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Beginning around November 1st, I began to notice a continual, gradual drop in impressions and traffic.  During the holiday season we typically see a decline in business so I initially passed it off as that, but there has been no rebound and I'm really confused on where to begin looking to figure this out.

Daily impressions have now dropped from 20,000 all the way down to 5,000 and it has taken a major toll on the business (see attachment for graph of this).

Some Background Information:

• My Site has been very static for the past 8 month's (since April '12).  Admittedly Overly static with very little other than a blog post here and there added.  However, during these 8 month's traffic jumped 30% so we were riding that wave and feeling confident that our past efforts built a great foundation.

• I'm not aware of anything even remotely black hat that has ever been done.  Everything is very much on the up and up and done with the user in mind.

• I'm unable to track anything to a Panda update due to the consistent, gradual nature of the decline.  However, with some important search queries completely falling off the map, it feels to me like we are being penalized or affected by a permanent algo change.

• In GWMT that are a variety of important search queries that show a change of -100%.  These terms do show an average position, but when I manually search for them they are no where to be found in Google search results.  This is very strange to me. It feels like we've been blacklisted for some of our more important keywords.

• We had a major site relaunch on January 20th (a week ago).  However the downward trend was in place well before this.

• The site is www.mycreativeshop.com

To sum it up, I'm extremely confused and very concerned with what this drop is doing to the company.  I've never been in this position as we've worked very hard to lay a solid foundation and have always seen a continual, positive traffic increase.  It then seemed to just start turning downward one day and won't stop.

If anybody has some suggestions of how to try to get to the bottom of this and learn what is really taking place it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

-J

Wdab7Sk

I like this answer because it is the route I want to go, however is there any documented resources stating that there is no penalty or issues with this approach?

Personally, I think the second option (no pipe) would look more natural to the engines, but would also be less descriptive to the users.

Also, does it matter if what is after the pipe is the domain name or not?  I know that's fairly common practice, but I do not want to use the domain name there.

I'm creating a few hundred category level pages on my site, and am wondering if duplicating a phrase within each title tag is OK to do:

Examples:

1)  Title Tag for a page that provides brochure templates for the child care industry.

- Title Desired:  Child Care Brochure Templates | Brochure & Flyer Maker

2)  Title Tag for a page that provides brochure templates for the financial services industry.

** - Title Desired: ** Financial Services Templates | Brochure & Flyer Maker

Question:

Is it OK to repeat what is after the pipe in each title tag (i.e. 'Brochure & Flyer Maker') on a few hundred category level pages.  It's definitely an accurate description of what you will find on the page, however I don't want to run the risk of duplicate content / keyword stuffing issues.

Essentially, can I use an exact duplicate phrase inside multiple title tags and be OK?...or is this not advised?

I appreciate any advice or feedback.  Thanks.

-J

Looks good!

On your pager anchor, I don't see the rel="next" & rel="prev" attributes:

On the link you sent above, the pager control at the bottom of the page should has the below markup, but you need to add a rel='prev' attribute to it.

_[anterior] _

Similarly the below link needs to have a rel='next' attribute added.

[próxima]

The title looks OK.  Personally, I'd make a small adjustment and not connect the hyphen to the last word..  So I'd change this:  Suena Tremendo-Pagina-6 to this:  Suena Tremendo - Pagina-6

Irving - thanks for the response.  I appreciate the insight.   A few follow-up questions if you have the time:

So is it relatively safe to assume that if no content is being lost and duplicate content is being eliminated, then consolidation of URL's (pages) is smart?  Even if this results in the number of indexed pages dropping from 15,000 to 3,000?

This consolidation should conserve link juice and help make the category & sub-category pages much stronger correct?

Good point on the host crowding - all of the pages I'm looking at consolidating are deep in the site and really just product pages that are filtered very granularily, so they aren't high in the SERPS.

From GWMT Blog - There's no need to mark page 2 to n of the series with noindex unless you're sure that you don't want those pages to appear in search results.

Regarding the page titles - the rel="next & rel="prev" do not solve the duplicate title issue, so you would need to alter the tiles on the subsequent pages.  I would just make the page titles unique by adding something like this after the current title (assuming you were on page 2):  ' Page 2' or ' Page 2 or 50'.

I would recommend using the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in your pager control:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

In regards to the URL, I'd just put a '/{page#} after the main article URL.

I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site.  If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's).

It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us.  I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels.

For customer usability this is smart.  From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation.

My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages).

We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-).  Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do?

Thanks,

-Jason

I like this answer because it is the route I want to go, however is there any documented resources stating that there is no penalty or issues with this approach?

Personally, I think the second option (no pipe) would look more natural to the engines, but would also be less descriptive to the users.

Also, does it matter if what is after the pipe is the domain name or not?  I know that's fairly common practice, but I do not want to use the domain name there.

From GWMT Blog - There's no need to mark page 2 to n of the series with noindex unless you're sure that you don't want those pages to appear in search results.

Regarding the page titles - the rel="next & rel="prev" do not solve the duplicate title issue, so you would need to alter the tiles on the subsequent pages.  I would just make the page titles unique by adding something like this after the current title (assuming you were on page 2):  ' Page 2' or ' Page 2 or 50'.

Looks good!