Can you spot the reasons for our site dropping in rankings so significantly?

[TimGaunt]

We've been racking our brains over this since the recent search engine changes (the notorious and non-cuddley Google Panda update) and have, within reason, corrected as many of the problems that we possibly can yet still our traffic drops further.

http://www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com used to rank fairly equally with it's competitors however since the update (and a number of suggestions from another SEO company), the traffic has dropped by about 90% and it's dropped almost completely from the search results (unlike the competitors who are breaking many faux-pars yet remain well ranked).

I don't think we're seeing the wood from the trees anymore so I'd be grateful if someone could take a look and see if we've missed anything glaringly obvious?

Any thoughts welcome.

Thanks

Tim

Big changes around the same time/since that might be worth noting:

• Setup a canonical domain name of www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com and (using IIS7) 301 redirect all other traffic over.
• Setup canonical URL meta tag for all results pages so they point to a single page
• Moved the redirect page (the one which sends users to the B&B's site) to another subdomain.
• Redesigned the URLs where possible to use "friendlier" and more keyword rich urls and 301 redirecting for the old urls
• Added XML sitemaps to the various tools (we found out they weren't there before)
• Added a robots.txt file
• Lowercased all urls
• Where possible removed duplicate results pages and pointed them at a single page
• Restructured the page titles to be more relevant
• Setup nofollow on the external urls

[evolvingSEO]

Sure, one thing I forgot to mention. Look at your XML sitemap. It doesn't seem to be correctly formatted at all, and it caused my window to freeze loading it. I'd look into that.

As far as the backlinks, yes I would start to build up some positive and natural backlinks.  Start with all the social profiles, like linkedin, youtube, facebook, twitter - make sure they all have links pointing to your site. Put unique, useful content on them. Try knowem to find more relevant social media sites to register with.

Then I would read over this guide to linking building and try putting it into practice to build new links.

A full off-site review is obviously out f the scope of this Q&A, but you can run your site through open site explorer and take a look - see if there's any sites that stick out like a sore thumb with a lot of links that provide no value (low quality domain, spammy or tons of exact match anchor text). Pick the worst sites and contact them and see if you can get them removed.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

[TimGaunt]

Thanks Dan, there's some interesting bits there. Nice to hear we don't necessarily need to redesign the site (though we still feel it would benefit the user).

We've not done any back link analysis no -and I can't explain those two spikes either but we have noticed a large increase in the number of robots storing invalid links (e.g. ones which have been truncated) which was one of the reasons we looked to move to friendlier URLs.

In regards the back links, is this mostly a matter of improving the quality of the sites linking to us to resolve this?

[evolvingSEO]

Ryan's on-site analysis is great. But I honestly don't think its the total reason for a 90% drop in traffic.

In taking a quick look at off-site, its looking like you have a very unnatural backlink portfolio.

And take a look at the screenshot of Majestic's historic backlink discovery.  All the sporadic spiking as well as referring domains spiking without total links spiking or vice versa is the sign of links being acquired unnaturally.

Plus only half of your external links are followed, and there's even much less linking C-blocks, which means many of your links are coming from the same place.

The good news is, you can address this without redesigning the site, but the bad news is, it could take a bit of effort in its self. I'd suggest starting with a back link audit.

Have you done much by way of trying to clean up your links?

-Dan

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[TimGaunt]

Thanks Ryan, all valid points (we'd like to redesign the site but thanks to the massive drop in traffic and subsequently sales) are having to hold off. Interesting point about the homepage links, we'll look into that thanks.

[RyanKent]

A few items I noticed:

1. Your home page has over 300 links. Ideally you should have under 100 but at least keep it under 150.

2. In the center section you have a "B&Bs By Category" block. I am using FF7 and the top three columns are cut off so the last 3 links in each column cannot be seen. I am unsure if this issue exists in all browsers but this could be taken as hidden links and cause you to incur a penalty. Users cannot see all the links.

3. Your home page title is too long and will get cut off. I would suggest just using your site name and save the rest for your meta description.

4. Going back to the links on the page, it is not simply the number of links but how they are presented. The page is basically a big collection of links. It doesn't present a good user experience.

5. The page itself is actually difficult to read. As you look through the various blocks such as "B&B Articles", you offer teasers of 8 different articles and most do not even complete the first sentence before being cut off with ...

From a Panda perspective of a user looking at a quality webpage, the presentation is not good. There is far too much being crammed onto the page. Several of the link blocks should be removed entirely. The blocks which share content such as "Featured B&Bs" and "B&B Special Offers should either contain fewer entries and/or be widened to 1/2 a page rather then 1/3 of a page.

The above is my feedback and would require a significant redesign of the home page. My suggestion would be to try it with A/B testing.

[TimGaunt]

One other (big) change that we made was that the old developers used to pass around a session id for the user on all pages so every time Google came back to the same page, it would get new content. This resulted in Webmaster Tools having over 35M pages for the site (there's about 100k at most). We fixed this issue but we're wondering whether it was actually helping (despite what's recommended)?