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Okay, I thought I was following best practices.  In our industry, electronic hardware, we were ranking well for a particular product line (/spacers) but we wanted to do better.  We addressed several concerns that Moz found first; duplicate page titles, lack of meta-descriptions and overall lack of targeted keywords.  We also took a new approach to add a better structure to our site.  Instead of being presented with a list of part numbers we wanted the user to learn more about our products with content.  So we added a /products page with content and a product specific page (/spacers) that is almost a definitive buyers guide.

We are attempting to answer the questions that we think our customers find most relevant.  Well our customers might find it relevant but Google sure didn't.  After our deployment of new content our rankings for targeted keywords in Google fell from  10-15 to 80-95

As an open ended question, could somebody explain to me why our ranks fell off a cliff?

Homepage: https://www.lyntron.com
New catalog summary page:  https://www.lyntron.com/products
New content with focus to rank high:  https://www.lyntron.com/spacers

TPdn6ym

@ThomasZickell -

Thanks for hopping on this thread and taking a peek at our site.  The site structure wasn't changed from my perspective.  So I'm not sure that 301s are the primary culprit.  We added a main "catalog" page (/products) and a product type page of (/spacers).  The original pages and URL mapping stayed the same.

I'm interested in what your test shows.

One theory in the office is that the term 'spacers' is to broad for what we actually sell.  Things like 'wheel spacers', 'dental spacers', 'tile spacers', 'inhaler spacers', etc... are more popular in searches.  Our niche is very specific.  So....  Perhaps our content change now informed Google what we are and they're correctly weeding us out from a search term like 'spacer'

Thomas,

Have you had a moment to review our situation?

Thomas,

Thank you so much for taking the time to evaluate our current situation. Let me see if I can address some things that you brought up.

Have we moved to Shopify?

No. The stakeholders wanted a look and feel that of Amazon.com and McMasterCarr.com

Fix your robots.txt & make a sitemap index.

Robots.txt - I'm not sure what I need to fix in the file given your statement.
Sitemap Index - I made an index file and submitted that to google. But over time I found that single file more difficult to correct crawl errors. By creating individual sitemaps for the relevant part types I felt that was easier to manage. Is there a direct benefit from Google to have a single sitemap index covering the whole site? Am I getting penalized for doing sitemaps the way I am?

Rel="canonical"

You are correct that /spacer is being canonicalized by /spacers. That was my intent. I was under the impression that if multiple pages, of similar content, was serving the same purpose I should pick one and tell the engines to focus on that. When /spacers was created we thought that page really answered the questions that people tend to ask about our product. Thus the creation of /spacers and pointing heavily to it.

Meta Descriptions too long

Agreed. I'll have to figure out how to deal with that working along side the content writer. Programmatically it's fun because every page is template driven.

301 /spacer to /spacers

I'm not sure why that is. Could you explain to me the benefit of that? I don't want /spacer to go away and it hasn't moved. We haven't rebranded the site nor changed URLs.

I'm also up for a phone conversation if you'd like to continue that way.