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That's exactly what I have found as well Kane - that you so much for your time and insight!!

Hello All:

I would really appreciate any insight that can be provided into this dilemma.

I've ruled out bad links issues - we don't have them and never engaged in grey to black hat SEO linkbuilding.

I cannot find the cause for this drop off.

Maybe I'm missing something because I am so close to it?

The site is markspace

Thanks in advance for any and all help or insight!!

I agree with the other responses, especially the keyword stuffing in the footer area of the page - which also exist in the top menu - so over doing the number of internal and external links esp. with the same anchor keyword text again and again and again is potentially an issue.

Plus one of the external links is to adultsextemplates - not sure how much that has to do with it, but when you link that many times to external links within the same site and if all the links are in the same C block, that's a problem.

I would also say the keyword density for "templates" is too high.

Hello:

I know this is long - but I kept it as succinct as I could to explain the situation - but everyone of the brilliant people on here insight is so greatly appreciated in advance.

There has been more than a 30% decline in traffic mostly from Google on a site with an 11 year presence on the web, 5 page rank (historically 6), fairly good quality backlinks (but they are old).

I cannot pinpoint a smoking gun (such as a specific penalty) - if it's just not attrition in demand for the product itself which there is plenty of evidence for.

But I practice only white hat, so I don't know what it is.

I do not engage right now in link building because my time to work on SEO is very limited.

We have a few common keywords that cannot be avoided (because there are no good synonyms) so there is a high density for one word especially all over the site.

From some websites (like tidbits) we have in Google Webmaster account tens of thousands of backlinks. How serious is this (FYI - they're not new though)

Because of some unflattering reviews from sites with strong authority, the number of click throughs vs. impression in Google Search has dropped dramatically - I think a big part of it is that because the reviews drove down CT ratio.

Interestingly, the number of CTs from Adwords has also dropped off significantly, and I was told by Adwords specialist that declining organic traffic does affect the Adwords traffic to - in fact, they're not even using our daily budget for Adwords as they used to.

The site also doesn't pick up quality organic backlinks as it used to, and the anchor link text is almost always the same - a product name.

Plus, the site was banned in 2008 by Google (from a black hat keyword stuffing that I discovered happened in another dept.) and only after really working hard was it reinstated by reconsideration request.

Site traffic from Google has never fully reached it's potential since then.

Also, text prices were removed from Buy Now buttons even though the prices were textually part of the buttons for years (could this be some penalty?)

**Is it possible that Google is taking the ban history, the poor reviews, the decline in CTs to impressions on the site, the huge decline (75% over four years) in "search volume" or "search interest" (according to Google Trends) for the site's main product name and just using all of this to keep downgrading the site? If true, wouldn't the page rank be diving down to anywhere from 0 to 2 (or is that not relevant at all?) **

There are no messages of a penalty or anything else in the official Webmaster account for this site.

Any insight anyone is able to provide is much appreciated.

Hello all:

You probably noticed Google showing product prices in SERP snippets and this did not do us well because there was a noticable drop off in click throughs to the site with the price displaying in snippet.

So we're replacing them with graphic prices instead.

Does anyone see a problem with that in as far as how Google ranks our pages?

Thanks!

Hello All:

Google snippets now include prices.

We feel it's causing less click throughs from search results.

Someone suggested to replace the textual prices with graphical prices. I worry Google will expect some sites to do this and penalize them for doing so.

Any thoughts or evidence in this regard?

Hi Zsolt:

I was referring to a program called Spring Metrics - supposedly it provides insight on conversions.

Hi All:

Over the past couple of months, I have heard a few people mention Spring Metrics as something I might want to try to help with conversions. Sure, SEO can lead a horse to water, but getting the horse to drink the water is a whole different issue.

Do any of you have experience with Spring Metrics, and is it something that you would recommend to help with conversions?

Has it actually made a difference for anyone that would make it worth the time and money investment?

Hi Marcus:

Thanks for your reply.

