Major Ranking Drop

[RustyF]

My site bestdslrreview dot net was ranking number one for Canon T3i. I was amazed considering my competition. Canon T3i was at number 3 to 5 usually for US traffic.. Canon 7d review was ranking number 2 and Canon 7D was on page one.

Canon 7D keywords dropped about 10 places but Canon T3i Review dropped about 50. and same for Canon T3i.

I worry about a number of things, including thin affiliate site but I don't know, my articles are original. I also worry about to many links with my keywords in anchor text.

My on page results from SEOMOZ look great to me. This drop was my main reasons for going ahead and signing up. Hoping I could find out what happened.

The site is only about six months old. I waited probably three months before doing any significant link building.

The good thing is, I was ranking high from Black Thursday until a few days before Christmas.  It can't be someone else just started doing SEO as I fell far too fall. Some kind of penalty.  I had Google do this to another of my sites once though and after a couple of months it bounced back for most of my keywords. A site very much like this one.

Is this just the Google Dance?

Thanks

[RustyF]

Oh I laughed about blaming it on the kids but personally, I think it is more likely the dog.  haha

[RustyF]

I don't THINK I have a think content issue. But I'll re-write those features just to be on the safe side.

I think I built too many links too fast, thousands of them and then stopped. I wont do that again. I think it is a sudden decrease in link velocity. I've have struggled with link velocity a lot and finally, I think I understand why it is important to continue with it.

You touched on it. To me it could look unnatural but like I said a small site could be popular and get lots of links. Another SEO expert told me that is true but if the backlink velocity drops to fast it could be that Google takes that as a signal the page is no longer popular as well as the possible natural linking problems.

I will continue with my blog network, slower but better quality than the others I built.  However, I will also work on the duplicate content issue. I have lots of content with no links just  to help with the thin but now I realize that a page could still be thin too. Will make things a bit better if I do that too.

As always, I'm all ears.

[AlanMosley]

I dont mean that duplicate content on same site is ok, only that you want be penelized for it. But only one version of the duplicate content will rank. meaning you wont get any credit for it. they will pick a version to rank, using a canonical you can hint to the search engines what version that should be.

what the penalty you want to avoid is thin content. meaning what is left on the page after you take away advertizing and duplicate content found elsewhere on the web, then if what is left is not substantual and usefull, then it is thin content. Duplicate content wont hurt you in itself, it wont help you, but thin content will hurt you.

[RustyF]

Yes, I made them no-index follow. I've now removed the no-follow on category and tags but that's the way it was before. the drop.

As for the duplicate content, only the bullet text is duplicate. That's 105 words out of 890. That's 13% and it is too high for me. I'll re-write that and resolve that just to be on the safe side.  Its really two of the bullets that are causing it. But I'll change them all, looks like I got lazy there. I'll check the other articles on the site as well to make sure I didn't do that on those.

The duplicate content issue is as clear as mud. Now I know that Goggle says they don't penalize a site for duplicate content on other sites. Of course, that doesn't hold true for autoblogs. But that doesn't seem to be true when one considers backlinks. I'm uncertain. You seem very knowledgeable and I'm sure you are. What you basing the statement that onsite duplicate content will not hurt you. I'm pretty sure I've read on Google site itself that they HATE that. The reason they do is because of having the same page show up in the SERPs more than once. And I clearly had that going on before.

Yeah, It was Matt Cutts, I just couldn't remember his last name.

I'm really having trouble with this issue and based on what I've seen around the web, I'm not alone. I've got one fairly large site with over 1500 indexed pages. Google Web Tools showed a LOT of pages with duplicate titles and it took me forever to get those to disappear. Finally they did after I removed the index for categories and tags.

I'm having a lot of trouble with canonical URLs. I know I'm not alone. i've read much and understand little. I learned the most for an SEOmoz help link.

If I understand it, the intent is to tell SE where the main article is. I turned the canonical option back on in SEO platinum but then turned it off again.  I'll show you why. It gave me two different links in the header. One for my category and one for my article.  That seems counter productive to me and exactly what I don't want to happen.

Thanks for all of your help.

I probably shouldn't have marked your message Good answer as that made the thread answered. LOL oh well, I'll know next time. I don't want to take up all of your time.

Thanks very much for the help.

[AlanMosley]

i noticed to made them follow that is good becqause linkjuice can still flow back out.
but you that fact that a page is not indexed does not change the flow of LJ to it.

