Help needed for a domain
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I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM.
We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping.
In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace.
I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections.
When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation!
To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually.
My conclusions are:
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Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what!
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The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO.
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We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time.
My actions are:
a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request.
b) I'm working on the site:
- Improving internal link building for relevant keywords
- Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO.
- Also, I did some redirections that were missing.
c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site.
d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate!
I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people!
Thanks a lot,
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Your new hosting company provided you a shared IP address which is not a big problem, unless there are some funny business going on with other website on the same IP.
According to this test, 71000+ websites have the same IP as your site
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