Tuesday July 12th = We suddenly lost all our top Google rankings. Traffic cut in half. Ideas?

[aran088]

The attached screenshot shows all.

Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic.

Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back.

Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine).

Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong??

eartheasy.com

wtf.jpg

[AdamThompson]

Are your articles unique or are they syndicated?

[john4math]

Adam is asking the right question.  On http://eartheasy.com/live_water_saving.htm, I grabbed some text "Many beautiful shrubs and plants thrive with far less watering than other species. Replace herbaceous perennial borders with native plants. Native plants will use less water and be more resistant to local plant diseases."  That text appears on a bunch of sites.  I tried this with several other phrases from different pages on your site, and almost every time several other sites shared identical text to yours.

Google is penalizing you because your content is identical to a bunch of other sites.  The more unique, original content you have, the more you should see your rankings rise.

[aran088]

All of our top ranked articles are unique, although many people rip them off and it's hard as heck for us to track them all down and get them to remove our content.

I recently did this for our "Raised Garden Bed" Page, which contributes a huge amount of our traffic. It was very labour intensive.

Our blog has a lot of articles that other authors have written and are republished elsewhere.

[aran088]

That page has been around for 10 years on our site, and as you can see, many many people are ripping it off, along with all other pages on our site.

Would you recommend an aggressive campaign of "cease and desist" emails to these plagiarizers, coupled with more addition of unique content??

[EGOL]

One thing that I would do is implement the rel="author" attribute in a link to your author pages if you have not already done that.

[EGOL]

Hold your fire.  Your traffic might come back tomorrow.

However, it looks like you are on the edge of whatever Google does not like because you are flashing in and out.

Hang in there, keep working to improve and iron out any problems that you think might be causing this.

[aran088]

So at the footer of any article we publish by another author have a link to that author's original article with rel="author" in it?

[EGOL]

Study this... implement carefully....

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920

[toddmumford]

Drops such as the one you have experienced can be difficult to assess. I would advise the following procedures to rule out other issues first. As Egol correctly stated it is important to not jump to fixes right away, for two reasons. First of all, the situation could be temporary and could revert. Second of all, changes you make will obscure the potential issues, making it more difficult to find problem spots.

1. Check robots.txt to ensure there are no issues with file additions that could be blocking major pages
2. Check link canonical tag, if you use it, to ensure there are no issues there with incorrect urls
3. Check inbound links both using inbound link tools and Webmaster tools for any suspicious bursts of links or links that look dodgy you might not account for
4. Run a sitewide meta check on all titles and meta descriptions and ensure everything is correct. There are software companies that offer fairly inexpensive options that will spider the entire website relatively quickly. Do this late at night post-swell
4. Use Xenu to check all broken links and fix. Even if there are only a few.
5. Run the google bot indexing tool in GWT and check for any instances of funny code or potential problems
6. Analyze your analytics to determine which keyword clusters lots the most positioning. This can often give you clues as to what might have happened.

Hope this helps.
Todd
www.seovisions.com

[JamesNorquay]

Place links within your content too if people are talking your content, also add the rel=author attribute.

I would also look at the link profile for your site, have you added any dodgy links recently.

Regards.

[aran088]

Great advice  - I especially like the suspicious inbound links idea.. never thought of that.

We have had experts say that we have too many links per page on average on our site, and that we should consolidate the links in the sitewide footer as they add so many links per page.

Is this a good idea? Are we being hurt by having so many outbound links and such a link heavy footer?

Thanks

[aran088]

Thanks - reading up on rel=author now. Looks kinda complicated from the Google instructions..

[firstconversion]

If you think people are scraping your content, you might want to look into making sure you link back to your pages within your content so that you always get links back in those cases.

I noticed that when scraper site pick up SEOmoz content, tehy dont pick up the footer with the author links back. So make sure to keep links in the actual body text

I also saw a number of site that pull seomoz content into an iframe on their site. Places like twitter and Flickr detect when their pages are opened in an iframe and give a error message -> tabs.to/POL-Lp

[AdamThompson]

OK. Well, my suggested strategy would be:

1. Go through the list Todd gave to make sure that there is nothing wrong on your site. If not, you can probably assume it was a Google algorithm tweak, so proceed to...
2. Work on improving your site, starting with any areas you know of that might be an issue. I would say any content that is not unique would be a good place to start.

[toddmumford]

It's a possibility. There have been ongoing discussions on internal linking on most of the major SEO forums for quite some time.

My personal feeling is that most websites can effectively reduce the number of internal links by auditing their link flow, determining their "ideal" real estate and ensuring that they are not necessarily duplicating unnecessary links, which would steal some of the juice that might otherwise go to some of the bigger pages.

Only <5% of people ever see the footer in the average website, so my opinion has always been that the footer should contain supporting links to areas to help the user in "context". Contact, About, Sitemap and Investors, for examples, are classic links one might find there.

Big real estate - or important pages in the website - should be linked to from your main nav or areas above the fold with lots of user exposure.

Keep in mind when changing and removing links - it is a process. Do not go in and remove all or a significant part of your links in one week.

Make one or two good changes, then wait for a period of a week or so, then make others small changes over time

Hope this helps.

Todd
www.seovisions.com

[onlinemediadirect]

something to throw into the mix from a guy I know who was also hit hard by the panda update was the incoming links cname. Do the incoming links you have all come from one particular source or host ?

[duncan274]

couldn't they edit out the links back to your site?