Yet another SEO thread!

[951TSE]

Sorry, getting away a bit from your immediate problem.

ehasler said:

4. I do have a mailchimp email pop-up appear after 30 seconds, so I guess you weren't on a page long enough to see it? Not sure that would make much difference in the eyes of Google though? I personally don't like these forms if they pop up as soon as you visit a site, so I've set the delay to be quite long on purpose.

Yes, I do remember it coming up briefly on my first visit, but with cookies set I didn't see it on return visits and someone with a popup blocker won't see it at all. I'm not sure if that is important to you but all the marketing blurb I've ever seen says that a nice large targeted email list of willing buyers is the holy grail of direct online marketing. Whereas on your competitors site the details capture appears on the page permanently and on my small screen is 'above the fold' if that matters anymore.

Talking about small screens what does your site and his look like in comparison on phones and tablets as Ebay's research suggests that more and more of their customers are buying using those devices.

I've no idea if a google (or other search engines) algorithms are skewed to mobile device optimisation these days? Perhaps an expert can advise us?

[ehasler]

Webber3 said:

The Google webmaster forums used to be full of people moaning about crappy sites outranking them. They never got anywhere with it.

They're full now of people moaning that they lost 80% of their traffic overnight so at least it seems I'm not alone.

Webber3 said:

You do need to try to ascertain if this is site related. It could be that your top search phrase just dropped a few places. To a point where it gets no clicks. Page 2 perhaps. Look at webmaster tools and pinpoint which Search Queries dropped (select the 'with change' option). If all your rankings dropped at the same time then it may well be site related.

It does appear to be site related. Prior to 19th August, I had about 1400 search terms listed and was ranking on page 1 for a good number. Then the queries dropped 80% overnight, and many of the terms I was ranking well on had dropped 50-100 places, plus the number of search terms dropped too.

Webber3 said:

If it is site related, I know it's a ball ache moving to a new domain, but I once spent 6 months trying to recover a site and got nowhere. Google will never give you any feedback, so you're working in the blind with no guarantee you'll ever fix it. If you move your content to a new domain and are squeaky clean with your SEO, you could see results a lot sooner.

I can see your point, but what's to say they wouldn't do the same with the new site after 6 months? If I'd been creating spammy links, or doing something else dodgy then I'd at least know what not to do next time - but I really have no idea what Google doesn't like.

Since the drop in traffic last month, I've made a few changes and added more unique content so I'm going to stick with it for now and hope that Google miracles happen! I'm also going to focus on getting some articles written that will hopefully attract social media sharing and links from blogs, so should improve my backlinks which is one area that my site falls down on.

[ehasler]

951TSE said:

Yes, I do remember it coming up briefly on my first visit, but with cookies set I didn't see it on return visits and someone with a popup blocker won't see it at all. I'm not sure if that is important to you but all the marketing blurb I've ever seen says that a nice large targeted email list of willing buyers is the holy grail of direct online marketing. Whereas on your competitors site the details capture appears on the page permanently and on my small screen is 'above the fold' if that matters anymore.

I've read the same blurb too, but IMO there's a fine line between driving visitors away by being too in-your-face, and capturing details - I've started off on the cautious side as I personally don't really like those pop-ups, but will look at making it more obvious.

Saying that, I did sign up to the other site a while back and haven't seen a single newsletter, so they aren't even making use of the details they have collected.

951TSE said:

Talking about small screens what does your site and his look like in comparison on phones and tablets as Ebay's research suggests that more and more of their customers are buying using those devices.

I've no idea if a google (or other search engines) algorithms are skewed to mobile device optimisation these days? Perhaps an expert can advise us?

It looks OK on tablets, but isn't responsive (yet) so looks a little small on phones - although is usable if you use it in landscape mode or zoom and scroll a bit. I don't know if they are looking at mobile device optimisation, but I would guess they do or will do as they have a score for both mobile and desktop browsers in their Webmaster Tools site analysis section. But again - although my site isn't great, it's still rated higher then the other one.

[ehasler]

Webber3 said:

This sounds like your main problem. If your site has been penalised, for all the effort it takes to recover, you might as well start a new site on a new domain.

I thought I'd update this thread with some good news

After a lot of work, my site has recovered from the drop and is now doing better than ever.

I did quite a few things, including:

1) Added additional content to the product pages which were quite thin on unique content, and removed some internal URLs with anchor text.
2) Optimised the site to improve time on site and page views.
3) Wrote a few 2000-3000 word blog articles.
4) Removed a few backlinks - one of which was a comment on a blog which ended up on the footer of every page of that site which resulted in hundreds of backlinks from them.
5) Asked a number of relevant websites for links to some of the new content I'd produced, which resulted in a few decent links.
6) Waited...

Interestingly, and I have no idea if this is co-incidence or not, but a couple of days before I saw a jump in Google traffic, an old post of mine on here (about an old site that no longer exists) got bumped up in this forum which resulted in lots of people visiting my site from PH.

As you can see, some or all of these paid off!



Even better, the competitor site has gone the other way...

[markcoznottz]

Google has no loyalty to anyone sadly, it has damaged its own client base and potentially its own customers, with changes to rankings. 'Like they care they are worth billions', is the normal answer, but if they are 'allowed' to run a monopoly they should not be able to move goalposts on a whim.

[Dick Dastardly]

markcoznottz said:

Google has no loyalty to anyone sadly, it has damaged its own client base and potentially its own customers

Google's customers aren't businesses that want to rank organically, it's ones who pay for PPC ads. Since the big algorithm updates, more businesses spend on AdWords, so I think they have things kind of how they want them.