Significant Drop in Rankings without Explanation

[Marketing.SCG]

My company has experienced a significant drop in rankings in the last month or so. How significant? Across our top 11 keywords, we've dropped an average of 6 positions. Some have dropped less (1 or 2) and some have dropped way more (38).

We work really hard to provide great content on our site and have been building out our link profile with guest blogging on relevant sites (dailyshotofcoffee.com, for example). No major changes have been made to the URL structure or content on the pages that are ranking for our key terms, so I am not sure where the drop is coming from.

For example: One of our key terms is "espresso machine" and we went from #9 to #22 in the last few weeks. We have not made any changes to the main content on the page that is ranking since September. Our on-site page report for this page has us nailing all of the critical factors, most of the high importance factors (not exact keyword in page titles - we use "espresso machines" as that is one of our other terms - or "avoid keyword stuffing" - unfortunately, our products are also named with "espresso machine" and i can't very well not follow those links or remove the term from their names), all of the moderate importance factors, and most of the low importance factors. It has been reporting this way since September.

Most of our key terms are this way (haven't had content changed in the last several weeks to months and have great on-page grades). We don't engage in spammy link building (though I did some work this fall on cleaning up bad links a previous SEO company had built out). I'm just really taken aback by the sudden drop in rankings across the board.

Any insight or advice anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated!

[MarieHaynes]

Wanted to add one more thing.  Grrr....Q&A is being buggy for me today...just typed a bunch and then lost it.

You could go after duplicates by filing DMCA takedown requests but it is likely more hassle than it is worth.

Also, to help you build content that outshines your competitors, this may help.  When my husband was buying our Rancillo he did a pile of online research.  He ended up spending most of his time on Youtube watching videos of how each machine worked.  If you can provide information that people can't get on other sites then Google will like you, visitors will stay longer and you will probably sell more machines.

[MarieHaynes]

EGOL's given you some good tips.

There was an article on SERoundtable today that had a neat idea about a way to deter people from stealing your content and that was to link to yourself within the content.  (http://www.seroundtable.com/stolen-content-linking-16363.html and original discussion on the HighRankings forum here: This article has some additional tips too.)  It may not work for all sites, but it might help somewhat.

However, if your drop was mid January then this probably isn't Panda (unless you think it happened on January 22.)

It's hard to say what the cause could be though without digging deeper into your site and your analytics.  One thought I had was that when you mentioned you did work cleaning out bad links your previous SEO company made, you possibly could have removed links that had actually been helping.  I used to think that spammy article and directory links were useless, but I have now done several unnatural links penalty removals for sites that were ranking really well for competitive terms...well ranking well before their penalty that is.  These rankings were gained on the back of thousands of spammy article links.

Funny story...When I was looking at your site and quickly chose a product to check out its description, after I did my work I looked at the picture and realized that it was the same coffee maker that we own.  We love our Rancillo.

[Marketing.SCG]

EGOL,

Thank you for your response.

I would first like to clarify that I don't think I deserve to have a higher ranking. We have worked for years on our content and building out unique and creative information (a couple thousand pages of it). As a result, over the last year, our site has been on the first page for most of our key terms. The reason I posted was just to get some feedback on why the rankings changed so drastically (Google update?) and how to recover.

As a retail site, it really isn't feasible for us to build out our category and home pages like bestespressomachine.org has. I do, however, see what you are saying about the amount of information their site (the ranking page, in particular) contains and how optimized it is for those terms.

To address the duplicate content, please see the reply I had posted above:

"We don't use stock information from manufacturers and actually put a lot of time and effort into creating informational, clever, and unique descriptions. Unfortunately, a lot of people copy our product descriptions.

Do you have any advice on how to deal with others copying our content? I'd love an automated way of receiving a report on duplicate text (as we have thousands of pages on our site). I could then contact those sites and at least ask them to remove the content. Also, is there any way of notifying Google of sites copying our content?"

