Why does Google no longer like our site?

[CoBraJones]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to figure out why the traffic and rankings have been plummeting on www.readprint.com. It's a collection of both public domain books and books on Amazon's store. If anyone can offer any pointers as to if it's duplicate content or ???

It used to get 300K visits/mo but has slowly been dropping over the last year.

I appreciate anyone's expertise!

[CoBraJones]

Thanks for helping out, guys.

The homepage took the biggest hit (54% drop), but most pages took  big hits from a year ago. So I'm assuming it was a site-wide drop in rankings.

When I look at the OSE metrics, it looks like readprint.com should be crushing the competition, but they're now crushing us. That's why I'm so baffled.

Perhaps the competition has more unique content, better layout, better pagespeed? I'll keep looking, but I'm hoping it's something reversible.

Thanks!

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[kchan]

I had a brief look at your site and the design is very impressive indeed.  I do agree with Alan that a lot of the inner pages such as author pages do lack 'unique content'.

For example, I did a Copyscape for the page: http://www.readprint.com/work-439/The-Origin-of-Species-Charles-Darwin and it found 15 same/duplicate copies on the web.  I think you could introduce some sort of 'gamification' similarly to SEOMoz's Q&A forum, to get your users/members to write unique relevant content, rather than just asking them to email you.

Also I had a quick look at your website speed, and the 'first load time' is quite long.  Is it on a dedicated server? Maybe you should have a look into your hosting provider.  Also, you should cache the homepage, as it will improve the load time of your site.

Another question I want to ask is, the drop in traffic, I assume there were many keywords which have dropped in rankings.  Were most of these rankings associated with the homepage or inner pages?

Thanks

[loopyal]

Nice looking site, Colin.

And interesting information.

I really don't know what to make of the "you have stuff that I can find in other places"

A lot of people say that these days, but I think its a copout

If this was valid, then all search engines, other than google should just pack up and dig holes for a living. All book sites should close up and leave it to Amazon. All guitar makers should shut down and leave it to Gibson. Nike should be the only running shoes. All small phone companies should give up.

And Google Plus should close, because, compared to Facebook, it is weak, and a ghost town.

If your site was a perfect clone of another site, it would be a valid argument, but I doubt that is the case (I don't know your niche well enough)

You have GREAT social signals. You even have 82 G+ on the front page. That in itself is huge.

Have you thought about allowing readers to comment? you can use facebook comments. I have no idea if that helps. You really need someone here to comment who has live comments (not facebook )

Do you have internal duplicate pages?

Are you linking out to bad sites?

What does SEOMoz tell you about the site?

It looks like you have no incoming links, but that probably means SEO moz didn't know about you - or my Mozbar is broken

What do Google and Bing Webmaster Tools say?

What do your pages look like to a robot?

[CoBraJones]

That's really helpful, Alan.

Thanks!

[AlanMosley]

I had a quick look at your Mark Twain page, there is not much on the page that can not be found on many other web sites
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22was+born+in+Florida%2C+Missouri%2C+of+a+Virginian+family%22&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=%22was+born+in+florida%2C+missouri%2C+of+a+virginian+family%22&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=

This is what is called thin content. you need to have plenty of original content to outwiegh the duplicate