Ranking & Traffic drops in last month

[ShawnHerrick]

Over the last month, our rankings have been in a slow slide - that is until this week, when they absolutely crashed.

Here are some example phrases:

Phrase 11-Mar 5-Mar

bug shields 24 9
floor mats 25 14
nerf bars 23 12
running boards 61 14
snow plows 25 18

For the life of me, I can't see what would have caused such drastic changes. Our site is almost completely unique content. Some things, like Warranty & Install instructions, are from the manufacturer to protect us from liabilities. We come up with our own feature text, and we have custom written articles, blog posts, research guides, etc.

We also appear to be the only one of our competitors being affected in this fashion.

Any thoughts would be helpful. Domain is realtruck.com.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! We're going through older questions that are marked unanswered. Since it's been a few months, I'm wondering if you've recovered, or figured out why your rankings dropped, and if you have any insights to share with us. Thanks!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi, Is it possible that the drops you are seeing coincide with the release of Panda? I just took a random line of content from one of your pages and there seems to be many occurrence of this on your site and other called tonnnocover.com I am working with a number of sites who are all suffering from a terrible case of plagiarised content that is not their fault and are now feeling the pain. Not saying this is the case with your site, but if there was ever a time to make sure your content is unique, this is it. Regards, Andy

[JaneCopland]

Hi Rich,

I see all the phrases ranking at the higher level, besides [running boards], which I see at 64 (google.com, personalisation off, geo-location = US).

When you see activity like this--sites popping into and out of the SERPs--the answer is usually either that the site is very new (not the case here) or that it has a backlink issue that is causing a filter. Have you done any link building that would be considered less than white hat?

Also, have you experienced any down-time recently, such as the site returning 404 errors for a period? You sometimes come across indexation and rankings problems as a result of Google attempting a crawl while the site is unavailable.

[Extremehome]

Hi Rich,

I actually see you ranking pretty well. Number 13 for floor mats and number 9 for bug shields?