Major Drop starting Jan 22 2013

[polarking]

I have a friend who has an ecommerce site. He got slammed in January. He doesn't buy links. In webmaster tools his queries and impressions are way down as well. his site is www.beastmasterrodeo.com. Any suggestions would be great

[TomRayner]

January 22nd would coincide with the Google Panda update. See here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Has he received any messages in his webmaster tools? I'd advise to check straight away. Duplicate content is often a problem with ecommerce sites.

[polarking]

It webmaster tools says there are 724 issues with the sitemap being blocked by robot. Other than that no issues

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

As Tom mentioned, if it was the 22nd then it is likely a Panda issue. Without a link we can only speculate but the obvious starting point would be to review his site content to assess how unique it is. If he has a site full of manufacturers product descriptions then he needs to audit his site and identify any internal and external duplication.

My advice would be to sign up with copyscape.com and do a full site audit to determine what content is duplicated, weak etc.

Also, it would make sense to understand what is going on with the robots.txt problems. This may be intentional but it is certainly something to cross of the list.

On a positive note, this is the easiest of the penalties to work with as you simply have to remove all the duplication and improve the site to earn it's place in the results. Try to use this as an exercise to focus on creating a solid and informative site and adding real value through the content.

Hope that helps!
Marcus