I would appreciate any feedback you could provide in that regard.

Best,

Kaylie

[EGOL]

I see your site at #15 from the eastern USA.

I don't see any special reason why your site deserves a spot on the first page.

If I was google I would rank the homepage of thebestespressomachines.org/ over your category page for "expresso machines".

If I owned your site I would attack with the homepage by reoptimizing.  If I owned your site I would be working on original content.  I see your content on lots of other sites.

The homepage of thebestespressomachines.org/ (weakest competitor on page 1 of the SERPs IMO) has everything that everybody everywhere is searching for about expresso machines.  Then when you click deeper the content can be impressive.

Overall superior site, IMO.

[Marketing.SCG]

Also of note is the sites that have taken the first page/top of second page results for the "espresso machine" term.

The first page has 2 relevant sites, 1 site that's not very built out, and the rest are major retailers (Amazon, Williams Sonoma, Macys, Best Buy.). Second page has eBay in the top spot.

Sure, the retail sites sell espresso machines. But some of them only sell a few espresso machines and, on all of them, there isn't a lot of content to support these products. It seems to me that they are ranking on this term because they are large sites in general, which means searchers are not being served up the most relevant results. Instead, they are being served mass retail sites.

sigh

[Marketing.SCG]

Keri,

Thanks for clearing that up. Have you heard of others experiencing a drop in rankings recently or any insight into recent Google updates?

[Marketing.SCG]

Thanks for your response, Jeff!

I have searched around a bit in the Q&A but haven't found anyone else experiencing this particular issue.

[Marketing.SCG]

Thanks for your response!

We started guest blogging as a way of building out actual links and recovering from the spammy link building a previous company had done on our behalf. We only guest blog on sites that relate to our products (coffee sites, essentially). We write unique content for each blog article and only include a few, very relevant links in each one.

[Marketing.SCG]

I don't know the exact date but I believe they started dropping in mid-January-ish.

We don't use stock information from manufacturers and actually put a lot of time and effort into creating informational, clever, and unique descriptions. Unfortunately, a lot of people copy our product descriptions.

Do you have any advice on how to deal with others copying our content? I'd love an automated way of receiving a report on duplicate text (as we have thousands of pages on our site). I could then contact those sites and at least ask them to remove the content. Also, is there any way of notifying Google of sites copying our content?

[KeriMorgret]

Jeff, it's actually a different situation here. A couple of weeks ago, a large number of links stopped showing for many people in GWT, but their rankings stayed the same. In this poster's case, the actual rankings are changing.

[Andropenis_Australia]

I would say stop the guest blogging link building, pretty sure I read somewhere it's frowned upon if you have a lot of links coming in from blogs, especially if the blog is not related to your theme/products.

Reason being I believe is that people can easily set up automated linking systems to take advantage of blogs. Especially don't be pointing links to your site from a page if it is blatently being used by link spammers even if it's relative to your site, G will see these spammers and your link will be getting mixed in with the crud.

Make sure there is no overo-ptimization on your site either.

Hope this helps, all the best

[MarieHaynes]

Can you pinpoint the day of your traffic drop?  There was a Panda update on Jan 22 and also Dec 21.  A lot of sites that sell products and use the stock descriptions are being affected by Panda.  This could be the case for your site.  I randomly clicked on a product from your home page and took chunks of text and searched Google for it enclosed in quotes and found thousands of sites with the same text.  If the date of your traffic drop coincides with Panda then this may be the issue.

[IOSC]

Kaylie,

I had something fairly similar happen to my site (although my situation is different than yours is for a few reasons).

(There was a discussion about this a few weeks ago in the Q&A)

What I noticed was that (I assume that your talking about Google rankings) my link profile was diminished pretty significantly according Webmaster Tools.  A few others had the same thing happen to their site, I don't really know exactly what happened,  but slowly yet surely the link number is going back up.  If that is the issue I can dig up those Q&A's...

A shot in the dark but it might be worth taking a look at...