What happened with my site and google

[Northstar]

My site is a site directory. For years I ranked well in Google. Then two years ago I lost 70% of my google traffic over night and two months laster it was back to normal. Now last year around July 1 I lost 70% of my google traffic again and this time it stuck. I'm still down 70% to this day. I have made no changes to the site and new content/link are added to categories daily. I do have dynamic URLs but they aren't very long (example: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/pseek/dirs2.cgi?cid=39). Am I in some type of sandbox or could it be caused by the dynamic URLs? For the life of me I can't figure out what happen or what to do to fix this. Any ideas?

[edited by: jdMorgan at 5:57 pm (utc) on May 29, 2008]
[edit reason] example.com [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

Does your site resolve at http://example.com -- No www, as well as with "www"? If so, you've got duplicate-content issues (search WebmasterWorld for duplicate content). Make sure that any given page on your site can be reached by one URL and one URL only (the "canonical URL"). All other variations (such as "no-www") should result in a 301-Moved Permanently redirect to the canonical URL.

For best search engine crawling and indexing, static-looking URLs are highly-recommended. That's why the "Search Engine Friendly" plug-ins for blogs, forums, and shopping carts are so popular...

Also, check your server response codes for all possible conditions using a server headers checker. As usual, I'll recommend the "Live HTTP Headers" add-on for Firefox/Mozilla-based browsers. Check that you get the proper response codes for "Proper (canonical) URL and page is present" (200-OK or 304-Not Modified), Missing page (404-Not Found), Removed page (410-Gone), Access denied (403-Forbidden), Moved page (301-Moved Permanently). Make sure that there are no 302-Found responses. Make sure that any 301 redirects happen in one hop -- without consecutive multiple redirects.

And there could of course be hundreds of other issues related to SEO, level of competition in your market segment, strength and number of incoming links, etc. I'd recommend looking deep in our Google Forum Library for SEO tips and past discussion of SEO issues. I've only tried to address server-related stuff here.

It's unfortunate that the problem started two years ago, because the natural questions to ask are, "What changes were made to your site before this happened?" and "What changes did Google make to its algorithm two years ago?" -- The answers to which are now a bit hazy and lost in time.

Jim

[edited by: jdMorgan at 5:57 pm (utc) on May 29, 2008]