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As far as an drops in traffic on certain dates, there's not enough traffic and data there to tell.

Being that most of the terms were on page 2, traffic has been low,spotty and inconsistent. This is one of the first things I looked at but was unable to spot any obvious dates.

Thanks Thomas and you're absolutely right about needing more content to rank high and we're working on that. However, there are actually very few sites competing for this term with the kind of content you're referring to which is why we had this as well as many others within the top 15 spots for quite some time.

The content is an issue for top rankings sure, but it fails to explain the penalty.

Your exact match domain theory is interesting...... however:

1 It's not truly an exact match domain. - The domain name is not actually a searched term.

2 There are plenty of other domains in this law sector that also have keywords in the domain that are not being penalized such as our other site probateattorneyslasvegas.com which IS  an exact match domain.

3 The way I understand exact match domains is that any benefit that domains use to inherit from  having keywords in a domain, have simply been revoked. But being penalized for it, I'm not aware of and it surely doesn't seem to be the case in this sector.

I'm not ruling it out as a factor, but as the main reason for a 100+ drop, I personally don't think so.

There's most definitely something more going on, I'm just so surprised that it's not more obvious.

Thanks for you input.

I had two pages on my site with identical content. What I did was 301 redirect one page to the other. I also added canonical redirect code to the page that held the 301 code.  Here is what I have:

www.careersinmusic.com/music-colleges.aspx - this page was a duplicate and I needed it to resolve to:
www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx

Here is the code I used:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

music-colleges.aspx
<%@ Page Language="VB" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeFile="music-colleges.aspx.vb" Inherits="music_colleges" %>
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

http://www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx"/>

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
music-colleges.aspx.vb
Partial Class music_colleges
Inherits System.Web.UI.Page
Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader("Location", "http://www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx")
End Sub
End Class

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The problem:
For some reason, when the search “music colleges” is done in Google, I am #7. When the term “music schools” is done, I am around 119. I MUST be getting a penalty for some reason, I just cannot figure the reason. When perform well for one term and terrible for the next? All I can come up with is a duplicate content penalty or something along those lines.

Also, music-colleges.aspx seems to still be in Googles index, even though the above 301 happened months ago. Thoughts?

site:www.careersinmusic.com/music-colleges.aspx

Any insight into this would be GREATLY appreciated.

Many Thanks!