I fyou have 2 duplicates then use a canonical tag, or get rid of one of them things
like tag pages with shippets of other pages, are ok, at worst they wont rank, they
will not hurt you. its duplicate content from other sites that is the problem.

As a rule blocking from robots is a last resort. i would concentrate on the duplicate
content from other pages, you need to add enouth original conent to make the page usefull.

As Matt Cutts said, take away advertisments, content that is avaiable elsewhere, and what is left,
is it usefull and original?

I wouldent bother with the tags in the sitemaps, category pages yes, bing for one say that
they only want the main pages in the site map, not every page, but having said that I asked
Duane Forrester from Bing and he said for a small site listing all pages is not a problem.

We have alll been in panic mode when we lose rankings, I am a computer programmer
and when things are not working I start to believe anything and everything is responcible,
I will uninstall things, delete thing, blame my kids, assume i have a virus, but when i settle
down i usually find its somthing simple.

[AlanMosley]

As users build links to a website or URL, we see that pattern emerge and can
track the time over which links are built.  Fast growth can indicate
popularity.  Normally links build in a similar fashion across all websites, with
spikes potentially indicating popularity.  When we compare that data against the
other signals we track, we get a truer picture of if that popularity is real or
not.  Machines can build links quickly, but if we know the source of the links
is a common location or service that is “less than organic”, we’ll discount the
value of the links.

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/05/you-love-links-we-love-links-build-for-the-right-reasons.aspx

[RustyF]

I'm really glad you brought up the no no-index issue.

Most of that was probably created after the drop and I'll tell you why I did it to hopefully learn why I shouldn't do it.

I no-index privacy policy and disclaimer earnings type pages. I do that because I don't  want those pages to dilute my money pages. Is that a mistake?

I also went in and usually do it from the beginning and set tag and categories to no index. I'm not sure when I did that on this site but I think it was after the drop. I'm not sure. The reason I do it is that seems to create duplicate listings in the SERPs.  Or I thought it was afraid of duplicate content. Is my thinking wrong on that? I see the same pages/articles listed when I do site:domain.com and sometimes I get two listings for the same page on page one of Google. One for the article and one for the tag or category. I use SEO Platinum to accomplish this I also removed categories and tags from my sitemap using the xml sitemap generator plugin.

On the scripts, now that is something totally new to me. I'm pretty sure I did that after the drop. When I did site:domain.com I saw a lot of them listed. My robots.txt file looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Sitemap: http://bestdslrreview.net/sitemap.xml

This is likely what is causing the no index on the scrips/plugins. So I should remove those to lines? I'm going to go ahead and do that since I was never sure that they should have been there in the first place.

Also I do not include categories and tags in my sitemap, should I start including those in the sitemap?

Thanks very much for the help. Sometimes I over think when I don't know exactly what the answers are.

[RustyF]

Thank you. I think it will come back too but the too many links issue.....

I have always wondered about that and I seem to get different advise.

I forgot his name, the Goggle guy, Matt ??? most of you will know... He wrote a post indicating you can't link too many times.  That is what most of the people that say you can't build to many links to fast base their advice on. But to me, I've always wondered if it makes since to have 2000 links to a site with five articles. Then I reason people could love a site with only a few pages, I'm sure that happens naturally at times?

If you're right, then I've made it worse because I've been building more links but aiming at higher PR sites when I do it. I've got a lot of links from PR 0 sites but in open site explorer it appears I have a pretty good natural looking distribution of links across different PR sites so I'm not at all sure.

I'm all ears if you and others have more to say to help me with this issue.

[AlanMosley]

There is a fewe pages with no index, They see to have content i cant see why you would no index them, like this one

/tag/canon-7d/

You have also no indexed a few scripts, I beleive this is a mistake, because a search engine knows that the scripts are being used, but does not know what you are doing with them, and may lead to a lack of trust.Thhere are a few other technical issues, but not what would lead to a huge drop in ranking.

You do have a fair bit of duplicate content, the reviews are on other pages, if you wrote the reviews i would not worry, search engines usealy know why is copying and who is the creater.

If you are getting this content from elsewhere, you need to add enouth content to each page so that it apears original.

[SEO-Doctor]

So you are saying you have been only building links for 3 months, but looking at OSE the Canon TSi page has 425 linking domains and canon 7D 751 linking domains??   This is way too many for that time frame IMHO.  I would say you have tripped a filter.  Wait 60 days and see if it comes back up... it should do.