Can You Help Explain This Nightmare Screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools?

[Jantaro]

Your Next Dress (http://dress.yournextshoes.com/) has been performing poorly in search for a long time.

My theory is that Google's algorithm somehow thinks our content is poor, and that we're not ranking for that reason. While we have deleted hundreds of blog posts and improved plenty of others, our SEO has continued to tank and recently reached zero. We do not have a manual penalty of any kind, though I've tried to disavow dubious looking links just in case.

Is there anything that I am missing?

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[KeriMorgret]

Can you give us more information about Google "forgetting" your pages? I'm not very clear on your answer here.

[irvingw]

The first glaring problem I see that could have caused this penalty is the shared header navigation across all subdomains. Each subdomain should have main navigation to it's own pages - you have a shared nav on all sites that is interconnecting all sites like crazy, and also sending the crawler everywhere.

http://scarf.yournextshoes.com

[David-Kley]

I would look at where you have links coming from. Not saying you did this, but a lot of ecom sites do a lot of link submissions in an attempt to rank. That big of a drop, that fast propbably means they didn't like your link profile. Google does not have to assign you a penalty just to drop your rankings in the toilet. Sometimes, they just look at what you have, determine it does not fit within their newly established quality guidelines as well as the next guy, and poof you are on page 10.

Most likely your anlytics are working , and you are really seeing this drop. Here is what I would do to start with:

1. Look at the linking domains and manually go and check the pagerank of the linking sites. If they are zero, or godforbid they redirect you to another domain, disavow. You can also search manually for the linking site in google. If it doesnt appear when searching for them by name, Google most likely doesnt want you to find them for good reason.

2. Check to make sure all the blog pages have been properly redirected, or removed from Google. You state that you have removed 100's of pages from the blog, but have these been removed or requested for these to be removed form Google's index?

3. Check the redirect functions on your subdomain. Make sure that the home page of tyour subdomain cannot be accessed on any other URL of your site. This can be a tricky thing to get right, and I have seen many sites take a dive due to unintentional duplicate pages due to a subdomain.

That should get you off to a good start

[Jantaro]

Jane, good answer. Your Next Dress could definitely benefit from more backlinks. But I don't think a lack of backlinks is the reason why we're being penalized by Google.

Anyway, you can see my other query on "windy skirt", which we used to rank for. Now all the top 18 search results are Youtube videos, which at least explains why we're not ranking for that query.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Although tied to the parent domain as a subdomain, this subdomain on its own has very few inbound links from third parties. OSE sees only 7 linking domains that are not Your Next Shoes. For a subdomain (which does not traditionally inherit terribly much authority from its parent domain), this is quite low. Although it does not explain a sudden drop (unless Google considered it to be ranking unfairly before, e.g. because links from the parent were counting as impartial inbound links when they should not be), general poor performance might be because of a low number of linking sites when compared to competitors.

[Jantaro]

Thank you for the responses. Google is actually crawling our site quite frequently, and there seems to be no problem. I guess we're just stuck in the dark on this one.

[Er_Maqui]

You tried to see the graph of cached pages? Maybe google "forgot" your pages and if they doesn't have pages, then, also doesn't send search.

I think you can send a new sitemap, then, review all 404 errors google are returning (if you have), and use siteexplorer to analize your links in search of possible spam links.

[SamuelScott]

When you see a sudden, large drop in traffic, it typically means one of two things:

1. You messed up your website somehow (maybe your home page is taking forever to load or it is returning a 404 for some reason)

2. Google hit you with a penalty

Based on the information here and here, it seems that there was an algorithm update around June 28. There isn't much more specific information.

If you haven't received any notifications of manual penalties, then you probably have an algorithmic one. So, I'd keep checking your website and backlinks for thin or duplicated content, over-optimized anchor text, links from dubious places, keyword spamming, or any other similar things. Good luck!