Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites

[DavidWilsonSEO]

One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years.

Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products.

The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed.

The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable.

Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?

[DavidWilsonSEO]

Sorry Doug, I should have said that there were two drops, one for Panda, and then one for Penguin, with one coming in Mid-Feb and one Mid-April. Panda was a large drop, then as the site was recovering slightly it got hit with the Penguin update.

The competitors are mainly Amazon and eBay. Both sell the products, but only sporadically and don't have them in any number.

The client has dropped on the 4 big keywords from 1st-2nd position, to 5th-7th. Not a massive drop by any means, but in a market so small it has had a huge effect.

The rest of the site’s rankings did drop, but they have recovered since then.

The backlinks are not overly impressive, but nothing too alarming. There have been no warnings in Webmaster Tools, nevertheless, I have been working on the link profile and trying to add variety.

After originally thinking this was the cause I have begun to reconsider, and in my digging found several faults on-page. I fixed most of these when I first got to work on the site, such as the internal linking and general optimization. There was also a spammy element to the internal linking which I got rid of.

Fixing the internal linking didn’t have the desired effect, so I have re-approached that and changed it further. I also found an issue with the CMS in which it was generating a series of duplicated page titles (that mirrored the index page due to an error in the CMS to the lower pages). This would fit with the Panda change and the aim to reduce duplicates. This month, I have eliminated these, cleaned up the internal linking further and looked to vary the link profile (I'm hoping this will fix the issue, I just need to wait until it gets indexed).

Also, as an experiment, I made a series of HTML pages (not in the CMS) to test the site. These ranked well within a month, and have continued to grow since then.

Another issue the site has is the site itself. The code is outdated and messy with inline CSS and Java (some of which seems redundant) that all make the code to content ration something to be desired. I’m wondering if this could be a cause. The CMS has a penchant for duplication and the ‘readable’ code is not very clean, dates, filled with redundant code and is old.

Thanks

[DougRoberts]

I've encountered some very diverse serp results where niche terms are very niche and there isn't the search volume to out there and/or lots of alternative markets using the same terms to mean different things, but I guess it depends what you mean by not relevant to the search terms. If they're selling the niche products that's kinda relevant?

The first step to recovery must be to understand the problem.

Do you know why you got hit by Penguin? Are you sure it's Penguin that's caused the drop (when did it happen)? What does your back link profile look like? Have you had any warnings in Google Webmaster Tools?

How far has your client dropped? Are they in the index at all? Where are they ranking for other keywords - is it the same story?

Here's some penguin related SEOmoz blog posts:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recovering-from-the-penguin-update-a-true-story

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

So, first I'd confirm that it was Penguin and then try and see just how big a hole you're in! Good luck!