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Hey Ryan havent heard anything yet.

Have you had a chance to investigate further?

Thanks

Great, I look forward to hearing your response and proposed strategy.

The drop for watches was the first major indication that we had a problem and it was before the October Penguin update. Seems to be more likely looking at Analytics that it was late September.

Ever since then it seems are rankings have been going slowly backwards. Regardless, we need a new SEO strategy ASAP.

Thanks

Well looking at the dates I have found it to be around the time of the overlapping Panda and EMD updates. I didn't originally suspect our link profile instead some sort of duplicate content issue. So I've gone through all of that - canonical, next prev, parameters, sitemaps, no index on generic forms, Copyscape on a whole bunch of pages (some still to fix but I would put us at 95% unique), new blog posts and improved product titles.

But a month later no real change. Do you think Google is still processing my updates (maybe some of the canonical stuff which is faceted navigation related)? How would I determine if I need to start removing links?

We have filed a reconsideration request but are worried they will look at our link - like responders have - and consider them low quality and then penalise us more.

Let me know what you think.

We have examined our Analytics already and it would seem to indicate a slight drop in Google traffic that coincides with the Exact Match Domain and Panda updates that ran at the end of September. This is when we first noticed our plummet for the keyword watches.

It seems to be almost exclusive to Google organic traffic. We rank reasonably well in Bing/Yahoo. Other channels like CPC are of course not showing any issues.

It seems to have affected some keywords more than others but it feels like the authority of the domain is slowly being reduced in Google's eyes. We still rank for more specific stuff and they are still indexing us.

I have made a general response further down that you might be interested in.

We are actually looking to partner with an SEO company that can improve our rankings. Is this something Vitopian SEO would be interested in?

It would seem the general consensus of responses focusses on our link profile.

While I will hold my hands up and say there are some questionable links in there I'm not sure what to do about some of them. We haven't actively "built" links for quite some time as the results look unnatural and it would be dangerous to do so. I can contact webmasters where possible and ask them to remove links but where do I draw the line?

Any overly commercial anchor text is probably a given. Do I also go after really old directory links, years old in some cases? Should I go after websites that are crawling the web and linking back to us (probably not?). There seems to be a little bit of automated stuff in there which isn't down to us.

Should I disavow any comment spam in the profile or stuff which looks bad? The thing is, nobody here will own up to doing it and it and they have all appeared in Aug 2011 - so it could be a rogue contractor or I wouldn't put it past a competitor (they've resorted to DDoS in the past, so negative SEO isn't out of their league). If I disavow these links would it be seen as admitting to being a spammer? I don't want Google to single us out any further.

Or would my time be better spent trying to get more links? Problem is, we've already been trying to get natural links for 8 years. There are companies which will charge us thousands to make infographics and "great content" but there's no guarantee of it working for us.

In the case of Wikipedia - I can't think of many reasons why someone would put a link up to http://www.wikipedia.org with that as the anchor text or something similar, unless the way there are posting the link doesn't allow them to change the anchor text. It is probably the case of automated links throughout the web as they are such a massive website.

I think people would be even less likely to do a link like that to our website, we do have the majority of our link going to our brand name though.

Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces)

A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since.

Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season.

Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability.

I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog.

I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT.

Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword.

The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users.

So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty?

Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!