First: This is my first post to a forum on Digital Point. If I am out of line in my subject matter or the section for posting this question, please let me know! My site is a music review magazine which has been around for several years. I started actively trying to optimize my site a couple months ago. At first, everything was going great... individual pages were showing up very well in all three major search engines and the results were definitely (and quickly) tending to higher. Then around the end of January I noticed that a few pages I regularly check had gone from at or near the first page of results to off the charts. I did some checking on the site and saw that maybe this was due to some overlapping in keywords (using the same keyword more than once). I fixed this to the best of my ability and resubmitted the site. Within a few days everything was back to normal and building very favorably. For most of the review pages, if I entered the artist's name and the keyword "review", the associated page on my site registered in the top 10 on many, many pages. But now, about 2 weeks later, I'm back off the charts again with google. I'm at a total loss to figure out what's going on. I don't sell or buy any links, I do not resort to any black hat tactics.. I try to do everything by the book. The only thing that is bothering me is the potential for duplicate content. If I have pages with duplicate titles (I use Joomla and I'm finding that this is common with this CMS), would that cause the wholesale changes to my site that I'm seeing on Google? I am going crazy trying to figure out why this is happening!
Which site is this? (Don't worry about not being able to post links due to your recent membership and low post count, just type the URL like you would normally - it'll just be parsed as normal text.)
I'd have to agree with Dan, with a URL we could only speculate your problem. You don't provide any illegal content do you?
In terms of duplicate content, does your content appear anywhere else on the net? Do you update your content regularly? Do you have people returning to your site?
the site is music-reviewer.com. I have had the domain online for eight years. The magazine itself has been in existence since 1996 and content going back to that time is on the site. There is absolutely no illegal content on the site. As far as duplicate content goes, there should not be any that is off that domain. The site consists of music reviews, which are sometimes quoted and occasionally reprinted by publicists and artists on their websites. This has never been a problem for me from a legal perspective because generally whoever republishes the information fully credits my site and the person who wrote the review. Anytime I find someone who doesn't, when I request that they do so they always comply. This of course could be meaningless to Google, which only sees the duplicate content. But the occurance rate should be less than 1% of the thousands of reviews that are on the site. The site is updated monthly with approximately 50 to 150 pages added per month. The content of each page is seldom changed, after all a review is a review and doesn't change. Return traffic is not as high as some sites. By nature, people come to see a review of an artist they are looking for, look around, then leave. If they return, it's not until they come across something else that strikes their interest on my site. I have been looking around on the site all afternoon and I am finding that there are some pages that are coming up as duplicates. This could be due to a change I made to the reviews menu about a week ago. In changing the menu system, I think I may have created duplicate content for a lot of pages, which could in turn be causing me to be penalized by Google. That's my current theory.