Over the years my website has gone from 9k visits to 2k visits and was curious on why

[Veebs]

Answered.

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi

I thought that there was a good chance that you had been hit by Panda at some point as your site content was so thin and the little content you have could be even considered over-optimised purely there to rank for a term in the search engines. Every time Google brings out an update there are changes to how it looks at sites and even though you haven't been doing anything to yours it could have triggered a penalty as it matched the relevant criteria of the that specific algorithm update.

Have a read of these two resources I think you will find them interesting - http://marketingland.com/panda-4-1-changes-content-performance-strategy-103850

and

http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/panda-4-1-analysis/

Don't forget Moz's Google Update History - http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

In terms of your site and how to fix it I would stick with what I suggested originally and make sure you start building a great information resource for visitors - then more will come! Focus on really beefing up that copy on each of your pages. Also consider employing some form of review system and encourage visitors to review the different places hotels, restaurants, etc. Also make sure that you have submitted your XML sitemap URL to Google Webmaster Tools - plugins such as Yoast SEO will automatically update your sitemap when new content is added.

Remember Googles aim is to serve the most relevant content for a search term whilst also providing the best user experience.

Again I hope this helps

[Veebs]

Matt

I looked at the Penguin/Panda Tool you sent me and it looked like the last panda update nailed me. There were three or four in the past year that didn't do anything to my site, but this one did and I haven't done ANYTHING to the site. So would it be safe to assume the factored in inactive sites into the algorithm? It would make sense to do that, I guess, but the pages that are currently on there and static, shouldn't be penalized I wouldn't think. But I seem to be pretty wrong!

[Veebs]

Hi Matt,

Thank you for those super helpful suggestions. I was also thinking about archive.org but I have been out of the SEO game for a couple years and didn't know if that still even existed!  I will definitely check that blog post out and install Google webmaster tools for this site. Yes the content isn't very good with what I have.  I will have to just start working hard at it and see if I can't revive this bad boy!

Also, I'm sure you have been told this enough, but you're the man!!! Thanks again for these suggestions and tips.

[Matt-Williamson]

In order to double check that your site hasn't been the victim of any of the Google Algorithm updates I would run it through the Panguin Tool which maps updates in Google over your analytics so you can see if there have been any sudden drops in traffic at the time of these updates - http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

In terms of seeing if your URLs have changed you can get a good clue from http://archive.org/web/ which is the WayBackMachine and is likely to have archived the different versions of your site. Run your domain through this and go and have a look at your navigation and the URLs prior to your redesign - do they match?

I would also make sure you install (if you haven't already) Google Webmaster Tools - it will give you a lot of clues with how your site is preforming in Google. Unfortunately in terms of crawls errors - such a 404 not found pages it will only show the last 90 days of data, so probably not of great help for this - however worth using.

In terms of your content it would appear very thin - not much on the pages that I was looking at. I would definitely suggest that you invest in producing some copy whether it is your own time or a professional. I would look at updating your site and maybe populating it with more images as well as text as it seemed empty - especially the right sidebar (todays offers) providing I am looking at the correct site that you mentioned above. As it appears to be WordPress you might want to consider updating the theme and also look at making sure you have the latest version installed.

I also think that you will find reading this article useful if you haven't seen it already - http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

Hope this helps

[Veebs]

DC, thanks for the response. I have been doing SEO a while and been out of the game for a year or so, and of course content is king. Not only that, but quality content, moreover.  As you know, having a city state domain is great but a HUGE undertaking. there is a college here so I can get some journalism folks to help out with it, etc.  I just wanted to make sure that it's not that I was being penalized for anything other than lack of content creation ie. bad links, etc.  I don't think it is, since I haven't done any sketchy link building practices, but just wanted some folks opinions to make sure my suspicions are probably correct.

[DirkC]

You gave the answer yourself: no continual post and (no) great content.

Put yourself in the position of a potential visitor: why should he/she come to your site. As far as I see, the topics which are covered (hotels, restaurants, real estate,...) are covered in more detail and with more up-to-date info on a multitude of other sites. Your site doesn't add a lot of added value.

There are some technical issues that could be improved, but it doesn't make sense as long as you don't work on the quality of your content.