.  Google wants to see different domains on page 1 - not many of yours... so they tweaked it down a bit a few weeks ago.  This is Matt Cutts' Twitter report on it:

**"**Just fyi, we rolled out a small algo change this week that improves the diversity of search results in terms of different domains returned."

I think you're only a few minutes north of me - if you ever want to talk SEO, let me know.

bump.jpg

[catfree]

Thanks for your response :). What about for Australia wide, which is how I usually check? Our online sales are normally at least as much as our instore sales, so results from other states/areas are pretty important to me.

[MattAntonino]

You are 22 in Sydney and 21 in Perth.  No local results there because you're not located there, of course.  It's possible that your improved Melbourne (local) results are forcing your other national results down to page 3.  I'll ask around but never heard of that happening.

I can't imagine it would be better for you not to rank locally but anything is possible with Google.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey,

The first thing to do is to determine if you have any obvious problems or technical problems and I would start by setting up an SEOMoz campaign for your site. This will crawl the site and report on any obvious issues that you can address. Additionally, review google webmaster tools and see if there are any notifications or problems being reported there.

From a quick review, there is nothing obvious from a technical perspective. Likewise, your anchor text and link profile look okay from the quickest of looks.

We did have a penquin update around a week ago and it could be that sites that link to you have been removed or lost equity and you are seeing a knock on effect. This could suggest why you dropped a bit, then a bit more as more and more links to your site get devalued as external pages are removed.

You certainly have some sub standard links for the keywords you mentioned:

http://brandedfeel.com/432869-Are-maternity-clothes-necessary-in-order-to-look-good-during.html

http://www.exportimportaustralia.com/directory/apparel_fashion/women_wear/

Likely thing here is that you have lost equity from some of these weaker keyword links and that has knocked you for some of your big searches. You may possibly have some technical issues as well so get that site set up in the campaign manager and report back on your findings and lets see what we can do to help.

Marcus

[catfree]

Thanks so much Marcus! Webmaster tools - no messages or notifications, this is the HTML Improvements section... what other info would be useful? HTML Improvements Last updated Oct 11, 2012 Addressing the following may help your site's user experience and performance. Meta description Pages Duplicate meta descriptions 18 Long meta descriptions 0 Short meta descriptions 10 Title tag Pages Missing title tags 0 Duplicate title tags 11 Long title tags 0 Short title tags 0 Non-informative title tags 0 Non-indexable content Pages We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site. There has been an increase in 404's from 0 to 61 - I wonder if the update to my ecommerce package removed my redirects from the previous php version of the site to the current asp? Number 1 is the previous sites main page! Will get on this today... What info is most pertinent from my campaign? Happy to provide reports etc - but also don't want to overload with TMI - let me know Thanks again Marcus! Cath