Why is a section of our website dropping in&out of Google SERPs?

[imventurer]

In July 2011 we started a news section that has it's own 'subfolder' /news/  (http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear/, http://www.chorder.com/news/gear_deals/ etc.)

The whole news section is dropping in&out of Google SERP's since late October, as show in attached graph.

All news texts are real deal, written by our own staff, linked from homepage.

Any idea why this happens and how to prevent it?

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[RyanKent]

The page you mentioned above titled "Epiphone Introduces Ultra 339...." offers details about four models of guitars. It seems like a category page which offers a brief description and then users who have an interest can click through and read more details. The quirk is that when users click through, the specific item page contains even less information (thin content) and the information is somewhat a spin on the content from the first page.

Please refer to the following page: http://www.chorder.com/electric-guitars/Epiphone/Ultra-339+8130/

With respect to pagination, my highest recommendation is to set up the page for your readers, not the search engines. There is not an issue with the number of links on your pages per se, but rather they are currently just a list of links. Perhaps you can link to category pages allowing users to find models they are interested in. If someone wants an Epiphone Ultra 339 then they will either search Google or your site and quickly find the specific model. The pages seem more geared to help people who do not know exactly what they want so they can figure it out.

[imventurer]

Thanks for your time and great advice Ryan,

I will fix these issues and hope that'll be enough to rank again. Here's my plan:

• Create new URL structure for news: Use dash instead of plus or underscore character, remove all non-alphanumeric characters
• Fix trailing slash problem
• 301 redirect old URLs to new categories/articles URLs
• Create pagination for category pages: 15 news article links per page, to lower the on-page link count
• Redesign category pages to include more text: Will add teaser text for each news link, not just for the first one

I'm not really sure what did you mean by:

"- Even the http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear/Epiphone+Introduces+Ultra-339,+ES-339+PRO,+Toby+Standard+IV+and+Toby+Deluxe+IV+110/ page is duplicate content from all the individual guitar pages."

Can you please explain? Thanks.

[RyanKent]

Why is a section of our website dropping in&out of Google SERPs?

I try to be helpful in Q&A responses but your site and web page have so many issues which can affect SERPs it is not possible to point to any specific issues. A few examples:

• your site is duplicated on the web. http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear/ and http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear (no trailing slash) are two unique URLs which lead to the same web page and return a 200 header code. This is an SEO issue which needs to be corrected. The fix depends on your web server setup.

• The page you mention, http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear/, has no unique content at all. It is a list of 100+ links. The primary content on the page is "Epiphone unveils two semi-hollow bodies and two basses. Semi-hollows include Ultra-339 and ES-339 PRO, and the basses are Toby Standard IV and Toby Deluxe IV." The first sentence seems unique so I performed a Google search where another page from your site with a url of http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear/Epiphone+Introduces+Ultra-339,+ES-339+PRO,+Toby+Standard+IV+and+Toby+Deluxe+IV+110/

• Your URLs use "+" as a word separator where you should use a hyphen "-".

• Even the http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear/Epiphone+Introduces+Ultra-339,+ES-339+PRO,+Toby+Standard+IV+and+Toby+Deluxe+IV+110/ page is duplicate content from all the individual guitar pages.

There are many positive aspects of your site. You address a niche, you offer clear images, social logins, rss, etc. If you spend some time resolving the SEO issues you have the potential to do well.