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Hi Keri,

You're right, those graphs are for the entire site and not just Google Organic however it's the same (worse) when you just look at the organic traffic. They don't do any form of other marketing so it's not that sadly (I truly wish it was!).

Here's an overview of just the Google Organic traffic: http://www.thesitedoctor.co.uk/img/201202080932-Google-Analytics.png

Although there is a similar drop in traffic from Bing/Yahoo, there's nothing so cyclical as this.

Nothing in Webmaster Tools other than the usual notices about pages blocked by robots.txt.

We'll dig some more into the individual pages to see if there's anything in there thanks that's a good idea.

Tim

Can anyone offer any insight into why since the Google Panda update www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com has been fluctuating on Google so much? One week it's ranked as it used to be, the next it's nowhere to be seen?

If you take a look at the screenshot of our traffic, this is the traffic after 75% loss (dropped in two stages) you'll see we get traffic for a week and then nothing. This has been happening for months.

Some points that might be involved:

• Around the same time the SEO guys suggested setting the canonical url to www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com (before there wasn't one so traffic was coming from www. and non-www).
• A lot of the original urls have been consolidated and rel="canonical" added throughout
• The "pages" of results all have had a rel="canonical" set to page 1

Could it be that the www is competing with the non-www despite the 301 redirects.

We're doing everything we can to help this client (and have reduced their site errors from the millions to low tens-of-thousands) so it's not filling them with confidence when their site just keeps plumetting!

What's also irritating/odd is that some of their competitors -who used to be ranked lower and have sites which contradict every rulebook still rank high.

Hopefully you can spot something we've missed.

Tim

I8PNL

Thanks Dan, there's some interesting bits there. Nice to hear we don't necessarily need to redesign the site (though we still feel it would benefit the user).

We've not done any back link analysis no -and I can't explain those two spikes either but we have noticed a large increase in the number of robots storing invalid links (e.g. ones which have been truncated) which was one of the reasons we looked to move to friendlier URLs.

In regards the back links, is this mostly a matter of improving the quality of the sites linking to us to resolve this?

Thanks Ryan, all valid points (we'd like to redesign the site but thanks to the massive drop in traffic and subsequently sales) are having to hold off. Interesting point about the homepage links, we'll look into that thanks.

One other (big) change that we made was that the old developers used to pass around a session id for the user on all pages so every time Google came back to the same page, it would get new content. This resulted in Webmaster Tools having over 35M pages for the site (there's about 100k at most). We fixed this issue but we're wondering whether it was actually helping (despite what's recommended)?

We've been racking our brains over this since the recent search engine changes (the notorious and non-cuddley Google Panda update) and have, within reason, corrected as many of the problems that we possibly can yet still our traffic drops further.

http://www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com used to rank fairly equally with it's competitors however since the update (and a number of suggestions from another SEO company), the traffic has dropped by about 90% and it's dropped almost completely from the search results (unlike the competitors who are breaking many faux-pars yet remain well ranked).

I don't think we're seeing the wood from the trees anymore so I'd be grateful if someone could take a look and see if we've missed anything glaringly obvious?

Any thoughts welcome.

Thanks

Tim

Big changes around the same time/since that might be worth noting:

• Setup a canonical domain name of www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com and (using IIS7) 301 redirect all other traffic over.
• Setup canonical URL meta tag for all results pages so they point to a single page
• Moved the redirect page (the one which sends users to the B&B's site) to another subdomain.
• Redesigned the URLs where possible to use "friendlier" and more keyword rich urls and 301 redirecting for the old urls
• Added XML sitemaps to the various tools (we found out they weren't there before)
• Added a robots.txt file
• Lowercased all urls
• Where possible removed duplicate results pages and pointed them at a single page
• Restructured the page titles to be more relevant
• Setup nofollow on the external urls