Diagnose My Google Crash!

[2bloggers]

On July 20, my site peaked in terms of google impressions. On July 21 it crashed and then got worse. Here is my chart from Google Webmasters.

http://tinypic.com/r/abruv7/5

I have been working really hard to get qualify backlinks from my niche (mom deals/coupons) and I know people like my site due to the growth in newsletter subscriptions etc. So what happened with Google? Is it Google Panda? Nothing on my site changed except maybe I had been getting less backlinks for a few days.

I am having duplicate content issues which I posted about in another question. For some reason Google is indexing past page 1 of my category pages even though Yoast Wordpress SEO is set NOT to. So I am getting duplicate title tag errors from the subpages. I also have some crawl errors/404s due to deleting and renaming categories to improve my site. Any SEO issues my site might have (shorter posts than 300 words, affiliate links etc) are the same issues my competitor's have who are on page 1 of Google.

Any input would be appreciated.

[Jonathan_Hatton]

If Google is still indexing past page 1 of cat pages, have you gone into WMT's and removed URLs from the index?

[jesse-landry]

Well.. yeah it sounds like duplicate content issues from what you described here but there's no way for us to tell without seeing the domain and being able to poke around.

So without that I can't really help you.

[2bloggers]

Alrighty.

http://tinyurl.com/ml4chpb

[2bloggers]

Well I just saw this in WMT's today so no. That is going to take forever. Sorry I know that sounds whiny. But thanks for the reminder that I can do that.

[jesse-landry]

So it's hard to tell by that graph as the date range isn't listed, but it seems that this is a relatively new site, right? Like maybe 3 weeks old? You might just be feeling the effects of the Google Honeymoon (Thanks to Marie for that term)

Google will bump your SERPs way up when you're  new and then you'll fall back down. That's pretty typical. Your domain authority is 17, you have 7 linking root domains with 22 total links. That's very very small. I'm assuming your targeted keywords are pretty high competition so I'd say you just need to keep building awesome content and gaining legit links.

I couldn't find an example of the duplicated content but didn't spend a ton of time with the site after seeing the small link report. This could also be affecting you but I'd guess it's more of what I was just saying. You just need to get your online marketing campaign into full gear!

[2bloggers]

The graph is over a period of almost 3 months. May 1 until today. I can understand the honeymoon thing but crashing me overnight isn't very nice!

I know my DA is small. But it isn't really updated either - I have way more links than that. But I know I am new and time will help.

I think certain posts were ranking high because I was getting backlinks from sites with DA of 68-72. I just got 2 more this morning. It seems like Google decided to just disregard all of those backlinks. I am still on the first page for my main keyword so at least I have that.

Any links or suggestions for an online marketing campaign? I really appreciate your feedback.

[jesse-landry]

You're absolutely right I see a bunch of backlinks in the just-discovered tool from high DA sites.

Google isn't disregarding them. If anything it just hasn't noticed them yet.

Fix those crawl errors, get rid of your duplicate content problems, and give it a little time.

Supplement with a strong PPC campaign if you have to in the meantime.. Otherwise just keep doing what you're doing. Keep building content and finding relevant sources to gain links from.

I'm sorry I'm not sure what else to tell you at this time.

[2bloggers]

You've been extremely helpful. Thanks!