New here, need some advice

Our website was punished?

[dusterjh]

Hello all,
I am new here and have done some reading for a week or two in this forum, there is alot of information here and the further I read the more confused I get.
The problem is that our company website which we count of for a large percentage of our sales suddenly went from the #1 (it was #1 and sometimes #2 for about a year and a half)position for our two word keyword phrase and went to #20 around 10th of this month. The main page rank I believe was #5 or #6 and now is #3 and the rest of my pages are #2's. I hadn't made any changes to the main page in awhile.
I sure would like to hear any advice or suggestions for this problem our sales have been slow since this happened.
If there is any other information needed please let me know.

Best Regards,
Joe

[Shak]

Joe,

welcome to webmasterworld.

just to quickly get the ball rolling and try and answer some questions.

Your website does not look like it is suffering from a penalty, and has just dropped in the positions, a few reasons:

1, Your Industry/Competitors are employing SEOs.
2, You have lost some quality inbound links, probably with the anchor text that you were ranking high for in the 1st place.

obviously Google will NOT be showing your backlinks if you are now PR3 and PR2.

take a look at alltheweb to find out who is linking to you, and better start getting some more links to your site.

if your site is crucial to your business than I suggest you employ a SEO/SEM

Shak

[le_gber]

Welcome to webmasterworld Joe,

If I understood correclty what I read so far, Shak is right, you may have some inbounds like that either were lost or 'became illegal' (a link farm spotted by google lately for example).

Try to see if the people that are linking to you ( and who you are linking to) are using genuine-legal (to Goggle eyes) strategies to rank their sites.

Also stick to this forum and apply every SEO strategy that you learn here to every pages of your site. This is a great source of information.

leo

[netguy]

I would agree with the above comments Joe... I did do a quick check and you have about 21 links on Google, and assuming your keyword is obvious, the #1 spot is held by a HUGE company that has literally hundreds of (apparently legit) inbound links, #2 has 97, etc.

Another thing I would look at though, that you can fix quickly, is the page TITLE. 10 words is Way too long and dilutes your primary 2-word phrase. Keep it simple here.

I'm sure more people here will have some very good input for you.
Good luck!

[le_gber]

I did do a quick check and you have about 21 links on Google

Out of interest, how do you know which website he's talking about? ;)

leo

[netguy]

Columbo got me his email address.........

[le_gber]

Columbo got me his email address.........

Damn! where is Dr Watson when I need him ...
never liked Holmes ... too clever ;)

[dusterjh]

Wow that was fast, thanks for all the comments.

I'm not really sure why we were #1 for the longest of time but I sure was happy about it. I have no formal training in web design as you can tell. I'm still not sure why it went from #1 to #20 overnight, if we lost an incoming link or two does it usually make that big of fall? The current hight rankers for the key words have spent alot of money to get their pages on top I'm sure with optimization.
I don't know if this is appropriate or not on this board to list the company website and have suggestions made for improvements (this is an industrial supply company I wouldn't be trying to sell anything to the readers).
I have been adding our information to business and industrial directories for a week or so, I will keep plugging away at that.
Thank you for your time.

Regards,
Joe Hance

[Shak]

Joe,

webmasterworld tries to keep away from site reviews for obvious reasons, no matter what industry they are in.

however i strongly suggest a posting in the Commercial Exchange Forum, I am sure there are members here who would be glad to give you some suggestions for a very "reasonable" price of something like $50 or so.

Good luck

Shak

[dusterjh]

Thank you for all your help, I'll be searching for appropriate places to list our site. I'll be sure to hang around this forum I have much to learn it seems.

Regards,
Joe