Huge drop in SERPs -- where do I start looking?

years of success and now nothing

[deanw]

I have a 5 year old website that has always done well in Google. Since the data refresh in late September my site has basically dropped out of site. I used to average 1,300 daily visitors through Google but now that number has dropped to about 50.

I do have duplicate content issues that I believe I’ve corrected in the past week with 301 redirects. I’m also working on changing meta descriptions/keywords to be more unique.

If I had recently made big changes to my site I could at least pinpoint the drop to something I had done but the truth is I haven’t really made any big changes to the site in 2 years. I add 10-20 pages of new content everyday.

Where do I even start to determine the corrections that I need to make to bring my site back?

[tedster]

First, get real familiar with the Google Advanced Search Operators [google.com]. Using them as part of well targetted searches will reveal a lot -- but if your domain has over 1,000 urls you will need to get clever and look at sub-sets of your total picture.

Here are some reference threads that offer plenty of food for thought:

Supplemental Results - What exactly are they? [webmasterworld.com]
Duplicate Content - Get it right or perish [webmasterworld.com]
Checklist for Sudden Drops in Rank [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]
The url-only problem [webmasterworld.com]