$100 to who discovers why our rankings drop

[BobGW]

I'm offering $100 to the SEO that pinpoints why our rankings dropped. Here's details:

Some very good people have this site:

nlpca(dot)com

and it has dropped for many of it's keywords, including the keywords

"NLP"

"NLP Training"

and many other keywords.

We dropped from 19th to 42nd for the term "NLP".

Here's what I'm doing about it:

(1) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the titles reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more.

(2) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the URLs reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more.

(3) We're redoing the home page as (1) above.

(4) We're fixing the 404s

(5) We're shortening the titles that are too long, and we're thinking of reducing the home page keyword count to 3 keyword phrases, although 4 keywords work in all of our other sites that have the keywords showing up at least 3 times in the content.

If it is something else, and you pinpoint it, and if because of you, we rise back up to around 19th (more or less) again then we'll give you $100 payable via paypal as a thank you.

I'm going to leave this question 'unanswered' until this is resolved.

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

Sorry, but not remembering 100% what I was thinking at the time of writing the response since it was a week ago, but trying to reread through what was written, I believe I was talking about how the SERP may have been manually rated.  While some of the SERPS are ranked via the algorithms google has developed, I've heard and read that there are a number of them that are affected and rated manually by humans.  If there was any human interaction by one of their manual raters, they may have deemed your site less "relevant" for the search.

Have you ever seen the "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of the SERPs?  Let's say somebody decides your website and the other 2 competitors are not what they were looking for when it came to the search "nlp" or "nlp training.  Well, they could complain and potentially be reviewed by the manual raters or whomever responds to the complaints and drop you.  Since it was before the most recent panda change, I was speculating that this could of been a cause.

[BobGW]

It might be true, but when the drops occur or when the SERP is manually rated and changed in terms of the makeup, it could be because whatever's triggering it could have been finally re-evaluated at the time you dropped.<<

Could you expain this, SeattleOrganicSEO. That might be what happened. It looks like there was an algorithm change that effected us and at least 2 other strong competitors and shifted us all down

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

It might be true, but when the drops occur or when the SERP is manually rated and changed in terms of the makeup, it could be because whatever's triggering it could have been finally re-evaluated at the time you dropped.

However, I don't know if I know all the different pieces you do.  Even with the above description of the issues, I think there's a lot more going on potentially that as "outsiders", we can't help with as much.  Even when we know everything, we still might be clueless.  Sorry, but I haven't had this problem with a client before.  I know it will sound cocky, but we've only had the opposite problem (well not a problem) that the rankings go up.  I call it a problem because sometimes a ranking improvement doesn't always translate into traffic (or qualified traffic for that matter).  Sorry, going off on a tangent...

[BobGW]

SeattleOrganicSEO,

That's worth looking at, but I'm pretty sure it's not only competition. We tumbled form 19th to 42nd in just a few days for the term "nlp". We'd been on the second page for many years.

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

I don't see it being the larger problem.

Have you considered that your competitors have jumped up their SEO efforts?  Have you been paying attention to their backlinks and seeing if they've been doing a bit of link building on the keywords you're targeting?  It's a lot of work, but if you know the 2 specific SERPs you're targeting, perhaps you can pay attention to what they're doing.  Some SEO software out there make it a bit easier to keep track of...

[BobGW]

I also just realized that we have articles on our website that are elsewhere on the web. Always with permission, but could this be a problem?

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

If this occurred around Nov/Dec, then it might not be the Panda changes.  I just though since you posted recently that maybe the recent Panda change (3.2) could of been a possibility.

[BobGW]

In that article, SeattleOrganicSEO, one of the comments is

Surviving Panda 3.2 - I will target the right keyword and provide superb content.

This drop in rank was occurring around November or December (Panda 3.1?) when I was trying to target several keywords per page and then later adding content to match.

I thought Panda was for scraping and duplicate content problems, do I need to worry about appropriateness of keywords? Do I need to only target keywords that the page is very obviously already optimized for? If it's not code errors, could this be why we've had a ranking drop?

[AlanMosley]

I also am a big believer of clean code, crawalability in general.

but i used the bing SEOtolkit, that sees the site just how bing sees, it, I only found one invalid code error, and one page with too much css. I think the w3 validator picks up a lot of issues that are a bit picky.

but I also believe one open tag, can mean huge amounts of content are not read as visisble content.

This is even more concerneing now we have Microsodata, one error can mean your whose scema is useless.

i dont like to have any css or js in my HTML, I like to look at my souce code and be able to read my content easlsy.

This is one of the reasons i dont like CMS.

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

When did it happen?  Any chance it happened around the 18th?

http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-3-2-update-confirmed-109321

[CoreyNorthcutt]

Those errors are just for the homepage, albeit, there may be much less (once a tag is left open, it tends to really confuse the validator).  I'd clean up the whole site for good measure; I'm a big fan of SEO PowerSuite's on-page tools when doing this sort of thing.

The line breaks don't all need to be totally replaced, the big gaps at the top just seemed a bit excessive.  That particular recommendation is just based in my own superstitions, and those of others, but is based on this: the first 1/3 rule comes into play so much in SEO (weighting content placed high on a page, early in a tag, etc.); condensing the header section to a more sane level seems sensible.  Some SEO auditers, such as WebCEO, will  also yell at you if your TITLE tag doesn't immediately follow HEAD, for what I'd expect to be a similar thought; although again, not as scientific of a claim to my knowledge as valid code (which absolutely matters).

[BobGW]

It's been a while since I did code validation, remind me - is that 79 errors just for the home page?

And will the line breaks confuse crawlers?

And remind me what the cleanest thing to replace the line breaks with are.

[CoreyNorthcutt]

Not necessarily your one path to salvation (and keep your money on this if it does help gain some ground), but I'd personally start with cleaning up the source:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnlpca.com%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&
doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.2

79 validation errors could definitely confuse crawlers about how things are organized, and imply usability issues.  I'd also do something about the extreme # of unnecessary line breaks.  I recently pushed a legal niche site up from page 5 to page 1 on a very competitive, short-tail phrase with not a lot more than cleaning up ugly code.

[AlanMosley]

One think i noticed is your linking structure, this would I assume been like it is all along and would not be the reason of the drop. But your menu is on every page (I am assuming), meaning that all pages are linked by all pages. This pattern leads to all pages sharing teh rank, but what you want is your landing pages to have most of the page rank.

you should link to as many pages as you can from the home page, but only link to the home page and landing pages from every other page (where posible of cause). this will shift the PR to those pages. See link for a simple explaination.

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank