Question

[DigitalMarketingInstitute]

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[RobertFisher]

Mark,

The Testfreaks piece is the first red flag you gave. "Aggregated Review Data" from an outside source. Google has stated they are going after markup spam. But, you say this is inserted with Java and you say "they have working on many other sites successfully." Do you have access to the analytics of the other sites or are they telling you this and you go to the site and there is a site with the same Java for aggregate reviews? There is quite a difference.

My first move, given the limited data supplied (your GA is a very small slice of time and there is no comparison to last year for example), the first move I would make is to remove the aggregate reviews. Also, for products, if you are using any markup for reviews, you need to do so on a page by page basis with only one product per page.

Now, I will give you the short version of my speech regarding e commerce sites using the other guys assistance to sell. You are selling speakers and HiFi equipment that Testfreaks is also an affiliate for. (Even the popup review on your site has multiple links to others selling the same product.)  So, why not use Schema and create your own reviews and ratings on the site? Would you really rather allow someone to pull your customers so that you can show a rating that Google probably does not like or won't like in the near term?

Now, correlation does not equal causation, but you give us little to go on. My first change would be a wave goodbye to TestFreak. BTW when you click on their site on the link for learn more about their reviews for other sites, it will not load. The url is a different domain: http://www.testfreaksdata.com/

I hope this helps.

Robert

[DougRoberts]

Do you know what traffic you've lost? Is it across the board (all landing pages, all keywords) or are their particular terms/pages that have been affected more than others.

You say that you were the number one organic result in Ireland for most of your key terms - is that no longer the case?

Are you tracking any keywords? Can you see how the reduction in search traffic might be related to changes in the search results? Have the search result pages for your target keywords changed at all (for example, has a new competitor appeared, or an existing competitor suddenly out-ranking you?)

What about outreach/link-building? Have you been doing any?

[DigitalMarketingInstitute]

Hi Robert,

Excellent answer- Many thanks for offering your input.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to the Analytics accounts of other sites my client is referring to, so it's difficult to validate that statement he made. As this review content isn't actually placed on the actual pages of my clients site, is Google capable of acknowledging it as duplicate content? Is it even crawlable within its current form?

It doesn't appear that my client has been doing any form of link building with the site having relatively few linking root domains. Also in terms of on-page copy, they have been adding unique copy per product on the site.

The aggregated reviews could potentially be the main issue but it does seem to be a very quick drop in traffic if they had only been added a couple of weeks ago. I do agree with you though that they should be getting their own consumer base to submit reviews, even if the volume of them won't be as comprehensive.

[DigitalMarketingInstitute]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for chipping in your thoughts.

The site appears to be still ranking high for several of its target keywords, but it's lost a considerable amount of traffic for longer tail keywords.

It doesn't appear that the site is facing any new competitors (Ireland is a small market after-all, and the company hasn't been doing any form of outreach/link building.

To me it seems the problem has to be something which was changed on their side, which again brings up the point flagged by Robert about the aggregated reviews.

Within WMT there have been no messages received either, and I've checked to see if noindex or robots rules have changed...pages losing tracking code etc..and not noticed any issues there.