Rank drop ecommerce site

[BobGW]

Hello,

We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop.

There's no warnings in GWT.

We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth.  With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar.

We have 70 linking root domains, of which:

15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones.

One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages.

One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages.

There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial.

That's all the bad stuff.

Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine.

Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like:

running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes

where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times.

Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword.

We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords.

We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT.

Our sitemap does not include any broken links.

Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines.

We don't link out to anyone.

We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles.

Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?

[BlueprintMarketing]

before I could tell you the best way to get your ranking backup I would have to look at your site.

I Would bet you that because you have bad back links that you try to remove you might've missed a few.

"There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial."

Google it is a $40 billion a year company that has the resources and ability to figure out if it's a paid link or looks like a paid link. They will find out from other sites using similar services paid links are one of the worst things you can have in my opinion.

Do a title tag like this is spamming

running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes

using something like Shoes - Walking - Running - Cross-training

would be a better title tag

"Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines."

This is normal for Google will change your title tag to suit the queried keywords. It is supposed to help you.

"We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT."

Are you only using Google Webmaster tools to try to figure out if you have for 404's?

when you say blogs I'm assuming your meaning posts?

when you delete blog posts and other parts of the website you're essentially deleting interlinking, back links that you may not know about, your changing your website structure.

If you have not corrected all possible 404's or at least most this will hurt you quite a bit.

For instance when people redesign their site and do not 301 redirect properly even sometimes when they do 301 redirect properly they go down drastically in the SERPS

this is because Google does not trust change immediately.

if you scroll down you'll see my answer in this post and its relevancy to changing parts of the website and Actually trying to keep your site rank.

http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch

" We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu."

That might not be the wisest idea.

I would strongly recommend a site audit.

if you give me your URL I will run it through some tools for you and give you my opinion.

Sincerely,

Thomas