HELP - Configuration Killing Me, Dying on Google, About To Give Up

[Humanovation]

My organic Google traffic just completely died and it is not Panda related.  I really need someone to offer some suggestions because I am about to give up.  This is going to be a bit complex ..

Here is the skinny:  I have several relatively new sites.  My main site for the purposes of this discussion is smartwatchnews[dot]org and I host my sites on wpengine.com.  My traffic was was slowly building and I was averaging 2000+ unique visitors per day on 8,000 highly ranked Google impressions.  In addition, Google was indexing my new posts about an hour after they were made.  After reading seoMoz in its entirety and subscribing to Moz PRO, I decided to streamline my site, and focus my content to provide a better user experience.  Here are the changes I made:

1. For ease of administration, I converted all of my sites into a single multisite wordpress installation.  For some reason, Google now has half of my pages listed on the master site smartwatch.smartfamily.wpengine.com, and not on smartwatchnews.org.  I have implemented 301 redirects for the pages at issue hoping to fix this problem.

2. At the same time, I also streamlined my categories and tags and used 301 redirects to route users to the right pages.

3. Finally, I subscribed to Moz Pro, analyzed my sight, and reduced usage of my keywords to around 3%. I had not stuffed, but the focus of my site necessarily resulted in me using certain words frequently.

Within one week of implementing the above-listed three tweaks, I went from getting 2,000+ visitors per day to ~200 and my Google impressions went from around 8,000 highly ranked per day to approximately 150 poorly ranked.  In addition, Google went from indexing my site hourly to indexing about once per week now.  I do absolutely no blackhat, link-building or marketing of any kind.

Other interesting things I have noticed:

1. Several SEO companies have linked to my site recently ... for example, all of a sudden, chkme.com just showed up in Webmaser Tools with over 1,000 links to my site.  I have no idea who they are.

2. Google Analytics shows that my site has an average page load time of 33 seconds!  It has never taken me more than 2 or 3 to load one of my pages and I have Google PageSpeed scores in the 90s.

I guess what I really want to know is, can I just create a bunch of quality content over the next few months and the problem will remedy itself, or is there an obvious problem that I need to fix?

I am at my wits end ... can anyone offer any suggestions before I simply chuck the whole thing?  Thanks in advance for ANY assistance, ideas, or simply "hang in there's" ;-(

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Patrick

Glad it helped. Ask any more questions here and I will get an email and pop by if I can help.

Cheers

Marcus

[Humanovation]

Yes ... I need to get better at schema implementation.  Reading up on that now

[Humanovation]

Well, I like wordpress ... I just need to get better at implementing it appropriately and that is what I am trying to learn here.  If a url was changed, i put in the required 301s.  And you are correct, I do not have the skills or money to build a site from scratch ... maybe some day

[Humanovation]

I streamlined the categories and tags.  For example, I had a category named Sony ... I also had a tag named Sony and a tag named Sony Smartwatch.  I would condense all three into a single tag named Sony Smartwatch and delete the other two (placing appropriate 301 redirects as I deleted).  I had hundreds of tags and categories like that so I streamlined everything from several hundred categories and tags into less than 100 total.  I did this hoping to address my obvious internal duplicates problem and increase my ranking even further.  However, immediately after I streamlined my categories and tags, my ranking plummeted.  I still think that it was a good idea, I just got hit with some other issues at the same time which is making it difficult to pinpoint the cause of my dramatic drop.

[Humanovation]

Marcus:

Thank you SOOOOO much for your amazing response.  Everything you said sounds completely logical to me.  I have set up a Moz Campaign pursuant to your suggestion and will start figuring out how to use it properly.  In addition, I will begin working on the duplicate content issue.  I had put 301s in place for the other site, but it still shows up on Google.

Again, thanks so much ... I am going to reread your response a couple of more times to make sure that I don't miss a thing.

[AlanMosley]

I suggest to role your own.

My philosophy these days is make sure your site crawls perfectly, use html5 and schema.org to tell the search engine what your site is about. Keep code clean from any script or css, no redirects or noindexing.

It is hard to gain the system by links these days, good content described semantically and clearly to the search engine seems to work well.

It is hard to describe your content using html5 and schema.org using CMS.

[Francisco_Meza]

I think WP is fine in most cases. I try to use as little plugin as possible. One I do use is Yoast's WP SEO plugin.

I did about 3 site migrations last month from HTML to WP and my rankings were not affected. I 301's from .html to trailing slash URLs and everything was fine.

Alan, honest question here. If WP isn't good, what would you recommend?

[AlanMosley]

Moving to wordpress is not a good move, CMS is good for people who need to get a site up quick and don't have the skills or the money to get a be-spoke website, but it is riddled with crawling problems.

I assume if you moved to WP your urls have changed? if so you can expect to lose ranking.

I would go back to what you had before for a start, then have a rethink.

[Francisco_Meza]

"I decided to streamline my site,"

How do you mean that? Did you use a plug-in or some type of software? If I were to do that (condensing websites into one), I would have gone old school style and do it via mysql DB into the mainsite's DB. Then 301 from one website to the mainsite your are trying to promote. To do this, I would probably hire a programmer to help.

My question is "how" did you streamline?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Patrick

Okay, tricky one as it's not really clear what the problem is here but it feels like you have created some kind of duplicate content problem when shifting all of your sites over to WPMU.

Some questions:

1. What are the other sites?
2. Were any of the other sites affected?

It's tough to give you a perfect answer without some further analysis but I suspect a few things here.

1. You have created a duplicate site over at: <cite>smartwatch.smartfamily.wpengine.com/top-5-smart-watches-2013/</cite>‎ (on a much more established domain)
2. You have lots of internal duplication on the site

A few things you can do

1. Redirect the smartwatch.smartfamily.wpengine.com site to your main site (seems you have done this)
2. Tidy up the internal duplication (too many categories and tags likely)

It would be interesting to get some insight into all the 301's you have implemented here as well and really I would recommend an audit of the site just to make sure you have no underlying and not immediately obvious problems. There are a some solid tutorials on SEO audits on this very site so if you want to keep it in house at least find a structured audit process and follow it through (you will likely find other optimisations so it will be a worthwhile process).

Long before Panda and Penguin I have seen sites slapped for duplication and lose 90% of traffic. I have seen this with accidental multiple domains and due to aggressively stolen content and other seemingly innocent reasons.

Ultimately, it seems innocent and like some kind of technical gotcha so certainly, I would not give up here.

Some tasks you could perform:

• Set up a moz campaign and review any issues
• Run copyscape and check for duplicate content and resolve
• Do some manual duplicate content queries to spot other domains that may have your content due to misconfiguration in WPEngine
• Claim all domains and tidy them up in webmaster tools
• Wait

Ultimately, just tighten everything up and give it some time and everything should bounce back. Beyond that, maybe consider getting a pro to do a quick audit to check things over for you and advise on the best (quickest) course of action.

Hope that helps
Marcus