Bought old site. Two weeks later, rankings burnt... could this be why?

[Demosthenes]

Hi all,

Just joined SEOmoz. Good to be here.

I bought an amateur business directory site (not a web directory, but actual profiles of professionals) started in 2004 with page 1 rankings for the top 2 keywords in a professionals niche. Very stable rankings for years and super clean link profile.

However I fear I have killed the asset in a matter of weeks, hopefully it's not terminal... here's what I did:

#NOTE: I have reverted all changes 2 days ago, but still going down in the rankings.

**A) Added Google Analytics:**I think this is what killed it. Why? I didn't realize the analytics account I used had been previously used for a website that was burnt by the search engines, I believe because of duplicate content (I copied a full glossary from a book, didn't know better at the time).Looking at my AWstats the traffic started going down slightly the same day I put the code. It's gone from 170 to 80 visitors per day in 1 week, steadily going down. I rank page 4 or 8 now for what I was page 1 before :(Could it be Google all of a sudden linked that blacklisted (I suppose) Analytics account with the newly purchased site and decided to doom it as well?How can I redeem it?I have taken out the analytics code snippet and deleted the url from the account.OTHER CHANGES:

B) On-site SEO:

• Added H1 in homepage with main keyword (only had H2s before)- Added H1 in each professional profile page "[Professional type] in [Region]" (only had H2s before)- Changed title  "[Professional type]  - Region: [Region], Professional [Name]The idea behind the changes was to add H1 which in my understanding is very important and was missing, and to include the location in the title, as many searches are of the type "[Professional] in [region]".I think what could have hurt it is now many pages have the same H1.I have reversed all changes.C) I launched a Google Adwords test campaign.In the campaign, because it was a quick test to see how much traffic I could get from the kws, not an attempt to get new sign ups, I simply copy-pasted a landing page from another site and tweaked the text so it made sense to my audience. I run the test for a day or two.
  D) Added Hellobar.There was no correlation in time between adding the hellobar and rankings going down, so I don't think this mattered. I have taken it out too.**THANKS FOR YOUR HELP!**I really want to develop a long term asset I can focus on full-time but I fear I may have stupidly doomed the whole website already.

[Demosthenes]

Todd, I have Private Messaged you the Url. I'd rather not put it out in the public thread. Thanks!

[polarking]

Do you want to share you website Url I have a few things I can check if you like.

[Demosthenes]

I didn't do any new linkbuilding since buying the site a month ago.

Since the drop happened 6 days ago are you suggesting someone could have given me bad links on purpose?

I didn't change URL/domain.

I'm trying to see if I can revert instead of add things to the site, which would make figuring out what affected the rankings even harder. I will install webmaster tools once nothing else seems to work, thanks!

[polarking]

Webmaster tools will let you know if you have unnatural links

Crawl errors

It is easy to set up.

If you changes the URL's make sure you 301 them to the new ones

Did you switch domains?

[Demosthenes]

@Russ: I'm not certain when I lost my ranking, but looking at my traffic stats in AWstats, they started going down on April 26th, which is the day I installed GA. This is less than a week ago so I doubt it has to do with algo updates?

PS: read your chairman's first book ages ago. Cool to see you here.

@Moosa:

I forgot to mention the On-site SEO changes of point B seemed to increase the traffic from 170 to 200-300+ for the following 4 days, until I added the GA code snippet...

• Only 1 H1 per page. Now I have taken them out as before, when it ranked well (no H1s in any page).

• I believe Title was relevant, which is why I added the location in it, though I have reverted to old one now.

• Adword: ok, I think we can discard it as reason.

• Hello bar: ok, I think we can discard it as reason, also it was on for 3 weeks and nothing had happened.

Page time: hadn't thought of this!. I just tried pingdom.com on my homepage and it gave Perf (75/100) Requests (55) Load time (956 ms) Page size (288 kb) "site faster than 89% of websites tested".... so it doesn't seem to be the problem?

@ Todd:

No, I don't have it... would it help revert thigs at this point?...

@ ALL: I think it has to do with a change I have done on the site. Nothing external. If one reverts back to the same site that he had before rankings fell, does Google usually get it back up? If so are we talking days/week/months? Thanks so much for your support, I feel blind without it.

[MoosaHemani]

Aha! There is no correlation of adding a GA of a burnt site and rankings… there is no way I can believe that your GA account that has been previously used for a website that was burnt by the search engines can kill the rankings in SERPs…

This must be something different!

• Unless you are not using too many H1 on each pages its great!
• Changing title can hurt the rankings if they are not keyword focused!
• Adword campaign can never kill the site rankings if you are not changing anything in the website for this purpose… usually for adwards if you add/include more pages, its good practice to exclude those pages from indexing!
• Adding a Hello Bar not really!

Check your page time speed and may be due to (improperly) adding of codes page time load might went up and effect the ranking negatively.

H1s and Titles can hurt if they are not keyword focused but other then this adding GA or Hello bar can’t hurt Google Rankings in anyway…

[polarking]

Do you have a google webmasters account for this site. It allows you to check your vitals of your site.

[HiveDigitalInc]

When did you lose your rankings? You may have lost your rankings in the myriad algo updates, panda releases, etc. in the last month or so.

All of the changes you mentioned above should not have  had a negative impact.