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Hello Ryan. Thanks for participating in helping me figure this out. You are correct - competition in our space has really ramped up in the last year as we fight for the last bit of consumers' disposable income. Also, there has been a steady decline year-over-year in travel-related search terms, according to Google Insights.

RE: the robots.txt. On the form pages - we actually do NOT have a customer log-in area (planned for an upcoming improvement), so that's why I had them blocked by robots - as a safeguard. Do you think I would be better off just deleting these nodes that Drupal generates from the forms? I had been leaving them there because I wanted to have the historic data on hand, but it seems to be doing more harm than good.

Also, how do you so quickly identify the 302 redirect? Our DNS controls are administered by parent company's support, so I'll need some "proof" to get this error corrected.

Finally, any tips on pulling specific reports/tools to identify where a drop in long-tail has occurred?

Thanks again for your insight.

Wonderful reply, EGOL. I am very inspired - I hear 'getting stronger' in the background.

Correct you are about the competitiveness of this space - and we have actually recently had a huge competitor enter the space for our Amazon River cruises.) We are challenged with a lean budget, and I am a one-man e-commerce show.

I think you are right - it's time to go back to basics w/ the term-targeting grader. Solid suggestions on the UI as well.

Question: To your analytics point, what is the best way to determine if the long-tail search volume has dropped? I'm trying to think of the best way to pull this in Google Analytics.

Thanks again for your inspirational post and insight.

The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting).

The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month.

The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages.

Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools.

1. I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates

2. We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away.

3. We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions.

My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings?

I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either.

If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated.

Best,

Carlton

Damien,

Thanks very much for your input. I have been doing a lot of reading on content siloing, and my question (FINAL   is, how similar or dissimilar should the URLs and on-page SEO on the landing pages be from the product pages? For instance, if I'm targeting "amazon river cruises" and "galapagos islands cruises" on the product pages, should I consciously seek to use variations for the landing pages, such as "amazon river tours" and "galapagos islands tours"?

Best,

Carlton

Dan, Damien:

Thanks for your answers - they were very helpful in being "forced to consider" this issue. I'm basically planning on paying a service to generate 125+ articles for me over 4 months, and was trying to decide on the most beneficial way to house them. The service recommended building landing pages aimed at each of those terms, but we don't want content pages outranking commerce pages - sales are what it's all about, at the end of the day!! That said, what would be your recommendation?

My thinking was to publish them under the blog under the most relevant categories, then push to the authority pages via anchor-text links.

Hello,

We recently launched a redesigned site in Drupal in December of last year. We are an eco-travel company. My current URL's look like this:

/africa-and-middle-east/kenya-tanzania

/central-south-america/galapagos-islands

My pages have good term targeting grades, and the rankings for the terms we are targeting - "kenya and tanzania safaris" and "galapagos islands cruises" are decent, but not great - most are on page 2 or 3. The one URL where I targeted our most important term, "amazon river cruises," I am still on page 2.

/central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises

My questions are:

1. Did I miss an opportunity with the rest of the URL's, and should I consider changing the rest to more targeted terms with 301s? Since the new site launched in January, perhaps I have not given enough time for my new URL's to index and mature. Would it be easier to set up landing pages with unique article content that targets terms such as "galapagos islands cruises" and "kenya and tanzania safaris"? If so, how can I do it in such a way as to not "compete" with the pages I want to drive them to?

This also raises the question of redirecting the same URL twice i.e. I would have 2 redirects in place for the same url e.g. from the former site to the new site, and yet another redirect to the most-recent URL. Is that a problem?

Sorry if I've asked too many questions in one post.

Any advice appreciated.