Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed

[Jon_bangonline]

Hi guys and gals,

I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results.

The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not.

The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places.

See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason:

• The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause.

• The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue?

• We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues.

• they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue.

• We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic.

Summary

So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though.

Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.

[SajeetNair]

Suggest going back to the basics -

• Generate sectional sitemaps and submit them to WMT. Check which sections are not getting indexed to the fullest
• 301s to the home page might be an issue in cases in which the URL numbers are lot
• Code clean up, use gzip compression, call all JS and CSS files externally, improve text to code ratio
• Implement self canonical tags along with Syndication and original source tags, this is just for hygiene purposes
• Check for duplicate content, see if anyone is scraping your content
• Check at server levels, sometimes some CMSs generate scripts that block search engine spiders at the server level
• If you can clean WMT HTML improvements that would be great
• Check if rel=next and prev tags have been implemented in case of paginated series

I am assuming that all the other SEO basics are in place, no spammy on page and off page techniques.

Hope this helps.

• Sajeet

[kimmiedawn]

Aren't duplicate title tags more than a minor issue?

Another thought...In my experience I watched a page which was ranking in the top 3 drop to under 50 then come back up again for its targeted phrase. As it turned out, once I changed a different page which happened to be targeting the same phrase, everything calmed down. It's just an observation, but it seems once I removed the possibility for confusion about which page was 'the' page, Google ranked the right one.

good luck.