Unexplained Drop In Ranking and Traffic-HELP!

[Kingalan1]

I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). It was hit by Penguin in April 2012, with search volume falling from 6,800 per month in March 2012 to 3,300 by June 2012.

After refreshing content and changing the theme, volume recovered to 4,300 per month in October 2013. There was a big improvement in early October 2013, perhaps tied to a Panda update.

In November 2013 I hired an SEO company. They are reputable; on MOZ's recommended list. After following all their suggestions (searching and removing duplicate content, disavowing toxic links, improving the site structure to make it easier for Google to index listings, re-writing ten key landing pages, improving the design of the user interface) ranking and traffic started to decline in April of 2014 and crashed in June 2014 after an upgraded design with improved user interface was launched.  Search volume is went from 4700 in March to around 3800 in June. However ranking on the keywords that generate conversions has really declined, and clicks from those terms are down at least 65%. My online business is severely compromised after I have spent almost double the anticipated budget to improve ranking and conversion.

A few questions:

1. Could a drop in the number of domains lining to our site have led to this decline? About 30 domains that had toxic links to us agreed to remove them. We had another 70 domains disavowed in late April. We only  have 78 domains pointing to our domain now, far less than before (see attached AHREFs image). It seems there is a correlation in the timeline between the number of domains pointing to us and ranking performance. The number of domains pointing to us has never been this low. Could this be causing the drop? My SEO firm believes that the quality of these links are very low and the fact that many are gone is in fact a plus.

2. The number of indexed pages has jumped to 851 from 675 in early June (see attached image from Google Webmaster tools), right after a site upgrade. The number of pages in the site map is around 650. Could the indexation of the extra 175 page somehow have diluted the quality of the site in Google's eyes? We have filed removal request for these pages in Mid June and again last week with Google but they still appear. In 2013 we also launched an upgrade and Google indexed an extra 500 pages (canonical tags were not set up correctly) and search volume and ranking collapsed. Oddly enough when the number of pages indexed by Google fell, ranking improved. I wonder if something similar has occurred.

3. May 2014 Panda update. Many of our URLs are product URLs of listings. They have less than 100 words. Could Google suddenly be penalizing us for that? It is very difficult to write descriptions of hundreds of words for products that change quickly. I would think the Google takes this into account.

If someone could present some insight into this issue I would be very, very grateful. I have spent over $25,000 on SEO reports, wireframe design and coding and now find myself in a worse position than when I started. My SEO provider is now requesting that I purchase even more reports for several thousand dollars and I can't afford it, nor can I justify it after such poor results.  I wish they would take it upon themselves to identify what went wrong. In any case, if anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it. I am very suspicious that this drop started in earnest at the time of link removal and the disavow and accelerated at the time of the launch of the upgrade.

Thanks, Alan

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[randfish]

Hi Kingalan - definitely a frustrating experience. Let me see if I can provide some thoughts on each of your questions:

#1 - Yes, it's certainly possible that links from bad sources could have propping up your rankings, and by disavowing these, you've lost rankings/traffic in the short term. However, I'd agree with your SEO consultants that pain now from this action is better than the potential penalty/banning you might experience in the future. Google has been very aggressive with penalties, but they haven't been wholly consistent. This makes bad links something that can provide short-term opportunity and long-term cataclysms. If removing these links is what hurt you, I'd argue it was the right choice to make, and getting some new, editorial, high-quality link sources is the next step.

#2 - My guess would be that extra indexation of a few hundred pages has nothing to do with the rankings/traffic changes. I've seen Google index thousands or even tens of thousands of extra pages without much problem - a few hundred are very unlikely to be the cause of the problem. That said, I'm not sure removal would be my first step - I might think about how to canonicalize these back to pages you do want indexed (if you do want that content discoverable). If you really don't want the content findable in Google, then meta robots noindex might be worthwhile.

#3 - It is possible that thin content is to blame here. I agree it's hard to scale quality content, but keeping a few hundred pages up to date and incredibly useful for visitors/searchers is exactly what Google wants to see. I'd be constantly asking the question - is my page the most valuable one in the search results? Does it provide a better, more useful experience than anything else in the top 10? If the answer is no, then you don't really deserve to rank (don't worry, many sites don't), and extra effort here may go a long way. One way to do this might be to ask those who submit listings to give you more content (or to get agents/interns/writers/contractors to bolster each listing).

p.s. You may wish to check out http://moz.com/blog/why-you-might-be-losing-rankings-to-pages-with-fewer-links-worse-targeting-and-poor-content

Wish you all the best,

Rand