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Site appears to be well indexed to me. You get no results for a site: search?

1. Traffic from Yahoo/Bing is nearly non-existent.

2. Yes, nothing abnormal there.

3. No bought links.

4. No downtime that I know of.

I have a website that I'm working with that has had the misfortune of gaining rankings/traffic on Google, then having the rankings/traffic removed...3 times! (Very little was changed on the site to gain or lose "favor" with Google, either.)

Notes:

• Site is a mixture of high quality original content and duplicate content (vacation rental listings)
• When traffic crashes, we lose nearly all rankings and traffic (90+%)
• When traffic crashes, we lose all rankings sitewide, including those gained by our high quality, unique pages
• None of the "crash" dates appear to coincide with any Panda update dates
• We are working on adding unique content to our pages with duplicate content, but it's a long process and so far doesn't seem to have made any difference
• I'm confounded why Google keeps "changing its mind" about our site
• We have an XML sitemap, and Google keeps our site indexed pretty well, even when we lose our rankings
• Due to the drastic and sitewide loss of rankings, I'm assuming we are dealing with some sort of algorithmic penalty

Timeline:

1. Traffic steadily grows starting in Jan 2011
2. Traffic crashes on Feb 19, 2011. We assumed it was due to a pre-panda anti-scraper update, but don't know.
3. Google sends traffic to our site on March 1, then none the next day
4. On June 16th, I block part of the site using robots.txt (most of the section wasn't indexed anyway)
5. On June 17th, Google starts ranking our site again. I thought it might be due to the robots.txt change, but I had just made the change a few hours ago, and Google wasn't even indexing the part of the site I blocked
6. Traffic/rankings crash again on July 6th. No theory why.

Site URL: http://www.floridaisbest.com

Traffic Stats: Attached

I know that we need more backlinks and less duplicate content, but I can't explain why our Google rankings are "on again, off again". I have never seen a site gain and lose all of its rankings/traffic so drastically multiple times, for no apparent reason.

Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome. Thanks!

t8IqB

I find GWO is suitable for nearly everything I need, although sometimes coding skills are needed.

I've heard that visual website optimizer is very easy to use, but have not yet used it myself.

I know many social and article sites (hubpages, ezinearticles, many low quality article sites, etc.) were hit by Panda.

Many higher quality sites that accept user-submitted content were not hit. High quality blogs that accept guest posts is one example. I believe Squidoo fared pretty well.

Any other sites that accept user-generated content (with links) that still rank well?

If it is coded correctly then search engines can and will read the links in the dropdown menu.

Are you referring to a mouseover menu, or a form select?

When adding or editing categories in WordPress, there is a field called "description" (not meta description) with the label "The description is not prominent by default; however, some themes may show it." Your developer can modify your theme so the description text is displayed on the category page.

Eric,

If you are optimizing category pages, I recommend modifying your theme to display your category description as visible text on the page. This will allow you to have some optimized text on each category page. I believe there is a title tags plugin that will allow you to change the title tags of your category pages individually, also.

John,

I would go with the second title tag you listed. It contains all your keywords in exact or phrase match, and is more professional looking.

I avoid using exact keywords when it means your title becomes a list of keywords. It looks unprofessional and I haven't seen better results by doing it. I would ensure that your most important keyword is listed first.

Another example:

Keywords: cordless phones, buy phones, discount phones

My Title Tag: Buy Discount Cordless Phones (much better than a keyword list, and works just as well in my experience.)

We have a summer intern we need to give a handbook/guide on social media strategies, best practices, etc. Any recommendations? It can be free or paid, as long as it is accurate and up-to-date!

It's possible your site would be considered the original.

Matt Cutts has indicated that they use whois info to try to know when sites have been sold and 301'd for link juice. Other than that, I would not expect your whois data to affect your ranking.

If I am unsure about the site being linked to, I approve the comment and nofollow or remove the link.

Your situation sounds very intriguing. I, like you, would suspect that content had been copied from somewhere. But maybe not, if you can't find it anywhere online. Or maybe they copied it from a print book or ebook or something...

I would probably approve it, then check back in a week and see if you can find duplicate content then.

If I were you, I would move the blog to my own domain and 301-redirect the wordpress.com urls to my new domain (if that is possible!)

Without looking over your site, seeing the links you are building, etc. the best advice I can give you is:

It's not unusual for a new site to gain rankings then drop down a bit. Keep building high quality links and building your rankings up.

A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version.

See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics.

I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.

Do you find that you generally need linkbait/offer of content to get the link in competitive industries and/or when your site is commercial in nature?

I've only had success with just asking for links in low competition and/or local niches.

I'll start off by sharing one:

Choose 2-3 really good communities in your niche to become involved in. If you can get a dofollow link from a profile or signature, great. But the main goal is to use the communities to contribute and establish yourself as an expert, do market research, promote linkbait, form partnerships, etc.