Our traffic from google has dropped more than 35% and continues to fall. We have been on this forum and google's webmaster forum trying to get help. We received great advice, have waited months, but instead of our traffic improving, it has worsened. We are being penalized by google for many keywords such as trophies, trophies and awards and countless others - we were on page one previously.
We filed two reconsideration requests and were told both times that there were no manual penalties.
Some of our pages continue to rank well, so it is not across the board (but all of our listings went down a bit).
We have made countless changes (please see below).
Our busy season was from March to May and we got clobbered. Google, as most people know, is a monopoly when it comes to traffic, so we are getting killed.
At first we thought it was Penquin, but it looks like we started getting killed late last year. Lots of unusual things happened - we had a large spike in traffic for two days, then lost our branded keywords, then our main keywords. Our branded keywords came back pretty quickly, but nothing else did.
We have received wonderful advice and made most of the changes. We are a very reputable company and have a feeling we are being penalized for something other than spamming. For example, we have a mobile site we added late last year and a wholesale system was added around the same time. Since the date does not coincide with Penquin, we think there is some major technical driver, but have no idea what to do at this point.
The webmasters have all been helpful, but nothing is working. We are trying to find out what one does in a situation as we are trying to avoid closing our business.
Thank you!
Changes Made:
1. We had many crawl errors so we reduced them significantly
2. We had introduced a mobile website in January which we
thought may have been the cause (splitting traffic, duplicate content, etc.),
so we had our mobile provider add the site to their robots.txt file.
3. We were told by a webmaster that their were too many
links from our search provider, so we have them put the search pages in a
robots.txt file.
4. We were told that we had too much duplicate content. This was / is true, as we have hundred of legitate products that are similar:
example trophies and certificates that are virtually the same but are
for different sports or have different colors and sizes. Still, we added more content and added no index tags to many products. We compared our % of dups to competitors and it is far less.
5. At the recommendation of another webmaster, we changed
many pages that might have been splitting traffic.
6. Another webmaster told us that too many people were
linking into our site with the same text, namely Trophy Central and that it
might have appeared we were trying to game the system somehow. We have never bought links and don't even have a webmaster although over the last 10 years have worked with programmers and seo companies (but we don't think any have done anything unusual).
7. At the suggestion of another webmaster, we have tried to
improve our link profile. For example,
we found Yahoo was not linking to our url.
8. We were told to setup a 404 page, so we did
9. We were told to ensure that all of the similar domains
were pointing to www.trophycentral.com/ so we setup redirects
10. We were told that a site that we have linking to us from too many places so we reduced it to 1.
Our key pages have A rankings from SEOMOZ for the selected keywords.
We have made countless other changes recommended by experts
but have seen no improvements (actually got worse). I am the
president of the company and have made most of the above recent changes myself.
Our website is trophycentral.com
Unfortunately, I have quite a few categories like this - trophies, medals, etc. that are the same, except for size and / or color.