Hi All, Long-time listener, first-time caller. The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting). The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month. The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages. Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools. 1) I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates 2) We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away. 3) We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions. My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings? I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either. If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated. Best, Carlton
Your failing results may have more to do with penguin and panda than anything you are doing. Google has snubbed the small web in favor of the mega web. That said, duplicate title tags and meta descriptions confuse the search engines, so that could affect you. wiz
We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages - this is your main problem! If you are interested in a serious, professional analysis, you are welcome to contact me.
Actually, I had a similar situation. I fixed all the duplicate title tags and meta tags, including tags too short and too long and three months later we are still sliding down. wiz