80-90% drop in visits after Panda/EMD update - now what?

[kabledesigns]

Hi everyone,

Had my first wonderful experience with an algorithm update. Business was doing great - about 90-100 visitors a day down to about 12-15 from Sept 29th to current.

Our domain is www.hamiltonscarservice.com which I don't think exactly qualifies for an exact match but may be close enough (car service is one of our keywords).

I am more likely to think its related to the Panda 20 update. I haven't changed the site at all lately so I was wondering what tips you guys may have going forward.

The site isn't perfectly optimized (which is where you guys come in) but when I first set it up it worked great so I mainly focused on backlinks from that point on. Now evidently this has caught up with me.

Any suggestions are appreciated - thanks!

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[irvingw]

Nowadays you can't just spam the URLs and anchor texts with "car service" + location and create tons of pages with identical flimsy content with the exception of swapping you the location name.

Footer links are too spammy too.

[CMC-SD]

The EMD update should not have effected you. An EMD would be something like www.carservicemanhattan.com. You have a partial-match domain, and since it doesn't sound spammy or point to a spammy page, you aren't what Google has been targeting.

Your problem is duplicate content. You have dozens of pages with the exact same text on them, except for a find-and-replaced city name. That makes Google think your website isn't offering valuable content. Every page on your website should have unique content.

[kabledesigns]

So you recommended I remove all footer links to the landing pages.

What about the links to each of the landing pages from the areas served page (http://www.hamiltonscarservice.com/areas-served/index.html)? Should I just link them as a town and leave out the redundant car service portion?

I thought having the urls in this format (matching targeted keywords/content) was suggested as an on-page recommendation?

[irvingw]

You can actually leave the links in the footer since it's a good way to distribute your page juice, I would recommend just including the location though, you're creating a very high keyword density by repeating "car service" and "nj" so many times on the page.  Chatham, Clark, Cranford, etc. No keyword repetition when you do it that way.

I would rewrite the duplicate content on your pages and try to make it a little bit longer.

You've got zipcodes, map, links to close towns, not too bad man. The duplicate content needs to be handled though.