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I think you are correct about those back links and it is a source of concern. We never got any notification in Google webmaster tools about it, but I don't think that means it's not an issue. Outstanding point!

Also great thinking about the bad links following us even if we switch domains. That would have been a disaster!!!

We really love the beverlys.com domain name and have no intention to switch to something else unless it's going to be a benefit, which so far does not sound likely.

The input has all been very much appreciated!

Great feedback so far, thank you everyone. We definitely understand that fabric is a generic term and more challenging to rank for. But since we have ranked in the top 20 before, we know we can be competitive on it. We just need to lay good groundwork and strategies to get back to where we think we should be.

I've got a site that is under consideration for a domain change, however I have plenty of concerns about our particular situation. I'd love to explain my scenario and then get some feedback!

The domain in question is beverlys.com and has been up and running since 1996 (almost 16 years), so it has advantages in that it's a long standing trusted domain.

For the majority of that time however, the site was mostly a simple static informational site to accommodate a brick and mortar business. Then starting in 2009 the site underwent the change to become an e-commerce site.  Since then we have been working to compete with other sites in the same industry and attempting to rank well in organic results. In particular our business sells fabric, so "fabric" is one keyword we measure in various way to get an idea where we stand with the competition.

Over time we have had ups and downs while ranking for "fabric", specifically. At our peak we ranked 16th in Google in September 2011, and 18th as recent as January 2012. However since that time we have fallen off the map in Google's results. Currently we are around the 100th result! Though in Yahoo! and Bing we continue to show strongly with organic rankings hovering between 15-20.

I can only theorize that something in the last few rounds of Google's algorithm updates has punished us and thus far have not been able to identity the issue or find any resolution.

So, in response, one of the options on the table is to use a new domain name that specifically incorporates the keyword that is important to us. Unfortunately our current domain does not use "fabric" so we would use something like beverly-fabrics.com or what-have you.

There is so much potential for disaster in switching domain names that I'm having a hard time considering this as a viable option. But at this point I don't want to close any doors. We want to have the best chance at long term success and if a domain name change would help in that we would do it.

I'd love to hear anyone's opinions, recommendations or advice about our situation!

I have used the open source to find my competitors back links, but can't remember the process.

Thank you, that helps point me in the right direction. You are right that it's still hard to say for sure what the visitors are doing and if they will trigger a sale or not, but at least for us it will be a closer estimate than NOT filtering the data in some way.

Here is the scenario. We have many brick and mortar store locations as well as an ecommerce website. It's hard to get exact, but my estimates seem to be that approximately 1/3 of the visitors to our website are interested only in obtaining information about the brick and mortar store locations and not interested in ecommerce transactions. Of course this kills the conversion rate. We use google analytics and I'd like to somehow be able to quantify with more accuracy what the "real" conversion rate might be. Is there some method to weed out specific pages/traffic (like brick and mortar landing pages) from being taken into account when conv. rate is calculated? The number that matters for conv. rate of course is "visits" and not unique pageviews, so I'm not sure that really would do anything helpful.

Any tips?