Major Drop starting Jan 22 2013
-
I have a friend who has an ecommerce site. He got slammed in January. He doesn't buy links. In webmaster tools his queries and impressions are way down as well. his site is www.beastmasterrodeo.com. Any suggestions would be great
-
Hey
As Tom mentioned, if it was the 22nd then it is likely a Panda issue. Without a link we can only speculate but the obvious starting point would be to review his site content to assess how unique it is. If he has a site full of manufacturers product descriptions then he needs to audit his site and identify any internal and external duplication.
My advice would be to sign up with copyscape.com and do a full site audit to determine what content is duplicated, weak etc.
Also, it would make sense to understand what is going on with the robots.txt problems. This may be intentional but it is certainly something to cross of the list.
On a positive note, this is the easiest of the penalties to work with as you simply have to remove all the duplication and improve the site to earn it's place in the results. Try to use this as an exercise to focus on creating a solid and informative site and adding real value through the content.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
It webmaster tools says there are 724 issues with the sitemap being blocked by robot. Other than that no issues
-
January 22nd would coincide with the Google Panda update. See here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
Has he received any messages in his webmaster tools? I'd advise to check straight away. Duplicate content is often a problem with ecommerce sites.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redesign Just Starting - Should I Leave The Previous Incomplete Site or Setup A Temporary Holding Page and Redirect Previous URL'S?
Hi All I've picked up a new website project and wanted to ask about the best way to proceed with the current site during the development process. The current site is incomplete although it has been live for a while and has over 80 pages in the sitemap. Link to site https://tinyurl.com/ychwftup The business owner wants to take down the current site and simply add a landing page stating "new website coming soon". From an SEO perspective, am I better to keep the current site live until the new site is ready? Or would it not make any difference if I setup the landing page and add 301 redirects from each page in the sitemap to the landing page. Many Thanks In Advance For Any Assistance
Web Design | | ruislip180 -
Migrating Magento site to Shopify Plus without dropping in SERPS
We have been looking at moving our ecommerce store www.pretavoir.co.uk from Magento to Shopify Plus. However, as we rank quite well at present we are interested in hearing experience others may have had making this change and also any advice that you may have... Also, any general comments on Shopify appreciated..
Web Design | | seanmccauley0 -
New Mobile Site Traffic Drop
With all the talk about how much mobile is important and how it is going to return its own search results, we finally decided to make a mobile site for one of our smaller websites to test the water. We put it up about two weeks ago and did Vary HTTP header method to serve the site. Before the change, on the average week we would get 270-300 mobile visitors from organic search results and we converted 0.78% to sales. Since the change, we are now getting about 70 mobile organic visitors per week but converting 2.47% So what can I say but WOW. We are converting way way better but our organic mobile search traffic has dropped off a ton. Luckily our desktop and tablet traffic(we serve the desktop version of the site to tablets) has stayed the same and has not dipped. Do any of you guys have experience or gone through launching a mobile site before? Did you see the immediate drop in organic mobile traffic and did you recover your traffic back to previous levels? If so, do you know how long it takes to recover? I am thinking it is a big change and will take time for Google to adjust but I am not sure since the mobile version has so much less text now on the home page and on category or product list pages or whatever you guys want to call them.
Web Design | | KurtL0 -
Why is Google Webmaster suddenly started showing hundreds of HTML Improvements
Why is Google Webmaster suddenly started showing hundreds of HTML Improvements I mean to ask, my hundreds pages are been shown as duplicate - despite canonical marked correctly Below are sample url - which are been crawled in own way. I have rechecked canonical tag - which is correct as URL - 1, in all 3 url Do i need to worry about anything or shall i presume its a flaw from search engine to report this as an issue (This only pertain to Forum section) http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_easydiscuss&view=post&id=1683&Itemid=78 http://www.mycarhelpline.com/?id=1683&Itemid=78&option=com_easydiscuss&view=post http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_easydiscuss&view=post&id=1683 ps - i know these are dynamic url and not sef friendly url, but its been 3 yrs and , due to our ignorance and site builder took advantage of this. now - nothing can be done much to make them sef friendly as site has several thousand pages and touchwood - these dynamic url are not impacting much
Web Design | | Modi0 -
Major home page change!
Hi Mozzers, Making a major homepage change on my site Orangeoctop.us. I am going from featuring content to featuring products, similar to how moz and hubspot feature their content on the homepage. Just to give you some numbers, the homepage only sees 2.6% of the total traffic and of that traffic half is direct. The homepage is going to be changed to OrangeOctop.us/guides. My Question: Is there anything that should be added to the homepage to ensure that I keep the same domain authority/page authority?
Web Design | | orangeoctop.us0 -
New more "helpful" internal linking causing SERP & traffic drop?
Still dealing with the weird traffic drop on my website. I have removed a bunch of old links from a defunct blog, 301 thin pages, added text to remaining pages. I'm still stumped. So awhile ago I freshened up my website and thought I was "helping people" by making sure they could CONTACT the studio more easily... I added more links to the "contact page" I thought this would help conversions...This changed the number of links to my entire site....Would this be the problem with my ranking/traffic drop? http://bayareaboudoir.com/babinternal1.pdf
Web Design | | Squee1 -
Do drop caps impact the search value of your content?
A client of mine wants to include drop caps at the start of the first paragraph on the page because they think it looks nice. I found some css techniques for implementing this using a span on the first character to enlarge the size of just that character. First word of the first paragraph. Are there any seo concerns I should have for adding drop caps?
Web Design | | fivelinesmedia0 -
The primary search keywords for our news release network have dropped like a rock in Google... we are not sure why.
Hi, On April 11th, a month after the farmer update was released for U.S. users of Google, the primary keywords for ALL our sites significantly dropped in Google. I have some ideas why, but I wanted to get some second opinions also. First off, I did some research if Google did anything on the 11th of April... they did. They implemented the farmer update internationally, but that does not explain why our ranks did not drop in March for U.S. Google users... unless they rolled out their update based on what site the domain is registered in... in our case, Canada. The primary news release site is www.hotelnewsresource.com, but we have many running on the same server. EG. www.restaurantnewsresource.com, www.travelindustrywire.com and many more. We were number 1 or had top ranks for terms like ¨Hotel News¨, ¨Hotel Industry¨, ¨Hotel Financing¨, ¨Hotel Jobs¨, ¨Hotels for Sale¨, etc... and now, for most of these we have dropped in a big way. It seems that Google has issued a penalty for every internal page we link to. Couple obvious issues with the current template we use... too many links, and we intend to change that asap, but it has never been a problem before. The domain hotelnewsresource.com is 10 years old and still holds a page rank of 6. Secondly, the way our news system works, it´s possible to access an article from any domain in the network. E.G. I can read an article that was assigned to www.hotelnewsresource.com on www.restaurantnewsresource.com... we don´t post links to the irrelevant domain, but it does sometimes get indexed. So, we are going to implement the Google source meta tag option. The bottom line is that I think we put too much faith in the maturity of the domain... thinking that may protect us... not the case and it´s now a big mess. Any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Do you think it was farmer or possibly something else? Thanks, Jarrett
Web Design | | jarrett.mackay0