UK Serps dominated by Big Name Stores - even after Christmas

[Nexus1user]

Hi, I've been around WebmasterWorld for several years now but haven't logged in for ages, when I tried before my old user name/membership seems to have been lost. 

Anyway back to the reason of me creating a new account and posting:

I am based in the UK and have 8 years experience in SEO and our website has done well in google, for several thousand keywords for over 6 years now, that is until early this year, In our niche we have always noticed the larger stores eg.whsmiths.amazon.argos.etc.. being promoted in the SERPS before Christmas but always disappearing back to there dismal positions in January. But this year its completely different. There still about and stronger than ever, dominating the SERPS in our niche. We have also been moved down and where we have held 1st page results for years but now we are coming up on page 2 and even page 3.  We are a cottage industry eccomerce site selling popular consumables.

1) Are we on are own seeing this or is this being seen by anyone else? 

2) Is google still turning knobs or are we doomed.

3) We have changed our internal link structure over the last 2 days in response as this seems to be a big factor on the couple of our competitors that still hold good positions. Will we have to wait for googles next update or is there a chance that we may move up after google crawls  are site and sees the changes, taking it likes them?

4) Anyone got any suggestions?

We are also seeing a massive amount of foreign visitors on our site, we have a .co.uk tld any only ship to the UK.

Foreign visitors have doubled and UK visitors have droped between 25% to 33%.

Any feedback help or even useless comments much appreciated.

Thanks Marc   

[g1smd]

There's multiple factors at work, not least Google seemingly trying to boost legitimate businesses and sink the spam, not always successfully.

Recent WebmasterWorld discussions have highlighted a number of initiatives Google are taking to filter out many types of sites they no longer want to list.

There's also this factor to consider: [sebastians-pamphlets.com...]

[Novus]

I currently work for a medium sized media distribution company in the UK. Before I start I should mention my companies site is horrid and poorly built. For our exisiting content we're pretty much buried and its take a lot of my time to drag the rankings up.

However with new product releases i'm having some success out performing brands like hmv, play etc, for product titles. I feel a lot of this is down to getting our information out there (webpages, blogs, twitter, facebook, articles) before these titles become available on major brands.

I initally started this due to the inability to my pages indexed but it seems to have had a knock on effect.

I havent seen any of our rankings slide but then they were pretty bad before i got here.

[BenFox]

Can't cite any recent stories about this off the top of my head but I was under the impression that Google has been putting more emphasis on "brands" for a while now.

If you're an SEOMoz Pro member I think they did a webinar recently about potnetial branding signals which might be worth a look (haven't watched it personally).

[tedster]

We've had quite a few threads about the apparent increasing ranking power for "brands". I have noticed that Google people usually back away from using the actual word "brand" and instead use something more general, such as "named entity" (a semantics term).

Here are a few references:

Brands, Stores, Types - Related Searches expand [webmasterworld.com]
Head of Google Search Quality denies brand bias in Google Instant [webmasterworld.com]
Google Now Shows Many Results from One Single Subdomain [webmasterworld.com]