Rankings suddenly plummeted after 1 year of top 5 - advice?

[Sancho_NZ]

Hi all, I run a small onlone shop in New Zealand and for the last year have enjoyed very good google rankings, like in the top 5 slots on the first for a New Zealand search for pretty much any of my products. Recdently my website plummeted for every item to anywhere to 10 - 15 pages in!

My site is blog based but has all the blog stuff removed and looks and feels like a regular website and runs on the wordpress engine.

It has duplicate content and I wonder if this COULD be the reason, although it has had so ever since I launched it. I recently added a bunch of new products and some are again duplicated.

When I say duplicated, I have copied a page and simply changed the size of the item as thats the only way I can do so at the moment. I am looking this but just wondered if this would be an issue with google or not. I can post the link to the site but am not sure if that is allowed or not.

I am mostly just after a bit of advice as to what could have happened and any possible solutions.

Mark

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, Sancho_NZ.

I'd say it's extremely unlikely for duplicate content to cause this kind of ranking problem - it would have to be way over the top, truly massive. As a reference, see this Official Blog post from Google: Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty" [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]. I would still suggest addressing those duplicate issues, but don't hope for a rankings recovery.

That kind of a hit for every keyword usually comes from something Google doesn't like about a site's backlink profile. I'd research your backlinks and see what Google might feel is not OK according to their guidelines.