What to do with 7 month old dead e-commerce site?

[kulboy]

I own 7 e-commerce sites but one of them died in Google rankings on 7/22/2014, it was a successful site for 2 years previous to this day. It still ranks in Yahoo and Bing but not Google, we have had no warnings in WMT. We have hired 2 SEO companies to tell us that they see nothing wrong with the site. The site currently just generates money mostly from picture ads now. We disavowed any links that looked spammy back in October. All 7 of the sites run on the same format but do not sell the same items. I feel no matter what we do the site will never recover. Should I just kill it or does anybody have any suggestions?

[minnapple]

If you have 6 other sites, I would on focus those and don't spend to much time or money on the problem site.

If the problem site is supporting itself, give it 1000 days. Any off site offense should be forgotten after that.

[kulboy]

Yeah you are probably right, it's just painful to watch it suffer. It's one of my oldest sites that has the most time invested and products on it. I will just focus on the other sites and keep my fingers crossed for a recovery.

[tangor]

Have you determined the loss of rank is a Google hit, or better ranking by the competition? If the latter, look to what you can do to make you site better. If the former, do the same thing! :)

[kulboy]

95% of our site doesn't show up on Google searches no matter how many times you press next, even for super obscure niche products that only our site has. We went from about 1,500 organic visits per week to around 40.

[RedBar]

Wow, it sounds like you were hit big time by an almighty algo screw-up however just how could that be if all your sites were built on the same format? I assume you mean template layout?

But saying that I've had similar things happen, Google annihilated an image gallery of mine which ranked #1 for years for many of my widget images, literally overnight they took a disliking to the extremely well-known programme I was using and deranked thousands of unique images at a stroke.

Great going G, I've now removed that gallery altogether therefore no one gets to see those images now and sure as heck no one else has built a gallery like it.

Have you considered trying it on a new name and server? The only problem with that is new sites are seemingly taking a long time to get any traction these days.

[RedBar]

Oh, and welcome to WebmasterWorld kulboy!

[kulboy]

RedBar, Yes all the sites use the same template, they look the same but all have different products on them. I have thought about moving it to a different server so the IP addresses didn't all match up, it is worth a shot. If that didn't work I suppose I could try a different name, I just worry that there is some sort of hidden penalty that might carry over at a later date.

[RedBar]

What kind of penalty wouldn't apply to 6 out of the 7 sites if they're all built using the same template?

[kulboy]

RedBar, I have leaned not to try to figure our Google, who know what they are doing.

[minnapple]

I tried moving a problem site to a new url and ip.
No help, it was like google fingerprinted the site and whatever caused the problem, moved to the new location.
Also, I performed no redirection.

All of this was done at least 7 years ago, before the algo was so refined.

[netmeg]

What kind of penalty wouldn't apply to 6 out of the 7 sites if they're all built using the same template?

I had exactly this situation (not with ecommerce though) where I have eight sites that all are exactly the same except that the content is targeted to a specific state. One site got penalized in a Panda around late October / early November 2012, and the rest of them were not touched. I didn't do anything differently to that site that I wasn't doing to the others, and it fully recovered just as mysteriously after 18mos. I wouldn't have thought it a false positive, but the other seven sites were fine. Who knows.

[minnapple]

I need to add that the problem site did come back in time. For the most part I had forgotten about it, so in this case I do not recall how long it was in the sandbox.
It was well over year.

[wesmaster]

Google de-index 1/4 of one of my sites (we're talking hundreds of pages) a few years ago and denied that the site had any manual penalty. I finally "gave up" on retaining the backlink value and re-named the pages in question so that G would see them as new pages and that was the only way they came back. In the mean time I lost a few hundred thousand visitors a day and today the site is useless.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 12:35 pm (utc) on Mar 10, 2015]

[kulboy]

Ouch wesmaster that hurts. I wish we had a penalty showing up in WMT, at least I would have something to work with. I am having our programmer move the site to a different server this weekend, I know it's a long shot but at least it is something.

[gameon]

There are some eCommerce sites that are built with no regard for SEO. This type of sites are always hard to optimize because of duplicate content, canonical issues, robots.txt issues, lack of content etc.