MelissaLB - 1:26 pm on Nov 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

We did not see any improvement on Nov 6th. We saw about a 20% increase in google traffic on the 4th and the 5th and a massive crawl increase, but no change once it was all said and done.

I'm concerned that there is something more technically wrong with our site (not on the users end, just in the way that google sees us). We've actually made a whole host of changes:
-dealing with all the soft 404's and returning 404's instead.
-noindexed all of our subcategory pages that had duplicate or very similar descriptions to one another (aprox 800 pages)
-removing 95% of out of stock items that could have resulted in a poor user experience
-removing all unused categories from our site (users could not navigate to them but google could index them - which i hadn't realized until recently)
-removed all keyword heavy anchor text from boilerplate navigational images
-removed all keyword heavy descriptions from 100's of categories
-rewriting product descriptions (so that they are better for the user, they do not look like generated descriptions, they were quite formulaic before) which we are only about 30% through of about 4000 products
- updated our preferred domain in EMT to www rather than not specified.

So of all the options I had in front of me when we begin this process the only 2 I have left are
1. finish re-writing product descriptions
2. move to sub-domain as last resort.

I'm just getting concerned, because of no change on the last update, that rewriting all these descriptions is not going to have the effect that I hoped it would.