Staff Dumbfounded by Rankings Drop - Please Help Us Understand!

[David_C]

We are completely dumbfounded by the amount of organic traffic we lost virtually instantly back on Aug 22 2012. We are spending much more money advertising as of late but took another massive plunge since rolling out our newer site redesign this past sat 04/13/13. The newer and more updated version of our site seems to all of a sudden have us dropping like a rock again!

Our developers and in house SEO guy that is in house here seems to think our content is ok and that our PR and page authority is ok as well. However they have told me it isn't good per-say, but not the reason in their opinion for our sites drop in rankings instantly. We've seen tons of keywords drop 22-40+ positions in google. We've been online since 2001 and I've never seen anything even remotely close to this. Didn't seem to see such an impact with bing or yahoo though.

Due to our rankings being slaughtered we decided to hired WebIMAX to come in and figure out what happened. They informed us that we must have been hit with the panda filter they collectively guessed. Said our content was fair lol. They done allot of tests without anything really indicated the real root cause of the problem and most every major change they requested we made. However we've changed the site design and layout now and changed much of the content and overall structure to be better we believe and we for the life of us cannot understand the massive unexplained penalty. I attached an image which illustrates our dramatic drop in traffic. Bare in mind that as traffic drops we spend more $$$ advertising so mere traffic numbers don't even really say it all. Our organic results are really down maybe 60-70%.

We really thought WebIMAX would be a big help and give great assistance and insight. I didn't see any of that and I think our IT staff agrees. We paid big bucks for nothing in return it seems. However we are desperate and are actually considering staying with them even though they've produced zero results or maybe negative results. In fact with all that was done over weeks and weeks with WebIMAX we continued to DROP in organic results. We don't know if we should go back to them, choose another SEO company or just go on trying to fix this issue ourselves. Website is http://www.cruizinconceptswholesale.com/

We just want someone that knows what they are looking at to say hey I see something Major Right Here. If we could get that then we would simply fix it. Thanks in advance for anyone willing to help us out with their expert knowledge and I think I would trust the community here more than WebIMAX easily!

David.

cruizin-traffic-image.jpg

[MoosaHemani]

Hello David,

Your Analytics shows a dip after 22^nd of August 2012 and this is the same date when Google Panda version 9.3.1 got updated so I have no problem saying that this is the cause of traffic down.

Google said that this update should affect only 1% of the total searches and you much come under that 1% of the search quires.

Panda usually affected the websites that contain low quality content as well as links. After looking in to your website following are the major things that can be a problem.

-          Your website is in asp and this is the most painful platform when it comes to SEO (have previously worked with ASP) so my advice would be to rethink about your URL structure and see if you can make search engine friendly URLs.

-          Your website contains links from many irrelevant website (irrelevant to your business nature). The idea is to increase quality links to the website by performing some content marketing and link baiting activities

Once you perform these ethical online marketing activities and see some natural links coming your way this is the time when you should send a reconsideration request to Google.

Hope this helps!

[TakeshiYoung]

It's possible that the traffic drop was a result of Panda, as the date is close to one of the Panda updates. Panda mainly targets sites with low quality or duplicate content, and it looks like your site has a ton of duplicate content. All of the product descriptions are taken straight from the manufacturer, which means its the same description used by every other site out there. Re-writing these descriptions or adding unique content to your product pages should be a priority.

You could also be doing a lot more link building. Your site only has a PageRank of 2, which pretty low, and only has a handful of linking domains. Regardless of the cause of the traffic drop, getting more high quality links will help your site rank higher in the SERPs.

Finally, the site overall is very busy and difficult to navigate. I would work with a graphic designer to clean up the layout of the site. This will create a better experience for users, improve conversions, and make your site easier to link to, which will improve SEO.

[MattJanaway]

This is definitely a thin content issue. Your drop in visitors coincided with the Panda 9.3.1 algorithm update. This update targets thin content specifically.

Looking at your product pages, they are incredibly sparse and contain little content. Content is one of the key (and most important) factors to getting your pages ranking.

I would recommend looking at further issues with the website which should also help:

• Introduce a better URL structure. Instead of mydomain.com/gnfjksdagh^&£!!!.asp go for something like mydomain.com/cobra-style-mustang-hood
• Ignore PR and Page Authority. This will only tell you a small part of the big picture.
• Develop a decent 404 error page.
• Your link profile is not the best. It has links coming from completely unrelated domains which stand out like a sore thumb to me. If I can see these, so can Google and it makes it obvious that the link building tactics are in place to try and manipulate their algorithm.
• Build some real, authoritive, relevant links. The key here is to make them look natural.
• Look at the user interface of the website. User Experience (UX) is playing a much bigger of optimising a website lately. Google is looking at things like bounce rate, time on page, time on site, page visits, page load times... These all directly play a part in your user experience.
• CREATE GREAT CONTENT. There are literally loads of your pages which have content which can be found in multiple places online. Make it unique.

Can you confirm whether you received a message within your Google Webmasters account?

Hope some of this helps.

Matt

[MattJanaway]

Oh and change that font. It hurts my eyes. Introduce something a little more... Erm... Modern

There are some nice fonts here:

http://www.google.com/fonts/

[EGOL]

This is a Panda problem.

The content is very thin.  Less than a unique sentence on many product pages. Lots of misspellings.

There are duplicate content problems.  Lots of the content is duplicated on other domains.   Lots of the content is duplicated from page to page.

There could be lots of other problems.

If this was my website I would start a complete rewrite of the content.  Every product would have at least three paragraphs of content that is absolutely unique, clear and written well.  This will improve the site for shoppers and for search engines.  It will solve the thin content problem, the duplicate content problem and add lots of keywords that will pull in more traffic.

Before I did that huge writing investment I would have the site checked out by someone who knows how to diagnose Penguin problems.  Because you don't want to invest heavily and only fix have of what is killing this site.

Check out this YouMoz post by Marie Haynes...

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too

[promotionsnow]

any reason why this would be for your home page?

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.cruizinconceptswholesale.com/zzzzzzzz33.asp](view-source:http://www.cruizinconceptswholesale.com/zzzzzzzz33.asp)

[EGOL]

Valuable information.  Nice work!