What can I do to put these pages back in the top results?

[fablau]

Hello here,

here is an interesting question for you. The following 2 webpages from our website have been ranking well on Google (usually on the 1st or 2nd page) for the past 12 years. They are among our oldest, highly relevant product pages on our site:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Eliza.html

And we could always find them with the keyword "moonlight sonata sheet music" or "fur elise sheet music". Now, since the last November these pages don't show up anymore despite they are still present in the index.

It is pretty hard to understand why those pages don't show up in the search results for those keywords as they used to, above all if you consider that those are among our best, most popular and unique product pages!

But instead to struggle to understand why we lost presence (Panda? Some unknown sort of penalization?), has anyone any suggestions to help us to have those pages back in the top results? What do you suggest to do in such kind of cases?

Any ideas and thoughts are very welcome!

Thank you in advance.

[mememax]

Hi Fablau, I'm still seeing you first with both your keywords, but in the google image results. It shows the first page of the sonata while the link to your html seems down to the 9th and 13th page.

It's strange to see such old and good pages (it seems they got high authority) going so down in the serps. A couple of things:

• have you done something since the change? Like affiliate promotion or heavy linkbuilding? I'm seeing 11 domains linking to the beethoven page but ~5k links. Many of them are from origenmusic.com it seems like they' linking a lot to that page. An affiliate? Maybe you can explain more but seeing so many links from few domains, seems the kind of things google doesn't like so much these days. In november I remember a couple of panda updates with one of them being quite aggressive.
• I'm seeing you having many tabs which are also different urls. Why not consolidate all those pages into the same one maybe using ajax to load the content so all the value remains in one page?
• Include your images in your pages, it seems that google like it since you're still ranking first with that, maybe you can use that value including that image into your main pages.

Hope that helps!

[peterthistle]

Add a paragraph or two of fresh content, state what the item is in new terms, try differentiating more from Origenmusic.

From here: http://www.origenmusic.com/free-piano-music.html, origenmusic links to virtualsheetmusic; maybe Google is thinking the origenmusic page is the original and the virtualsheetmusic page just contains a subset of the same information without adding anything else for the user?

[fablau]

Thank you Mememax for your response.

Here are my answers to your points:

1. I don't recall any change since September for all of our product pages that could have caused this issue. What we have worked in the past month for product pages is:

a. Adding markup code for rich snippets.

b. Applied rel-canonical to all tabs of our product pages (see point 2 below).

Of course back links could be an issue with the fact we have hundreds of affiliates linking back to our product pages, but I thought Google is enough smart to understand that (any link has inside the "af=" parameter). Maybe adding a "rel=nofollow" tag would help, but it is hard to control that from our side. But I have never worked on "link building" (all links are natural with the only exception of affiliate's).

2. As for the tabs, as I wrote above, I have consolidated product page tabs via rel-canonical.

3. The image well indexed in Google is still there, on the INFO tab (the default product page). Is that what you meant?

Thank you again!

[fablau]

Thank you Peter, that's exactly what I though... maybe Google got confused about the fact I am the "original" content compared with our own affiliate's. I will try that, but I still can't find a clear explanation of such a penalization.

[fablau]

Peter, I have added a new editorial review on the page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html

Also, by looking again to your suggested http://www.origenmusic.com/free-piano-music.html, that page is quite different from ours and it is not dedicated solely to that specific title (Moonlight Sonata). So, I don't think the possible "duplicate "issue may be the real problem (not for that specific URL at least).

Any more thoughts? Someone else? Pretty desperate to understand what happened on those pages to drop so much in rankings!