We are considering hiring an outside consultant to help on this issue. Is that what you do for a living?

I took a look at my organic search visits since March. There is no defining day that the visits dropped. Just a slow progression of fewer and fewer visits from my targeted keywords.

Hi Everyone,

I have been working on the website www.PetsSpark.com for a while now. I used to be on the first page for many of my keywords, now I am lucky if i am on the 2nd or 3rd. I stopped my SEO efforts for about 3 months while making changes to the website, its whithin these 3 months that I started dropping from the first page.

The biggest thing I notice is the "type" of website now ranking for my main keywords. Mostly Forums, Blogs, or Product Review websites.

Take for instance Dog Tear Stain Remover. I used to rank at about #5 for this keyword and now i rank at #20.

I'm not sure if my loss of ranking is a combination of things like who Google is letting rank now or if there is something wrong on my website, etc.

Can anyone give me a little insight?? Please....

I will also be happy to give more information about what has been going on if needed.

Okay, Thanks

So if you have a link from Yellow Pages and Urban spoon, do you think some are followed and some are not??

I am wondering if adding your company with url on a local listing like yellowpages.com, yelp.com, merchantCircle.com, etc. actually counts as a "backlink"? I'm thinking it is not considered a link because I have never seen one listing in Open site explorer, either that, or it is considered a backlink, just not one important enough for open site explorer to show it.

Does anyone know for sure??

Thank you Irving for your response. I actually ended up calling the company who is responsible for the bad listings. Surprisingly enough they said they would remove them! Now I just have to wait and see if they actually do.

For example here is one of the links

http://www.system-tr.net/slink/?from=1037

Anchor text - Bubble Mailers

I am starting SEO for an E commerce website. I guess like 1 year or two ago they had another SEO company working for them. After looking in Site explorer I realized that they have like 2000 links (almost all from website directories) that have the correct anchor text but are all in the wrong categories, and most from countries like china and india. Many of the Titles are even in Chinese. This company sells packaging supplies and they are in categories like real estate, animals, and so on.

I am changing the domain name, so I guess any links to internal pages will be lost, however I have to forward the main domain to my new domain, so any links to the home page will still be there.

Does anyone know how I can remove these links??

Thanks guys

I have a lot of text for my home page. My plan is to a J Query Plugin for accordion text. Does anyone think that this can hurt SEO efforts?

SEO Moz has reported 7 of my keywords declined dramatically overnight. One word even went down 18 positions in Google. I have a few ideas on why, but none of them really make sence.

1.) The night before the decline I deleted around 6 "test pages" from our website. None of them could be reached through our website but they could be found by typing in the url. Most of these pages only said things like "test", but one of them was a draft of a keyword rich page within my website that only included some of the keywords that went down in ranking. Could the fact that I deleted this page be the cause of the ranking decline?

2.) About two weeks ago I purchased a url volusion-store-design.com which is one of my keywords and forward the address to an internal page within my website http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Store-Design. Could have this hurt my rankings, like Google is considering it duplicate content or something?

If anyone has some ideas please help.

Here are the keywords that I lost ranking for:

volusion developers ---- down 18

volusion features ----- down 5

volusion store design ----- down 2

volusion templates ------ down 11

volusion designers ------ down 4

free volusion templates ------ down 4

ecommerce volusion features ------ down 3

Here are the pages these keyword were pointing to:

http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Store-Design

http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Features

http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Templates