Organic traffic down since before Dec. 28th

[beerSEO]

Hello,

I am new to WebmasterWorld but not so new to SEO.

Here is my dilemma:

I have a mail order site in the food industry. We have been doing a lot of META description updates recently (past 2 months) as well as redoing the titles (adding in relevant keywords, etc). All of our backlinks are either organic (food blogs, etc) or directories (non-link farm/spam).

I should mention that half way through October of 2010 we launched a new layout, a new CMS. Maybe we are losing real estate due to this?
We are still getting all the 301s in place and making sure the URL structure is where we want it, or rather the way we think G wants it.

I have been reading about the Dec. 28th happenings as well as the PageRank updates. None of these really explain why my site has been losing organic traffic. We are down anywhere from 30%-60%.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Greatly appreciated (in advance)!

[tedster]

Hello beerSEO, and welcome to the forum.

My first suspicion is the new layout and new CMS. You said you launched half way through October. Did the search traffic drop off begin within a week or so of that launch? If not - how long after did you see it begin?

[TheMadScientist]

Hi beerSEO, Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

We have been doing a lot of META description updates recently

AFAIK should not have bearing on search results, except indirectly via click-thru.

All of our backlinks are either organic (food blogs, etc) or directories (non-link farm/spam).

Good.

We are still getting all the 301s in place and making sure the URL structure is where we want it, or rather the way we think G wants it.

That would be my guess as to the issue...
IMO you should get them set ASAP and leave them alone.

You're either losing all the links to the pages not 301ed or you duplicated your content on new URLs.

AFAIK Google doesn't give much weight to URLs, so I would build them to be easy for people visitors to use and remember, not bots / SEs.

* I would also recommend getting the site / change over done. IMO it's not ever a good idea to have a site in a state of 'flux' and constant changes. (Meaning new URLs, new redirects, 404s, blah, blah...)

[beerSEO]

First, thanks for the insights!

@tedster: Yes, the traffic dropped off day-of launch, then spiked +30% then steadily decreased to where it is now (about 50-60% less than last year).

@TheMadScientist: We have most of the 301s in place, it's just we find new ones all the time from WMT and SEOmoz...