Help. Strange changes in rankings, no cached copy, etc

[coachm]

Ok. So I'm stumped. Site has a hyphenated name:

like management-technique.org

Was the last of our sites to lose 80% of traffic, but we still get some google traffic from long tail.

Ranks # 3 on Bing for "management technique, and had been as high as 3rd on Google before the drop.

Our pages don't appear to be cached for this site. Google results for "management technique" have us "disappeared" We ARE in the google index however, since when we search by url, it comes up with a nice selection of internal links shown.

No WBT messages, but there were some duplicate meta and title tags (which we fixed a few days ago).

Discovered we didn't have doctype on that site (the joys of working with ten year old legacy sites), so we've fixed that.

We have MY content on this site duplicated from another of our sites, because it fits for BOTH, and it doesn't make sense to have visitors from two different sites keep bouncing between two sites with different looks. (Amazing that I get penalized(?) for duplicating my own articles to cater to reader)

We also have an article directory on "management technique" where we list and curate relevant articles, all hand done.

Finally, at one time probably PR 5-6, I AM a real world authority on this technique, and solve hundreds and thousands of book about it worldwide.

There is some inter-linking between this site and our other sites, (not many) since "management technique" is also related to "other business technique". Mostly via "our other sites" menu.

Site is both informational, and ecommerce (guides, tools, books which we are sole providers). It has been a major adsense money maker in the past but we removed ads months ago after initial traffic drops.

I have NO idea what to do with this. Ten year+ old site, NO CACHE(?). Any thoughts on where to even start to figure this out? I've made lots of changes but so far, nada.



Any suggestions

[tedster]

We have MY content on this site duplicated from another of our sites, because it fits for BOTH, and it doesn't make sense to have visitors from two different sites keep bouncing between two sites with different looks. (Amazing that I get penalized(?) for duplicating my own articles to cater to reader)

And there I think is your culprit. It doesn't make sense to Google to index two URLs with the same content. So I'd start the job by figuring out which domain's URLs you want indexed and which one's you don't. Then use the meta noindex,follow tag on the pages you decide not to have indexed.

If you lost traffic and rankings to the entire site, then the Panda algorithm may have decided you are publishing low quality content by just copying another site. In that case, the "noindex" may help you bounce back.

Another approach you might add to the above is to add a cross-domain canonical link tag to the site you don't want indexed.

But bottom line on this issue is that you cannot expect to get BOTH domains in the index for the same bit of content.

[coachm]

Tedster, that's kind of been my thinking. I'm wondering if it makes sense to remove the dup content, but leave the index and also 301?

[martinacastro]

@tedster when the whole domain and also subdomains are penalized, seems to be an efecct of the Panda algorithm?

[tedster]

No, we cannot make that leap. In fact, moving each individual author to a subdomain has given hubpages and escape from their Panda troubles.

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So far, new Panda demotions have been showing up only on certain dates. That's the first thing I'd check - the date your traffic fell. See Reference Dates for Panda iterations [webmasterworld.com]

[indyank]

In that case, the "noindex" may help you bounce back.

Tedster, is that "may" or "might"? Are there good examples of sites having recovered from Panda by adding "noindex"? I know of an example site on which we just added "noindex, nofollow" to some thin image only pages (with captions) to recover.But I am not sure whether the site was a panda victim and this change was what it helped it to come out of it. However, I haven't seen a single example for the "noindex" stuff.

[tedster]

I was just at a conference this week and learned about a couple Panda escape examples where it does seem like the noindex helped. It's not clear-cut, of course, because Pandalyzed sites tended to make a lot of changes at one time.

In this case, adding noindex to the duplicated material from another domain is a much stronger action that just using noindex on shallow content pages.

[coachm]

Thanks. I decided the safest bet was to delete/301 the duplicates, and just reference the additional articles on our main site. So, I'm seeing our "not listed" site as reappearing in it's older lousy spot, but I'm betting it's a -50 penalty, because of where it's at in the SERPS.

Comments? Should I try a reinclusion request, even though the site is actually in but possibly penalized?

[tedster]

Should I try a reinclusion request, even though the site is actually in but possibly penalized?

They are now called "reconsideration resquests" because you absolutely do not need to be kicked out of the index to submit one.