Actually, I do have other pages already employed with keywords I'm trying for - but those pages all stay at a PR of 3 for some reason:

http://www.indierockcafe.com/new-releases/ - "best new releases" or "best new albums" or "popular new albums" - You'll see I rank for these words - but it's almost always the homepage - I do realize that it has to do with links and anchor text going to the homepage rather than the other pages. Maybe link building for these pages will help change this?

http://www.indierockcafe.com/artists-and-bands/ - "hot new bands" "best rock bands" - you'll probably see I have #1,2,3 for all these rich keywords, but Google is almost always choosing the homepage.

(PS - I'm not trying to rank for variants that include "indie" because the site is saturated for that term

and

http://www.indierockcafe.com/top-ten-songs/   - "best new songs" "hot new songs" "popular rock songs", etc.

Regards

Phil

Hello:

I've been the publisher and SEO for Indie Rock Cafe since starting it in 2007.

It's done great, and has #1 - #5 positions in Google for many strong keywords like "best new albums", "best new bands", "top new bands", "popular indie rock songs", and so on.

However, for many of the results, the homepage keeps popping up over and over again. I thought I'd done everything right to get other pages on the site to rank for top keywords.

Another potential issue is that I expected the homepage to have a 6 PR by now, but it seems stuck on 5.

Any ideas?

Insight from SEOs and experts is always enlightening and helpful, so thank you in advance for your thoughts and advice.

Hello:

I know this is long - but I kept it as succinct as I could to explain the situation - but everyone of the brilliant people on here insight is so greatly appreciated in advance.

There has been more than a 30% decline in traffic mostly from Google on a site with an 11 year presence on the web, 5 page rank (historically 6), fairly good quality backlinks (but they are old).

I cannot pinpoint a smoking gun (such as a specific penalty) - if it's just not attrition in demand for the product itself which there is plenty of evidence for.

But I practice only white hat, so I don't know what it is.

I do not engage right now in link building because my time to work on SEO is very limited.

We have a few common keywords that cannot be avoided (because there are no good synonyms) so there is a high density for one word especially all over the site.

From some websites (like tidbits) we have in Google Webmaster account tens of thousands of backlinks. How serious is this (FYI - they're not new though)

Because of some unflattering reviews from sites with strong authority, the number of click throughs vs. impression in Google Search has dropped dramatically - I think a big part of it is that because the reviews drove down CT ratio.

Interestingly, the number of CTs from Adwords has also dropped off significantly, and I was told by Adwords specialist that declining organic traffic does affect the Adwords traffic to - in fact, they're not even using our daily budget for Adwords as they used to.

The site also doesn't pick up quality organic backlinks as it used to, and the anchor link text is almost always the same - a product name.

Plus, the site was banned in 2008 by Google (from a black hat keyword stuffing that I discovered happened in another dept.) and only after really working hard was it reinstated by reconsideration request.

Site traffic from Google has never fully reached it's potential since then.

Also, text prices were removed from Buy Now buttons even though the prices were textually part of the buttons for years (could this be some penalty?)

**Is it possible that Google is taking the ban history, the poor reviews, the decline in CTs to impressions on the site, the huge decline (75% over four years) in "search volume" or "search interest" (according to Google Trends) for the site's main product name and just using all of this to keep downgrading the site? If true, wouldn't the page rank be diving down to anywhere from 0 to 2 (or is that not relevant at all?) **

There are no messages of a penalty or anything else in the official Webmaster account for this site.

Any insight anyone is able to provide is much appreciated.

Unless I'm missing something here, wouldn't it be easier to set the canonical tag for the main post? There are also plugins like SEO Ultimate that handle this automatically.

I agree with the other responses, especially the keyword stuffing in the footer area of the page - which also exist in the top menu - so over doing the number of internal and external links esp. with the same anchor keyword text again and again and again is potentially an issue.

Plus one of the external links is to adultsextemplates - not sure how much that has to do with it, but when you link that many times to external links within the same site and if all the links are in the same C block, that's a problem.

I would also say the keyword density for "templates" is too high.