Why did our site drop in Google rankings?

[Robbern]

My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9

Hi there,

We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick!

The last changes we have made are the following:

-redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date.

Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages.

Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?

[JacobFunnell]

I've had a look at your backlink profile and it doesn't look very natural. The great majority of the links to your site have the exact same anchor text: 'victoria falls accomodation'. This may have tripped a spam filter, resulting in your getting a Google penalty. The precipitous nature of your decline further points to being penalized by Google.

You need to look at your backlink profile (use Open Site Explorer) and see if there are any real editorial links in there. If there aren't, and those sites are mostly paid links, that goes a long way to explaining why you've dropped (the advertising with the 'dofollow' links will look rather similar to linkspam).

[RyanKent]

bought advertising with a follow link

Advertisements are not an endorsement of your site and should not be offered with a follow link. It's cheating, and this may have given your site a boost in rankings which has now been corrected. Or worse, you may have been penalized for this activity.

Your non-www re-direct seems to be working fine so that is not an issue. Adding a blog to your site would not be an issue either. Canonicalizing your pages as you described is a good step as well.

It sounds like you have a lot of changes going on at the same time which makes it harder to diagnose problems, but based on what you shared the advertisements is the only issue which should be corrected. After you fix the problem, use your Google WMT reconsideration request to determine if your site is under a penalty. Do not perform this step until you have resolved the advertising issue.

[akaigotchi]

Something odd, that might or might not have decreased your rankings: Mentioning a SEO company in the footer section If I were you I'd remove that just to make sure, you don't arouse too much suspicion, whenever you file a Google WMT reconsideration request, as Ryan pointed out correctly.

Other than that I totally agree with Ryan and Bix.

[RyanKent]

akaigotchi, can you please share your specific concern with the footer link for the SEO company?

It is a common practice for web designers, software companies and SEO companies to offer a footer link. Why would you suggest that link would negatively affect a site's rankings? Why would you suggest that the link might be suspicious in any manner?

[akaigotchi]

Basically that wouldn't affect anything, I do that myself all the time. But if I were the guy at Google, who has to manually reconsider your request to drop a penalty and I read "SEO company" in the footer section I wouldn't be too generous with your request. That is more or less a "psychological" factor, so I would rather call that link: Webdesign & Consulting: biggestleaf.

But that is no proven factor, just my 2 cents to how I think somebody at GooglePlex could react..