Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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'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

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