HELP!!! My webstie results have dropped

[sewsweet]

HELP!! Someone!

My website visits have take a drastic drop! I don't know what has happened. Can anyone help? I used to come up near the top on searches for "Embroidered baby gifts" and now I am nowhere to be found. What has happened and what can I do?? I am in a panic. Orders have stopped. HELP! PLEASE?

[pixel]

Hey sewsweet,

When did the dropoff occur? Did you make any changes to the website around or before that time? Are customers leaving when they get to the cart, item page or homepage? Changes to the store, especially dramatic changes or code, could be a reason.

[sewsweet]

The drop off occurred about 4 days ago. It was drastic. I added some wedding related products about 2 -3 weeks ago. No drastic code changes or anything. It seems anything I was ranked for has dropped drastically. I am still showing up just really far down the list. I called my Solid Cactus rep Patty Martin and I hope someone is taking a look for me. I am sure they are. I have always had great traffic since I originally went live after my re-design by Solid Cacuts. The results have dropped back to what they were before my re-design. Any ideas appreciated!

[Jan]

Debra, when I google "embroidered baby gifts" you come up #7.

When I google embroidered baby gifts (no parenthesis) you come up #11 (first listing on second page).

Is this where you were before? Google might have just hiccuped.

[sewsweet]

Okay,

I know I used to come up second when I searched on embroidered gifts or embroidered gift. I can't remember which. This has been such a stressful day. The biggest thing is that I know my search results have changed for the worst. I was getting between 150 and 200 people most days and I am now down to 50 or so. I have seen very little activity sent to my site via google searches and no orders. I don't know what is going on.

[lucysdoghouse]

How I rank on a particular search engine can fluctuate sometimes for me. Like last month I had a pretty major move upwards on yahoo moving up a significant amount for some pretty competitive terms and then I lost it all this month for those same terms. Do not know why but it happened.

On Google it is not unusual for me to move from spot number 4 to 8 back to 6 back down to 11 for one of my more competitve search terms.

It could very well be that the search engine devalued the sites that you links from. I know a lot of blogs that do paid links have been hit pretty hard in their rankings by Google in the last few months. Google has also been warning if the majority of your inbound links have the same exact anchor text, your rankings will suffer as a result.

My response to these events is to go out and try to build more links with varied but similiar anchor text for less compettive keyword phrases. While I do not get a ton of traffic from these phrases, I can get on the first page of google in a short period of time and the traffic converts at a higher rate than more general terms. I have increased my traffic by 75% since Xmas by doing this.

I hope this helps.

All the best,

Hans

[cactus_jeanl]

Hi sewsweet,

Hans gave you some solid advice. All the major search engines update their ranking algorithms regularly, so you will see your rankings on different keywords fluctuate from time to time. You can also see these changes when new competitors arrive on the scene or if existing competitors start taking an active interest in improving their rankings.

If you are paying for a lot of links, this could be an issue. I would also check your analytics if you have it to see what sites are sending traffic to you. Compare before and after the traffic dropped and see if any sites have recently stopped linking to you. If you lost some good links from trusted sources, that could have effected your ranking and hurt the volume of your traffic too.

Here's a link with a lot of good resources on getting links that might be helpful: Link Popularity - Search Engine Guide Blog

[sewsweet]

So far the only place I seem to have lost traffic from is google but I was getting most of my traffic there. I guess that is one mistake. I am not paying for any links. I do have my site listed in a mall type site that promotes all the shops there? Maybe that is viewed badly. I still seem to rank well on Yahoo and other search engines. I rank okay still for my main keywords "embroidered Gifts" but my individual item pages which used to rank really well have dropped down into Google purgatory where no one will ever find them. I am trying several ideas, press releases, getting more incoming quality links. I have lots of links but maybe they are not quality links. I just don't know what made me drop. I am expecting a call from one of the guys at Solid Cactus hopefully tomorrow to give me some guidance.

Thanks for all the comments. I enjoying selling and sewing but I don't enjoy the SEO aspect of running the site.

[lucysdoghouse]

Debra,

I had not gone to your site before today but I did just now and it is really awesome. It is laid out really well and someplace I would definately shop at in the future.

Wish you the best with your current challenges.

All the best,

Hans

[cactus_joe]

Hi Debra,

the one thing that concerns me are the affiliate banners you have on the footer of your site. My experience with google over the years has shown to me that the "footer" is very valuable "real estate" and google puts a lot of emphasis on it. Google is not fond of affiliate linking, especially outbound. I would immediately remove any shareasale or cj, etc links from your website, and if you want to rotate banners or something, have us build you a java script rotation where you rotate only one banner at a time off on the left or right nav. final text is dangerous... i dont know if this is the cause, but it certainly isnt helping