Please help - I've never seen my traffic drop so fast and close to zero (except for the time when the Planet servers caught on fire). The site in question is: http://betterwindowssoftware.com The problem that I am having is that I made some SEO improvements over the last month, and my traffic is continuing to approach zero. I know that there is usually a delayed reaction - this is why I included below the # of days ago where I made each change. What I changed: 1) fixed a double-quote bug in META keywords for most pages (50 days ago) 2) deleted 10% of the entire site's content (gradually over last 50 days) with correct 404 status 3) added "Popular Search Terms" tag cloud with 96 tags at first, now only 32 (10-20 days ago) 4) added "Top ranked" software block to pages' sidebar (12 days ago) 5) duplicate pages were merged -- keeping the oldest version of the page, and deleting the others (around 10 days ago) 6) fixed a bug in my Google sitemaps generation script that allowed links to previously deleted content to still appear in the sitemap (this week) The "Popular Search Terms" and "Top Ranked" blocks in the sidebar actually added 4 seconds to the visitor's average duration on the page. There seemed to be too many keywords in the initial cloud; remembering what I know about SEO, I thought that fewer might be better. The listings that were removed were not software and linked to mostly MFA (Made For Adsense) sites selling anything from "Yeast Infection Cures", "Padded Mens Jackets", "Hemorroidal Cures", etc. Other useless "software" such as browser toolbars, screensavers, and wallpaper themes, were also part of the removed items. Maybe Google loves pages that link to MFA sites, but I thought that my visitors would not really want to keep searching for software in one of their sites full of ads. Now, I am wondering what I did that has caused the ranking to keep dropping. My PageRank has been 0 for the last 6 months, but it was PR4 about 2 yrs ago, and then PR2... PR1... PR0. Actually, only the index.php page really ever had a PageRank - most other pages were always PR1 or too small to measure, a.k.a. PR0.
Your home page has very little text/content, and a huge amount of outgoing links. Don't think Google likes that too much. Google does take the number of outbound links into consideration. Based on your keywords and description tags, it looks like you are targeting better windows software for your main keywords. That term doesn't get many searches. Your Tools page does the same thing. You are targeting your domain name. That would be ok if there are a lot of folks looking for it. Your traffic problem could be due to your Title and Description tags. You want them to contain your primary keyword phrase, and the content of the page should reflect that too. Your type of site is hard to optimize for, as you well know. You might want to do some keyword research and maybe see what you can come up with if you attack it from a "free downloads" perspective. Or maybe pick out a popular software that people really want and get a page up on that. Finally, check out Google Webmaster Tools and run your site through it. It might help you find additional bad links, seo problems etc. Good luck!!
Additionally, to make further optimizations for search engines, I have plans to add more keywords to each listing - these keywords would be extracted from the refer URLs when it is a search engine. Each listing already has an average of 7 keywords associated with it, but this would add keywords that the developer never though somebody might search for to find their listing such as the filename like "super_mini_notepad.zip". These keywords would only be added when they occur in more than 5 referrals from SEs. @zeekstern - you make a lot of great points, but none of these things really changed. In other words, my keywords weren't better targeted when my traffic was 10 to 20 times what it is today. I am probably just seeing the affect of changing too many things over a short period of time. Google Webmaster Tools is very useful - it identified some duplicate content and recently helped me discover why certain sitemaps were being rejected (because of recent bug, they contained links to pages within betterwindowssoftware that weren't always there - some of the links led to 404s); I think that they didn't report this as a reason a few months ago - the sitemaps were simply labeled with the big red X and the reported info on that sitemap led me to believe that the file timed-out or a malformed URL might be to blame. I will certainly take the advise about the home page and keywords. I need to completely redesign the home page; I have some ideas, but I still want to get some expert advice for this... any advice from the wise digitalpointers on how to improve the PageRank for the home page of a software download site (let alone the PageRank for the thousands of listings within)? Cheers!
I don't think that it was banned. There are around 17,000 indexed pages (google search for site:betterwindowssoftware.com) - and this has actually been on the increase over the last 50 days. I really am just starting to think that it is too much changing all at once - and some sort of sandbox effect... I haven't kept an eye on what SE rank any keyword has had (in Google searches) over time, but I get the feeling that each results' ranking is lower while there are more indexed pages (than last month because of the six recent changes mentioned in initial post above). Even though I have no idea how long it will be before my rankings come back up, I will report back in the next two weeks to try to justify what is happening (especially if it is the "too much changing too quickly").
bgillingham - What your site was when google first looked at it has nothing to do now. You can put a 5 or 6 page site up and get tons of traffic the first week or maybe a month or so. This is normal. After awhile, your site will disappear. This is normal too) Since your type of site does not have what Google wants, (content), you should probably go the back link route in full force. I really can't see any other way right now. By the way, you will be better off getting rid of the + signs in your keyword tag. It is not needed, and goes against what Google tells you to use, which is spaces and commas. Not a big deal, but every little bit helps)