from #2 to #9

[MelissaLB]

For any of the paid members I've posted a very detailed outline of some changes we had our developer make to our site int he past few weeks as a continuum of a Site Review thread I began a few months ago here: [webmasterworld.com...]

It seems as though one of our most coveted 2-word keywords that directs users to a category page which we have held onto #2 spot in google.com for years has plummeted to #9! This happened either sometime early today or yesterday.

I've been certain that our site, has not been effected by Panda but now, I'm not so sure. This decline in serps happened to some other category pages, but not all.

My big question is how can we find out if this decline is caused by something that we have done to our site (with the intentions of improving user experience) or is this due to google testing of algorythims, or the dreaded being pandalized?

[edited by: tedster at 6:07 pm (utc) on May 25, 2011]
[edit reason] fixed the link [/edit]

[aakk9999]

If you have dropped in ranking for your category pages, then I would firstly scrutinise these pages and not product pages. For example, have you got enough text on category pages describing your category or do they only contain list of products?

[MelissaLB]

upon further investigation this HAS affected out product pages as well. In many or most cases our product pages have remained in place, as well as many of our category pages.

However, one thing I can say about the category pages is that there is no actual text on the page describing the contents of the page, it is simply the regular static menus and internal links with the first 12 products from that category showing.

The description for the page is written as a meta description only and appears only in the search listing, not on the page.

[aakk9999]

Meta description is not used in ranking. Perhaps you could try to put some relevant text on the category pages to see if this helps.

[MelissaLB]

Wanted to update this thread for anyone who was participating or curiou: Earlier this week, we added a noindex,follow on our pagination pages hoping to recover our category serps and so far and unfortunately, no movement. In the past when we've discovered the problem we were able to implement and snap back to position the very next day. No such luck this time. Afraid we haven't found the culprit.

2 things of note: We've noticed our 2 main keyword occurrences on page (reported in WMT) have switched positions. #1 keyword is now #2 and vice versa. Also, we've been experiencing major 6-12 hour blackout periods where traffic is still trickling in, but sales aren't happening at all, then all of a sudden sales will start again and sometimes come in back to back one after the other, then stop again.

aakk9999, your suggestion for putting text on the category pages rather then just product is a great one and it's something I think we will definitely do. However, we are still concerned that we have not directly addressed the issue that caused the rank decrease in the first place. We're still on the search though and not giving up!

[mslina2002]

Did you fix the issues that aakk9999 brought up in the original WMS review post? I remember seeing duplicate content that was pointed out before.

I have also seen the same thing you have described regarding sales. It seems that some days G decides to open the faucet and sales are like prePanda and some days that faucet is on trickle, there is traffic but hardly no conversions.

[Planet13]

Hi there, MelissaLB:

It's a little hard to get the exact concept of how your site is set up through this forum format, so from what it appears to me is that you have two ore three things that I would be concerned about.

1) Lack of text on Category Pages: That would probably be the first thing I would deal with. I think you said that you had meta tag text for the category pages, and if that's all you have, maybe you should take that meta tag text and at least put it on the category pages themselves.

2) Lack of original text on the product pages. You said something about wiki and product pages. Does that mean the text on the product pages is being found on other sites? If so, then I would definitely change that.

3) Category pagination: As a user, I hate pagination on category pages, so that may be clouding my judgment a bit. What I would rather see is all products on more narrowly defined pages - if your category has more than, say, 20 products in it, then personally I would seriously consider splitting it up into more clearly defined subcategories.

Additionally, consumer research shows that if you give your customers TOO many choices they are less likely to purchase.

Now I can't say with 100% certainty that these are what are causing your ranking problems, but that's what I would do if it were might site (which has seen about an 18% INCREASE in traffic since Panda).

[MelissaLB]

mslina2002: yes, in fact we have addressed those issues that aakk9999 has brought to our attention. Since we began posting in the Review side in February we have implemented 301's and rel=canonical and it has vastly improved our Dupe content reportage in WMT, going from nearly 10,000 occurrences down to around 100 or less (it still fluctuates though).

