What happened with Hayneedle's rankings?

[outdoorliving]

Hayneedle is an e-commerce company that operates 200 niche sites selling indoor and outdoor home products. They were ranking at the top of the first page for most terms related to their sites (fire pits, fountains, benches, etc.), but all of a sudden at the end of April they lost their rankings, getting dropped to page 4 or lower for tons of their sites (barstools.com, patiofurnitureusa.com, adirondackchairs.com, benches.com, etc.).

Does anybody know what caused this? Other than one thread on an SEO forum, we haven't been able to find any discussion about it online. It seems like cross-linking between the sites could have been a problem here, but we'd love to hear thoughts from the experts here on this. Our company is using the same business model of one brand with niche sites and we want to avoid anything like this happening to us.

[EGOL]

Seeing Hayneedle sites back in the SERPs today.  Looks like they removed the heavy crosslinking.

Strange that they seem to be at full previous rankings.  Maybe this is old data?

I would have expected them to have lost some power without cross linking or something else devalued.

[StalkerB]

Very possible, I've never even seen one of their sites before so am completely unfamiliar with them.

Fell into the same trap I've seen others fall into before and attribute everything to a known change if it occurs around the same time and not think whether it could have been something different.

Glad you're keeping me honest

This is interesting though - http://www.jobmagic.com/job/Internet-Marketing-Internship-SEO-Job-Omaha-NE-68114-US-6904531.html -

[EGOL]

Hayneedle's drop didn't occur on one of the dates of a Panda update.  Unrelated to Panda is my bet.

[StalkerB]

Doh, apologies, I didn't read the question right.

Never the less, looks like it could be Panda.

Hard to pinpoint exactly what Google doesn't like about it. Their main site does look a massive link farm with that many domains and links on it.

I think they've just been caught in the cross-fire rather than having done anything wrong, but as the main sign of a link farm is the interlinking of sites I would guess that, though can't be sure (doesn't seem to be anything dodgy in their code, not looked into their link profile and there's not too much else they could really do to be more authoratative with content).

If you have a similar site then I'm not sure what I would do to demonstrate that it was simply a directory of your other sites.

Sorry I couldn't be more help.

[outdoorliving]

Nothing has happened to our sites - we're not Hayneedle. Our sites are fine (currently). We're trying to figure out what happened to Hayneedle so we can avoid the same thing happening to us.

[EGOL]

All I can say is that the seem to have been smacked by google.  The sites that compete in my SERPs dropped from #1 or #2 rankings down to fourth or fifth page.

They had lots of heavy cross linking on their site.  For years I have felt that it was for SERP manipulation rather than cross-selling because lots of the cross-linked sites were irrelevant.

But, I honestly don't know what happened...  they lost rankings on all of their estores so Google must have caught them in some type of sin and demoted all of their sites.

[StalkerB]

Sounds like Panda got you - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html - It's designed to get rid of content farm style sites and thin affiliates.

It seemed to get a 3rd update towards the end of last week (or a little before) which may be what caught you.

Good news is Google tells you what they want you to do about it - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Bad news is there are very few success stories and you're at the mercy of Google as to when they'll run the check again (the update is not part of the main algorithm but a supplemental one run intermittently).

The fact it's hit all of your sites suggests that you're not recognised as high quality sites or appeared to be a farm. Did all your sites link to each other in some way?