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Big thanks to Chris (both Painter and Menke), Jesse and Peter for some fantastic answers. Definitely a lot to go on here and I'll be sure to report back on any successes (fingers crossed!).

Thanks again all.

Thanks very much for this Chris - very useful information indeed.

In terms of the paid directory issue, we have recently 'nofollowed' all of our links but I get the distinct impression that this may be too little too late.

Re: the over optimisation issue, I'll take a look into this so thanks for highlighting.

Just a quick followup question, but do you think that we should be considering moving domains and starting from scratch?

Hi all,

Over the past 18 months one of the sites I look after, www.english-inns.co.uk, has taken a massive dip in Google rankings (as per the graph attached). To give you an idea of what the site is about, we're effectively the largest directory of inns in England and have a mixture of exclusive offers direct from member inns but also have some affiliate links thrown into the mix.

In terms of steps taken to remedy our falling out of grace with Google, these have included:

• A complete website redesign
• Removal of any duplicate content
• 'Adding value' by including interactive maps, better search functionality, promoting exclusive offers, etc.

Unfortunately none of this seems to have helped our situation and we are now sitting at some pretty horrible places in Google's SERP's. For example, even for the keyphrase "english inns" we only rank #5 and this is a term associate with our brand!

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious here... can anyone see any glaring issues with the site?

Any help would be most appreciated Mozzers.

Cheers

google-analytics.png

Hi all,

One of our sites has seen a huge drop in traffic beginning in January 2012 and continuing to this day. However, even after spending a great deal of time going through analytics I'm none of the wiser to what penalty has caused the drop in traffic (please see attached - grey line is minus one year).

The problem is that our traffic is particularly seasonal, hence the difficulty in highlighting what algorithm update(s) has hit us.

I'm tearing my hair out with this one, so any advice would be most appreciated!

Cheers

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Thanks for the feedback Cody and Irving - very helpful indeed!

Hi all,

I run a large, well established hotel site which fills a specific niche. Last February we went through a redesign which implemented pagination and lots of PHP / SQL wizzardy. This has left us, however, with a bit of a duplication problem which I'll try my best to explain!

Imagine Hotel 1 has a pool, as well as a hot tub. This means that Hotel 1 will be in the search results of both  'Hotels with Pools' and 'Hotels with Hot Tubs', with exactly the same copy, affiliate link and thumbnail picture in the search results.

Now imagine this issue occurring hundreds of times across the site and you have our problem, especially since this is a Panda-hit site.

We've tried to keep any duplicate content away from our landing pages with some success  but it's just all those pesky PHP paginated pages which doing us in (e.g. Hotels/Page-2/?classifications[]263=73491&classifcations[]742=24742 and so on)

I'm thinking that we should either a) completely noindex all of the PHP search results or b) move us over to a Javascript platform. Which would you guys recommend? Or is there another solution which I'm overlooking?

Any help most appreciated!

Big thanks to Chris (both Painter and Menke), Jesse and Peter for some fantastic answers. Definitely a lot to go on here and I'll be sure to report back on any successes (fingers crossed!).

Thanks again all.