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Sorry about the bold message subject, but I'm in pursuit of definitive answer to problem which has been bugging me for some time.
My question is this.. (take a deep breath)
I have a website that sells widgets but I specialise in providing a few different type of widgets.
I mostly sell natural widgets, so my domain name is somehting like 'natural widget shop'.
Over the last 3 years I have been building high quality one way links from online news sites & directories, widget sites etc. I've done a few exchanges but only a few fairly relevant ones, and i dont think anything looks particularly toxic.
Much of the anchor text in my links will contain the word widgets, widget but many used in context with the word 'natural' .. so 'natural widgets'
Hope you are still following this...?
The amount of traffic my website recieves for my key term 'natural widgets' is in decline despite my search rankings being ranked #1 for this term and a a range of similar terms niche terms.
I believe the key to transforming my fortunes lies in getting on the first page for the single word 'widgets'.
Currently i'm listed on the second page for this term, about halfway down.
I know for a fact that one of the websites ranked @ #1 for 'widgets' has only half the links as me and nowhere near the quality - I was involved with the project a while ago!
This site sells different types of widgets too, even more than me. Too many to be a specialist even. The site has the word 'widgets' in his domain name but it doesnt refer to a specific type of widget.
Please can someone tell me why this site is ranked higher than mine? and by nearly 13 places!
I have a few theories including has the very nature of my products hindered me.. is google somehow discriminating and not ranking my site highly for a broad term such as 'widgets' because I only specialise in a few specific types of widget.
I firmly believe my products are completely relevant to searchers of 'widgets' and I believe the quality of my links are spot on. I refer to the word 'widgets' frequently on my website and in many instances not in context with any other word.
Will I be stranded on page 2 forever, for being a niche provider?
Has anyone else ever had a similar problem? and even better, overcome it..? :)
Thank you for reading.
(Impossible to say authoritatively without looking at the site, of course)
Naturally, it is impossible to give you a concrete solution without thoroughly analyzing your web site and the websites of your keyphrase competitors.
There could be well over a hundred different factors contributing to your SERP demise, including such things as: over optimization of the common optimizable web page components or lack of optimization, dampened link values (as already suggested), lack of web site evolution, the degree of difficulty that the search engine encounters when attempting to determine your content's uniqueness and authoritativeness, content repetition (which could appear as being replication), too many spelling and grammar errors or generally poor copy writing, erroneous or duplicated code (ie having two or more Title tags, which seems to occurs quite frequently in dynamically generated web pages), maturity and established trust of the domain ... on and on and on.
I understand you are at your wit's end with your SERP situation but I suggest that you start from the ground up and go through the code of each webpage line by line, tweaking and rewriting the most important tags:Title, Description, <P> and <Hx>.
Focus not on manipulating your link popularity. As a matter of fact, don't employ any link building schemes at all, particularly the trendy ones; social networking link dumping (Facebook, Twitter ...), dumpster directories listings, signature spam, forum spam, blog spam, useless meaningless article writing, link exchanges ... Allow incoming links to develop naturally while you restructure your own internal linking strategy. Should natural link building prove to be excessively challenging for you then build new web pages internally or find a good reason to deploy a "sister" site to compensate (blogging for example, can be easily justified and very useful for this purpose).
