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I'll admit to not being too familiar with their service but after looking on their website I still can't tell what methods they use to "gett you to rank 1" (in their own words).

Smells fishy to me instantly.

Do you have a link to your site please? In order to help, I think we would need to have a good look around your link profile.

Matt

The most important thing to think about here is your visitors and not the search engines.

Imagine being a customer and searching for "log house prices". Chances are you will want to see a list of prices. This lends itself to the category page perfectly. I would imagine that seeing an article or content page would have a higher bounce rate and will most certainly have a lower conversion rate (for this keyword at least).

Remember that there is no reason not to have a nice bit of content on the category page if it adds value to your visitors.

With regards to the term "log houses", this could be used for a more generic page which covers your entire range. This decision should be based on how much time you have to spend on the website, your resources and more importantly, the competition for the keyword. If you feel like you can rank for that term instead of log house prices then go ahead and give it a go... It will be harder though, that's for sure.

Matt

That should do it. Nothing else really to consider as long as the page no longer has internal links going to it.

On a side note, ensure that the redirect is relevant. For example, if you were a visitor to a website and thought you were looking for a torch, you wouldn't be happy if you were redirected to a bird cage. This would usually just result in them leaving your site and would probably have an adverse effect on your site's performance as drop rates would increase.

If something really cannot be redirected to another similar page then redirecting to the homepage is your best bet.

I'm assuming by taking them offline you mean discontinuing the product permanently? If so, it is important that you 301 redirect (always 301 redirect unless the product is coming back at some point) the page to the nearest closest product or if there is nothing similar that you sell, redirecting it back to the closest category page.

Hope this helps a little?

Matt

Do you have Skype? I have to pop out right now but I'd be happy to help you out later on?

I'll have a good dig through the page and check out your link profile

My Skype is in my SEOMoz profile. If you don't have Skype, pop me a mail or something.

Matt

Spot on thanks. What terms are you not ranking for? The page is indexed and when searching for "Isles of Scilly Cornwall" I'm getting you in 5th position?

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That's not the site I was talking about specifically but it is a site that my team are working on.

Looking at that product on your page, the content is essentially is a list of features. My advice? Try and make it unique and interesting. It can be hard to do this without simply thickening the content with fill words though. Maybe try to be funny?

By the way, I'd try and make your URL a little shorter

Matt

Great. I'm pleased you are wanting to do it the right way. Many people come here for advice and simply reject the advice given because it costs too much money or takes too much effort.

Generally, creating decent unique descriptions for 5000 products will take lots of time and effort. If you do have a budget for this sort of thing then it might be worth trying oDesk or Elance or something similar. Just remember that if you follow this advice, you should also have someone editing and checking the descriptions that you are provided with.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm working on a site at the moment which needs unique descriptions for 30,000 products.

Matt

I would regard this as actually being more dangerous than beneficial. You should be very careful about introducing lots of links from lots of new sites.

Bare in mind that links from new sites could happen once or twice, completely naturally, that is the way of the web. But if it becomes a large part of your websites link profile then it will do no good at all.

Above all else, beware of footer and sitewide links from new domains to your domain.

Matt

If you want the honest answer then there is only one real way of making this work... Rewrite the descriptions. Make them unique.

If you really want the pages to do well then this is the solution.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

Matt

Oh and change that font. It hurts my eyes. Introduce something a little more... Erm... Modern

There are some nice fonts here:

http://www.google.com/fonts/

This is definitely a thin content issue. Your drop in visitors coincided with the Panda 9.3.1 algorithm update. This update targets thin content specifically.

Looking at your product pages, they are incredibly sparse and contain little content. Content is one of the key (and most important) factors to getting your pages ranking.

I would recommend looking at further issues with the website which should also help:

• Introduce a better URL structure. Instead of mydomain.com/gnfjksdagh^&£!!!.asp go for something like mydomain.com/cobra-style-mustang-hood
• Ignore PR and Page Authority. This will only tell you a small part of the big picture.
• Develop a decent 404 error page.
• Your link profile is not the best. It has links coming from completely unrelated domains which stand out like a sore thumb to me. If I can see these, so can Google and it makes it obvious that the link building tactics are in place to try and manipulate their algorithm.
• Build some real, authoritive, relevant links. The key here is to make them look natural.
• Look at the user interface of the website. User Experience (UX) is playing a much bigger of optimising a website lately. Google is looking at things like bounce rate, time on page, time on site, page visits, page load times... These all directly play a part in your user experience.
• CREATE GREAT CONTENT. There are literally loads of your pages which have content which can be found in multiple places online. Make it unique.

Can you confirm whether you received a message within your Google Webmasters account?

Hope some of this helps.

Matt

July, take note here... Phil is the man to listen to regarding video!

I'm throwing my backing behind ensuring that the video doesn't auto-play.

I find generally that if the video does it's job then it helps to keep visitors on the page longer too

Matt

Do you have a link to the site please? I'd be happy to take a quick look.

Matt

CLOSED

Elegant Themes is pretty cool too. As others have said, also try out WooThemes.

http://www.elegantthemes.com/
http://www.woothemes.com/

Do you have a domain we could take a look at please?

Also, if you can give us the keyword you want to rank for we can have a look at various potential stumbling blocks.

I did a similar thing not too long ago (maybe 9 months ago) for a friend. To cut a long story short he only usually averaged 50 visitors a day coming on to his website from Google and about 400 visitors as direct traffic. He ran a large scale offline marketing campaign and the printers managed to screw up his domain name so he wanted to do the same thing as your client.

I anticipated a similar effect to what you expect in that SERPS might drop slightly but then recover. However, his 50 visitors a day dropped to around 25 a day for 3 months and all his rankings (not that there were many terms he ranked for anyway!) dropped off quite badly. After 3 months, they recovered quite well apart from one search term.

I think on a larger scale operation such as yours, the data and figures might represent a real life answer a little more than my data set on such a small scale website... Due to this its hard to say whether you will see a similar effect on your clients website.

You have given me an idea for an article, thanks. I think I will monitor this one for a few months and see how it goes