May last year my sites orgainic listings, and therfore visitors, plumeted. Why?

[infinart]

Hello,

May last year my site took a major fall. I am unsure why, and it's time I found out why. Recently I have rebuilt the site from scratch, except for the urls and content, and it's starting to turn back.

What is the best method to go about understanding just what caused the decline? What are the options I have?

See the image for a graph of the all-time traffic.  http://i.imgur.com/uL93yPj.png

My website in question is: www.ditalia.com.au

Thanks.

uL93yPj.png

[infinart]

Thanks guys, this does seam like a good place to get answers and help in my area of expertise--design and layout.I have had a couple of SEO people work on backlinks and they say they didn't do any black-hat stuff. But, I guess I will find out during this research and fix.

• Did you get a manual penalty notice in Webmaster Tools?

• I haven't had any penalty notifications from Google at all. (other than some 404 errors)

• Have you examined your link profile closely for obvious spammy, dubious, unrelated links?

• I will check this.

• Are your inbound links heavy with keyword anchor text?

• I will check this.

• Is your textual content unique and give value to your visitor?

• Yes, every page is unique, however, I have not check for plagiarism--if others have stolen it from us.

• have you changed your meta content?

• Only recently when I made the new site--about 4 weeks ago. They weren't change just before May 2012.

• is the drop relating to certain keywords

• Pretty much all of them.

MOZ has scanned my site and is displaying data about it now so I will start researching the links, determine their quality, and research how to

Any advice you have would be much appreciated.

[jesse-landry]

Michael's questions are spot on but based on the timing and a quick glance at your anchor text profile I think it's pretty safe to say you were hit by Penguin. I'd assume there was some shady link building done to your site in the past through a link-blast service or some black-hat SEO.

Your site has a ton of links with the anchor phrasing of "wedding dress" or some variation thereof. I would suggest that you do some research on Penguin penalties and how to clean them up and definitely check Webmaster Tools for penalty notifications.

This is a good community to stay close to throughout this process. There are a ton of helpful people here who can help with questions along the way.

Good luck!

[MickEdwards]

It might tie in with either Penguin or Panda updates, although content is Panda and Penguin is links (URLs).

• Did you get a manual penalty notice in Webmaster Tools?
• Have you examined your link profile closely for obvious spammy, dubious, unrelated links?
• Are your inbound links heavy with keyword anchor text?
• Is your textual content unique and give value to your visitor?
• have you changed your meta content?
• is the drop relating to certain keywords
• how have rankings stacked up over the past 2yrs - have they fallen?

You need to examine closely so that all your work doesn't fall flat again.