What Is Our Site Missing Causing Our Former Dominance To Slip?

[AarcMediaGroup]

So we have operated one of our retail sites, BonitaJ.com for many years now.  Through a lot of work, link building and optimizing around 2009, we were in a prominent spot on the 1st page in google for just about every main term we were targeting.

Towards the end of 2009, nearing December or so, we started slipping here and there, and began being displaced for our main terms by newer sites that according to several factors, don't have near the strength our site holds.  And by strength, I simply mean, based on link volume, mozbar stats and many other factors, it seems we should rank well above most, but still find ourselves just hanging to 8-10 positions on page one, and in many cases somewhere on page two for terms it seems like we should be in the top 5 positions for.

I believe some of our slippage is due to google's devaluing of many of our incoming links.  We achieved our early ranking dominence off a lot of directory links and things like that over time, but ever since 2009 when links began getting devalued we immediately broke into getting quality blog links via LEGIT blog relationships where we'd offer up contests, bloggers would review our products and so on, and these relationships continue through today.  We also do a lot of guest blog writing, article postings on various networks, as well as press releases, all with the goal of keeping our link profile happy and healthy.  So we still have work to do there, but we're on the right track.

So my thought is that to get back over the hump, we simply need to continue with the legit link building methods, but I'm also thinking that maybe we need to improve some things navigationally.

Things I was hoping people would chime in on are....

1.  If we're mainly trying to target bridal/wedding related jewelry terms, should we ditch the "Jewelry Sets, Pearl Jewelry & Swarovski Crystal Jewerly" terms from our main navbar.  They are featured inside each of the categories, and in the end, we don't rank or pull traffic for them anyway.  Would ditching them from the main nav, help pass more juice from home page and other pages to the pages that better target our niche?

2.  A while back, we ditched including actual product on each of the main category pages.  I'm leaning towards breaking the main category pages up into sections, for instance once on the "Bridal Jewelry" page, it would list each of the sub-cats, with a 5-10 product sampling of the most popular items, with a link that says "view all necklaces" at the end of each sub-section.  Do you think that more wise than just trying to direct them into the sub-cats with no actual product offering?

3.  Anything else you see glaringly wrong with what we're trying to do?  This site is just on the edge of blowing up from a ranking perspective if I can just get some confirmation on some things that I know I should do, but I'm wary due to fear of screwing things up.  If I can get some solid feedback, the rest is history.

[EGOL]

I agree with your decision to get back into the hard business of earning links. IMO that is more important than your three questions.

**1. Ditching links in the nav....  **

Is anybody clicking those links and processing to cart?  If nobody is doing that then I would ditch them - especially if those pages are not pulling organic SERP traffic.

2. Sub-cats....

I would try this and let sales be the deciding factor.  It might have more impact there than in SEO.

3. Anything else...

This niche has become really really competitive since you launched this site.  Everybody is working hard to eat your lunch.  I agree with your analysis that linkbuilding is the urgent need.