What Happend To My Ranks? Began Dec 22 - detailed Info Inside

[mwoody]

I have a .co.uk domain that was setup in November 2009 and it has always done pretty will in the SERPS. In Oct-Dec last year I could literally publish a post and be on the first page for a keyword with no backlinks at all.

All of my posts/pages feature-

100% unique content (min 500 words)
Imagery
Embeded video which is part of a video sitemap
External links
keyword density between 2 and 4
keyword in first paragraph bolded
Title tags are written like KEYWORD - Title, eg BLUE WIDGETS - What You Need To Know

Then this happened- http://i53.tinypic.com/2a62fb8.jpg
On december 22nd - december 24th i see a sharp decline in traffic, and then a further decline december 31st - Jan 1st?

On that graph I have marked out changes I have made to the site. The bottom bar that was deployed on Nov 30th was simply a floating price comparison bar stuck to the bottom of pages.

Other than that change, nothing else had changed on the site during that period.

Here's what I have done so far to try and fix things-

Optimized load time (now 2.5 seconds)
Deployed MaxCDN content delivery network
Removed some pages which were similar, but 100% unique (unlock pages on graph)
Change H2 tags to H1 (previously there were no H1 tags)
Removed the bottom bar on nov 30th
reduced price compare results to 3 from 10
Ran a broken link check
Noindex/Follow 2nd pages of tag/categories pages
Improved blog posting rates to at least twice a day

I have 100% indexation rate across the site, an average load time of 2.5 seconds. I've tried everything I can think of, and can't seem to pin point the issue and after 5 months of trying to get it fixed I think an outside view is needed!

So what happened at Google mid-end december?

Any advice/thoughts/feedback is greatly appreciated, thanks for your time.

2a62fb8.jpg

[mwoody]

Hi Ryan,

I have posted the stats for that further down in this thread

[mwoody]

Today all my rankings have reappeard!

I have done some analysis of the top 3 competitors for 4 keywords in my niche looking at onsite and offsite factors and comparing them to my page which can be seen here https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AsI-kgMI5Y7qdHhrSDdZUEY0aVJhT2ZZamZwN2lwOXc&hl=en&authkey=CP7Zo7QC

That actually throws up some quite interesting results! Are my pages over optimized?

sjvd0.png s0yZM.png

[AlanMosley]

Yes you can postt url

[mwoody]

Update: As of this morning (UK morning) nearly all of my remaining ranks have disappeared whilst doing a check with Market Samurai and confirming this with manual searches.

[mwoody]

Hi,

Are we ok to post URL's here?  Some forums frown upon this.

THe new design was much cleaner and lightweight.  I was careful to make sure I copied the site structure/internal linking across with the new design.  However a new plugin doubled the load time on the blog which is where we see the drop after the new design deployment.

[mwoody]

HI Ryan,

Firstly, the post you have linked is a great resource and I shall take a closer look at that today.  Takes a while for my brain to get going in the morning   Although my previous analysis has shown that no specific keywords were affected and it was sitewide but your approach to analysis might find something.

I have considered pushing some adwords/yahoo/bing campaigns to help recover some traffic as earnings have taken a serious hit recently.  In fact this month I expect living expense to outweight earnings.

I will have a hard time doing a year on year analysis as this time last year the site was only 6 months old and only ranking for a couple of terms.

[mwoody]

Hi,

Well the WTF is to indicate where the drop occured and never recovered from.  I expect drops at that time of the year because people have other things to do, but I would expect to recover shortly after in my niche once everyone has got over their hangovers

The new design was simpler and cleaner with minimal use of imagery.  I was careful to replicate the site structure (eg archives in same place etc) but the reason it bombed is because load time shot up from about 5 seconds to 12 seconds thanks to a dodgy plugin.

Since then i have done a lot of load time optimization

Looking at analytics, the rankings dropped across the whole site and not a specific area of the site.

The competition pretty much looks the same, although there is one site that is literally a list of about 100 affiliate links and no unique content which consistenly ranks well across this niche for some reason.

[AlanMosley]

At xmass visits usally drop. so it is hard to tell when your problems actualy start. but it guess it is your new design that is causing problems.

Can we see url, be good to see old and new design

[EGOL]

My sites take a big hit at Christmas!

[RyanPurkey]

I chuckled when I saw us respond to this simultaneously with, "Christmas, duh." 

Matthew, to help clarify things you'll want to look at ranking differences and exactly what keywords are/were doing well and what ones are/were not doing well now.  This post doesn't reference any of that.

I've frequently been referencing this SEOmoz post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ as a great practice to go through in your analytics to give you a better idea of what's going on, and giving yourself actionable goals.

[EGOL]

I agree... in a lot of sectors, just one site, kicking your butt, can damage your traffic badly.

[RyanPurkey]

There's always a decline on Christmas and New Years as people typically tend to unplug on those days, especially if you're B2B or running a commerce site.  The bad news is that you didn't climb back up to previous levels, but you're still not comparing year over year.  I'd go to Google Trends, and plug in several years of competitors and some of your top performing keywords to give yourself a better idea of seasonal tendencies.

After you get a solid idea of those swings and figure out which competitors got a boost when you got the boot I'd do site audits on those successful competitors as well as some of the people currently beating you in the SERPs to figure out if there are ways you can improve your content and links.

Finally, I'd look into social media and advertising solutions that could help me boost traffic or natural linking as well as directing some qualified traffic to a few different types of landing pages in order to maximize conversions.

[EGOL]

So what happened at Google mid-end december?

WTF? in red on your chart looks like Christmas and New Years to me.

Beyond that it looks like you put out a new design and it bombed.   Without seeing before and after there is not much we can do but guess.

What can you tell from analytics?  Did a competitor start beating you?  Rankings drop on one portion of your site.  You have access to a lot of information that you have not shared here.