Why have I lost my #1 ranking?

[shwoodeyewear]

Hello!

Ever since switching to a new website back in late 2014, my rankings have suffered.  My webpage https://www.shwoodshop.com was always the #1 google position for the keywords "wood sunglasses" and "wooden sunglasses".  For a while my site bounced back a forth between the #1 and #2 spots, but in the last 4 months I have been stuck with a #3 rank for both keywords.

I hired an SEO company to help fix the problem but after a year of work, there was still no positive change.  I have had multiple experts take a look at my site, but to no avail.   All signs seem to point to a stronger, healthier site than my competition.  My domain authority and page authority are much greater than the competition with the #1 and #2 rankings.  I have used the On-Page grader and other tools to try and help, and even though I am getting an "A" grade, I'm still not improving my rankings.

I ran a link metric comparison for my website versus the competition and attached it to this post.  The main area I seem to be lacking is the Internal Equity-Passing Links.  The top competitor has a ridiculous amount, which I think may be due to their use of breadcrumbs.  Is this enough to make the difference?

My other thought is that I could be suffering from duplicate page content.  My website is setup to be "localized" via Subdirectories With gTLDs  (.com/us, .com/eu, .com/au, .com/international).  The on-page content is the exact same, but the prices for the products changes depending on your location.  Moz shows a ton of duplicate pages due to this.  Could I be getting penalized for this?

I am an SEO novice and trying to learn as much as possible while investigation this issue.  Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated!

-Taylor

wUiyU

[KyleEaves]

I don't know if it is harming your rankings, but it looks like you've got two or three meta description and keyword tags on most of your pages, including your home page. Probably an easy fix worth doing using your site's CMS or template files to remove any unnecessary meta tags. Didn't really see anything else that stood out.

[ChrisAshton]

There are a few bits and pieces that could be improved on the site but really, I think the biggest issue is going to be that amount of duplication.

Having a small volume or percentage of pages with identical content isn't going to kill your site, Even now, you're ranking #3... you're definitely not penalised, just seen as slightly lower quality now. Besides pricing, there doesn't really seem to be any need to have an entire subset of pages for each country since the only thing that seems to change is the price.

If it were my site, I'd be culling all the country code subdirectories and having the price generate dynamically based on the user's location. If you're in the US, show US pricing in USD, if you're in Australia then you get the Aus price in AUD etc.

It will give you fewer redundant pages to manage, less duplication and help out with your crawl budget efficiency as well.

Admittedly I've only checked from Australia, but your site speed could do with some improvement too

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/shwoodshop.com/A31MtKKC

[shwoodeyewear]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the input!  What you're saying makes sense.  However, although MOZ is showing versions of each country code as duplicate content, I am wondering if google is seeing the same thing.

I have attached a screenshot from google webmaster tools of my sitemap index.  As you can see, google is using the main /all-sitemaps.xml which contains individual sitemaps for each country subdirectory.  You'll notice that google is only indexing the .com/us version.  Does this mean that google is not seeing the duplicate pages from the other country subdirectories?

Also, would you mind listing the other bits and pieces that you think could be improved on the site to bolster SEO?

I really appreciate your help!

FpVwqTr

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Taylor,

That screenshot is interesting. My assumption would be that Google has seen this duplication and is simply disregarding the other versions of what it considers to be the same content.  The reason duplicate content isn't such a huge deal these days (it's not a good thing at all but it won't really get you penalised) is because Google is much better and dealing with it.

From my understanding, what you're seeing here is exactly the expectation - they determine which piece seems to be the most relevant and useful to searcher intent based on a number of things, then disregard the others. No point in indexing multiple versions of the same thing, right?

As for the smaller bits and pieces, I'll take a closer look at your site again once I'm back in the office this afternoon and let you know