Shouldn’t Google always rank a website for its own unique, exact +10 word content such as a whole sentence?

[Qasim_IMG]

Hello fellow SEO's,

I'm working with a new client who owns a property related website in the UK.
Recently (May onwards) they have experienced significant drops in nearly all non domain/brand related rankings. From page 1 to +5 or worse.

Please see the attached webmaster tools traffic graph.
The 13th of June seemed to have the biggest drop (UK Panda update???)

When we copy and paste individual +20 word sentences from within top level content Google does bring up exact results, the content is indexed but the clients site nearly always appears at the bottom of SERP's.

Even very new or small, 3-4 page domains that have clearly all copied all of their content are out ranking the original content on the clients site. As I'm sure know, this is very annoying for the client!

And this even happens when Google’s cache date (that appears next to the results) for the clients content is clearly older then the other results!

The only major activity was the client utilising Google optimiser which redirects traffic to various test pages. These tests finished in June.

Details about the clients website:

• Domain has been around for 4+ years
• The website doesn't have a huge amount of content, around 40 pages. I would consider 50% original, 20% thin and 30% duplicate (working on fixing this)
• There haven’t been any signicant sitewide or page changes.
• Webmaster tools show nothing abnormal or any errors messages (some duplicate meta/title tags that are being fixed)
• All the pages of the site are indexed by Google
• Domain/page authority is above average for the niche (around 45 in for the domain in OSE)
• There are no ads of any kind on the site
• There are no special scripts or anything fancy that could cause problems

I can't seem to figure it out, I know the site can be improved but such a severe drop where even very weak domains are out ranking suggests a penalty of some sort?

Can anyone help me out here?

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[Qasim_IMG]

Thanks for the reply Chris.

UPDATE FROM GOOGLE REONSIDERATION REQUEST

I got a response back from Google after submitting a reconsideration request (they got back to me in 4 days!). Basically there is no manual penalty in place, thus I'm assuming its the new algorithms from panda.

But this still puzzles me as the clients website is outranked by even the most basic 4-5 page weak authority websites and subdomain 2.0 properties for its own 20+ word exact match content!

Answering your questions:
The website ranks no.1 for all of its domain searches

The bounce rate is up and down, from 50>70%, really depends on the source of traffic a paid search brings in some high bouncing traffic (but at cheap costs).

The avg  time on the website is around 1-2mins.

There is no active social sharing activity at all on the website except youtube. (However I would say 60% of the ranking competition are in a similar boat)

In terms of links, OSE doesnt indicate a big drop in links or anything.

Steps I've taken to address the issues you mentioned and other considerations:

Redesigned website from the ground up (SEO friendly IA)
Conversion optimisation (UX design + usability) on every page
Rejigged every single page with new content (rewriting from scratch)
Strong focus on best practice keyword targeting in content/headings/internal linking
Added 15+ new relevant, unique pages
New XML Sitemap + created html sitemap

So far no improvement has been seen but Google HAS indexed the new pages within 3-4 days. Should I expect significant changes when the next Panda update comes out?

The next steps are to add social sharing and an activity plan for Facebook/Twitter, add a blog, continue to focus on good content with some potential viral programs.

The only areas I am not 100% sure about are the more technical sides such as server hosting/index issue.

If anyone would like to take a look at the site I can provide the url privately.

Thankyou

Hash

[reilly3000]

That sounds like a sticky wicket! I would look at the following factors that might be panda related:

• How is the bounce rate on the site?
• What about time on site? under 2-3 minutes on average could be a problem
  (make sure to look at both of those for the non-paid search advanced segment)
• Try to compare tweets and FB shares with that of your competitors
• Do a site:domain.com search- is the homepage not the #1 result? that may indicate a panda penalty.
• If you were an impartial human rating the site for spaminess and usability, would you say that it is offensive or potentially off-putting in any way? The basic theory of panda is applying the feedback of search-graders in an algorithmic way. - Have any significant links to the site gone missing recently? This is REALLY hard to tell if it is a new client... If it isn't Panda related this is probably the #1 factor

I hope that is a decent jumping off point. It could be a lot of things.