Planet13: Thanks for the input. I definately agree with what you are saying, all great points and all things we want to move forward with. My only hesitation is what I had mentioned before: making improvements to the site without adressing something we may have done wrong (programming) that could have caused the rank drop. Yes, text on the category pages and removing wiki content in the description seems like a no brainier but that's where I start to get confused for 2 reasons.
1) The category pages ranked very well as they are for years, why all of a sudden would we be re-ranked due to that (we haven't heard of it happening to anyone else on that date so we think it's something we did wrong, not just as a result of being re ranked due to algorithm change.
2) As far as our product pages with the wiki content go, some of the pages that are ranking above us have more wiki content on their pages than we do.

Again, I do agree with you and think your suggestions are actions we should definitely take, I just don't want to lose sight of trying to track down the problem that caused this problem in the first place.

Another thing that just occurred to me, I mentioned above that our keywords found on page changed in WMT. Although I only noticed this update recently, It's possible that this is as a result of one of the changes we made on May 9th
-additional 301's on a few pagination pages we had missed in the February overhaul
-implementing anti-hotlinking
-301 on false urls that were being created on a page that lists all the categories on the page (this one is very suspect to me as each one of these pages has 12 image links that has alt text containing the word 'merchandise' and there are 29 pages of pagination there)

Thanks for the input guys, I really appreciate you guys being a part of my brainstorming team!

[aakk9999]

Earlier this week, we added a noindex,follow on our pagination pages hoping to recover our category serps and so far and unfortunately, no movement.

I would say you are expecting results too soon. One week is far too little to see the effects when your pagination changes are sitewide. Also, there are some changes on which Google reacts quicker (e.g. title element change) and other changes that take more time (anything to do with crawling and indexing, especially when we are not talking about one page but a number of them.

Also, it is not possible to say with certainty why your rankings dropped. SEO is not exact science. What is the best course of action is to fix everything you can think of, and wait to see what happens.

The drop in your ranking could be because of:
- other sites have done something better since
- Google tweaked the algorithm and you got re-ranked
- You changed something on your site that caused the drop
- Sites that linked to you got devalued
- You kept tweaking your site and your site lost a degree of "trust"

[Planet13]

I am inclined to agree with the second and fourth points above (i.e., algo change and devaluing of sites that link IN to your site due to panda devaluing those exrenal sites).

[MelissaLB]

Another update for those following along. I just got through a brainstorming session with our developer and I wanted to post what we came up with.

I mentioned we noticed that our keywords in Google WMT changed where our most predominant keyword (which is associated with our categories where we lost the majority of our rank) moved to 2nd most predominant keyword. WE tried to figure out what change would have caused this.

Earlier in May we noticed invalid url strings begin crawled by google that we found in a part of our site that lists links to all of the category pages. These invalid urls were being created by the addition of the title keyword from each of the categories on the site. With 300 categories there could have been potentially 300 duplicates for each page (29 pages of pagination). So, we implemented a 301 redirect for all versions of these urls back to he correct one. We also added a noindex, follow on all pages 2 -29 for 29 pages of pagination (12 links per page) Each of these links contains alt text containing our previously most predominant keyword.

What we are doing today is removing the 301's just from that part of the site as well as removing the noindex, follow just from that part of the site (29 pages).

Is it a possibility that these invalid urls that had good landing pages (not 404's) were actually creating a larger amount of internal linking that pointed toward the pages that have now lost rank? Could it be that what looked to be a problem was actually helping us?

and the saga continues.....

[indyank]

Is it a possibility that these invalid urls that had good landing pages (not 404's)

do you mean good landing pages that aren't duplicates? You will have to be careful in removing the 301s as it might create duplicates.Having 301s to avoid duplicates shouldn't have been an issue.

[MelissaLB]

I did not think I was ever coming back to this thread... we recovered the lost rank on June 9th and held it steady until today.

It looked like on June 9th all of our serps went back to their previous placements. Today something changed and all the overseas non USA sites are placing in a us search ahead of us!

UNBELIEVEABLE!

[MrFewkes]

You cleaned your cache in IE?

[MelissaLB]

sure did, cache is clear! It was smooth sailing, everything back to normal for 11 days.... very strange.

Those 11 days were generally the same set of results that were being served all year up until we first began this thread.

I think this time all we can do is wait it out. I was convinced that our drop was triggered by semething we had done ourselves (bad programming). But alas, it is google just messing around again.

I'm not really trying to be greedy here or anything either, we know that maybe our place isn't #1 in every search, but it's also not behind 7 sites that are not even in the country where the user is located.

we're hoping this is just a hiccup and it gets fixed quick!