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I think Guy Warner nailed it. I wrote the copy for my home page back in 2004. I've tweaked it over the years, but it remained largely the same. During that time, lots of others have been copying the text for their own websites. Now, if you search for an exact match, a few of the other sites come up even higher in the SERP than my own site!

I've done my best to get folks to remove the copies (and serving DMCA complaints when necessary) but I think my time is better spent simply rewriting the home page.

It's frustrating on one hand, but it's also good to finally have an idea of what the problem might be.

Thanks, Guy!

Hi Takeshi,

My competitors for the specific keywords I'm talking about have stayed fairly static in the rankings. I haven't noticed any on-page changes for any of them during this period (I check frequently) and I haven't noticed any major changes in backlink profiles (I use Raven and Majestic in addition to SEOmoz Pro).

Over the same period, my site's on- and off-page SEO factors did not change either, and yet my site dropped >10 spots relative to competing sites for these specific keywords.

Meanwhile, other pages of my site continued to rank well for other keywords - so if it was an algo change, it's an algo change that only affected my home page for certain keywords, while leaving my other pages and my competitor's pages alone.

Strange, no?

I'm sure it IS algorithm-related. The strange thing is that it doesn't seem to have affected all of my pages/rankings equally. I'll PM you shortly.

There's actually been a steady and gradual decline in organic traffic since around early February.

I'd rather not say which website or what keywords in a public forum, but I'd be happy to discuss it privately.

The Google Webmaster Tools "site performance" chart shows a period of slow performance for the first half of April. There was also a brief website outage about 2 weeks ago - I don't think it lasted more than 10 minutes.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

I've been banging my head trying to solve a mystery for a few months, with little luck. Maybe one of you has an answer.

My home page organic SERP rankings have dropped from #1 or #2 late last year, to between #8 and #25 a few months ago for a couple of important keywords.

I did not make any on-page changes during this period.

Meanwhile, many inner pages continue to rank well (top 5) for long-tail keywords.

All of my SEO is white hat, no unusual on-page tactics, no purchased or otherwise fishy backlinks. In fact, looking closely at the on-page and backlink tactics of some of the websites that have leapfrogged ahead of me, I'd say some of them have (and continue to) engaged in shady practices.

No errors reported by SEOmoz. I've been judiciously applying canonical tags and other techniques to ensure minimal duplicate content.

I've not received a letter from Google warning me of any unnatural backlink profiles.

The biggest part of the mystery is that it seems like my home page was the only page really affected. As mentioned above, the inner pages continue to rank well for their respective keywords. Thus, I don't think I've been hit by any kind of site-wide penalty.

Also, I continue to rank well on Bing/Yahoo.

Does anybody have an insight into what could have happened? Has anybody else experienced anything similar (home page dropping rank while other pages stay put)?

Good advice, Matt, and thanks for taking a moment to provide an actual data point!

And yes, we definitely take a balanced approach combining on page, off page, PR, social, and more. This just happens to be "on page" day for me.

Hi Matthew,

I agree with all of your points.

Nevertheless, I still think that it's overdramatic for the On Page Report Card to go from an "A" grade to an "F" grade when changing a single letter. It just doesn't seem to reflect the reality of how search engines look at content.

Akira

I have some pages on my website that receive an "A" grade with the SEOmoz On Page Report Card if I use a plural term in a phrase (say, "landscape designers in Dallas") but an "F" grade if I use the singular term (say, "landscape designer in Dallas").

Is this a true and accurate reflection of how search engines see the page?

Am I going to rank well for plural terms but not for singular, given the specific on-page content I'm using in this example?

Or is this an opportunity for SEOmoz to tweak its' algorithm to better reflect the search engines?

Note to self, and to others who see this thread later, the 301 for this situation is:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} x=([0-9]+)&y=([0-9]+)

RewriteRule ^product.php$ http://www.example.com/product.php?y=%2 [r=301,nc]

Dr. Pete,

Thanks for the very helpful answer. I've gotten rid of the rel-canonical tag for this part of the site and I'll try to figure out what's up with the 301s.

BTW, I listened to the recorded version of your "future proofing" webinar this morning and learned a lot.

Akira

Suppose I have two dynamic URLs that lead to the identical page:

www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1

and

www.example.com/product.php?y=1

The x=1 parameter had some historical meaning, but is now unused. All references to the x=1 parameter have been removed from internal links and sitemaps.

I have implemented two solutions:

First, the header of www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1 includes:

Second, the .htaccess file includes the following:

Redirect permanent /product.php?x=1&y=1 http://www.example.com/product.php?y=1

Questions:

1. I assume that since canonical is still relatively new, it's best to play it safe and implement both solutions. Is this correct?

2. When I point my browser to www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1, it does NOT redirect to www.example.com/product.php?y=1. The address bar continues to show the non-canonical URL. Is this because the canonical tag somehow takes precedence over the 301 redirect?

3. How long will Google Webmaster Tools continue to show these as duplicates, even though I've implemeted BOTH canonical and 301? It's been a few weeks and I thought it would have rolled off by now.

Thanks!

If you have backlinks pointing to www.etraxc.com/default.asp then using the canonical tag to point to www.etraxc.com/ instead should still be helpful. Or you can do a permanent redirect from the former to the latter.

Add rel="canonical" href="http://www.etraxc.com/" /> to the header of default.asp.

But first, learn how the canonical tag works so you don't hurt yourself by mistake: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

Thanks for a very thoughtful reply; I agree that it's important to promote the best content, and I definitely do that.

I misspoke earlier - the excerpts are just the title and 45 words, not 85. Maybe 3 sentences. Do you still think this is a duplicate content risk?

Last, a new question: Can you think of ANY good reason to put blog excerpts in a site-wide footer the way  http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com do? I currently do it randomly; these other sites excerpt the latest posts.

Ben,

Thanks for the reply. I didn't know about the nofollow on the internal links.

Yes, the body of every page has unique content.

My entire site revolves around serving the needs of a specific type of individual, and the content in the body and the content in the blog work together to fill the information needs of the visitor - so hopefully yes, the blog content is relevant.

I see lots of websites incorporating a blog excerpt in the footers or sidebars of their pages (e.g., http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com). The problem I have is that they almost always link to the most recent blog post(s), concentrating attention on a small subset of the blog inventory. That means older, still-relevant, still-useful content is getting neglected. That's the main thing I'm trying to overcome.

I do have good site search so people who know what they are looking for can find it - the problem is that many people don't know what they want until they see it.

Thanks again!

I have roughly 150 non-blog pages and 500 articles in my blog.

The footer of every non-blog page includes excerpts from 3 blog posts selected at random from the inventory of 500.

The posts in the footer of each page change with every page refresh.

So, if you scroll to the bottom of any non-blog page, you'll see about 85 words for each of 3 randomly selected blog posts, with a link to the source article in the blog section of my site. Each page will link to 3 different posts.

One of my objectives is to drive visitors to some older blog content that has become buried deep in the archives over the years.

Question 1: In a post-Panda/Penguin world, is this a good or bad technique?

Question 2: Should the links to the full content in the blog use rel="nofollow"? Without it, the internal link structure for this part of the site looks pretty crazy and random - I assume nofollow would help make things look more orderly (and prevent my main non-blog pages from passing excess link juice to my blog).

Thoughts or comments?