Flatlined traffic starting between April 29 and May 4 2013

[bobbygsy]

One of our clients, an ecommerce shop, has seen a significant drop in their organic traffic and I'm trying to determine whether this was the result of a data refresh or algo update. The site has few inbound links and unfortunately still has a lot of duplicate content on it (manufacturer provided product descriptions). There are also some remaining issues of duplicate page titles that we've been working through. The client has also been writing blogs recently, however there are a number which are relatively short in length. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can start recovering from this?

[PIXUS]

Prioritise, prioritise prioritise!

First of all you have two options:

1. You throw a load of money at it and hire some great copywrites to write great unique content for all product pages and you look at fleshing out the blog posts.

2. You de-index using the 'no index, follow' tag all the pages which have weak/thin/duplicate content until you have new unique content ready in which case you remove the 'no index, follow' tags one by one.

If you decide to do option 2 then thats another topic but here is a great resource to get you started:

www.seobook.com/how-free-your-e-commerce-site-googles-panda

Hope this helps!

[bobbygsy]

Thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately their budget is limited so I don't think it will be possible to hire a writer. I will definitely take a look at de-indexing in the meantime as they work through the content.