Is it time to hire a SE Specialist? What other options are there?

[karkadan]

Regarding the huge drop in traffic:

4 years ago, my site was growing amazingly. 2 years ago it stopped growing. 1 year ago it lost its "hair" (lost its battle in Google Images, meaning a 30% drop in traffic), and in the past 2 months I'm losing another 30%.

Shall I see my site as an old man dying? Or can it be boosted with some life by hiring a SE Specialist?

1. Is it too early to drop into conclusions because a) Google Caffeine may fix the traffic issue for some sites b) Google Caffeine is still a mystery so we need time to analyze it further?

2. Will a Specialist be any good? With over 100+ links back, white hat techniques, PR boosting, and so far? Take in mind that my nice, my keyword competition is low, so do I really need that kind of boost?

3. What other options do I have? Besides waiting, or jumping from a win...?

Thanks in advance.

[creative craig]

Not knowing the particulars of your site, what has been done over the last 12 - 18 months in terms of optimisation/content/development makes it very difficult to say if you could pull the site back up the rankings yourself or if you need the help of a dedicated SEO consultant.

Can you pinpoint a particular action that started the gradual slide in rankings besides the Google Images battle(?) ?

[HuskyPup]

Is your site image intensive and you rely on your traffic from image search?

If so then you may need to review how all your images are presented to G.

[karkadan]

My site grew a lot, since I mage one page per each image. In the past huge sites were awarded, and I had PR5. Then, Google decided not to award huge sites, my site got to PR3, and other blog sites linking my images got awarded at Google.

I'm past that. I cannot deal with it, few people know how to rank #1 on Google Images, therefore, case closed.

What I'm talking is about the Google Caffeine trend that is making me lose visitors. Now my problem is that I've lost keyword position on normal Google search. I'm losing 10% of my visitors per month, and I haven't changed anything.

This trend, I've heard, have affected others (see other posts about losing traffic). Today I spoke to a fellow webmaster, and he is reporting loses up to 40% in traffic. And he is more specialized in SEO than me.

So, I reask the 3 questions I made on post #1.

[levo]

Hopefully Caffeine is just around the corner, I would wait 15-20 days before making any changes.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

If you have not changed much on the site and getting links regularly and gradually then I would recommend you must check the trends/keyword traffic to see if the keywords you are ranking on are increasing in search volume or not. If they are showing decreasing global search trends then you need do start with a fresh keyword research.

[HuskyPup]

I cannot deal with it, few people know how to rank #1 on Google Images, therefore, case closed.

If you want to know how to rank for images see my post #:3963173 here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

The information is for free, if you want to deal with your images correctly then implement my guidleines, if you can't deal with it then there's no point in complaining about it.

Which do you want to do?

[creative craig]

It does not sound like a Caffeine problem - You say the problems started a year ago with zero growth and now you have started dropping traffic, this sounds like its a under lying issue.

Is the site increasing in size at all? New content being added? New links pointing to the site?

[karkadan]

I havent created new sections as before. I constantly upload new articles, since I have staff writers. The loss I got last year was Google Images. Now it is Google Search. I don't know if my incoming links are steady. I just lost position so suddenly in so many keywords, apparently. (not the most important ones).

BTW, Husky, I've read previous articles about image optimization. That one is new. But done, done and done. Since I made thousands of pages about images, Google just lost interest of them. While a small blog makes a page about one of my images, then G considers it more important that my monster site. But thanks,it was a nice article to read. Good one!