Hey pointypeeps, I've got a new client, http://www.servaas.com.au, who was doing well in Google in Dec '07-Feb '08, then traffic and rankings started to drop and haven't come back up. I've checked the web developer's change log, and can find nothing that would correlate to the drop in rankings (and traffic). He's put up some XML sitemaps and though they don't look great to me and haven't helped any since adding, they were added in September, way after the troubles started. If anybody's got thoughts and opinions on this, and even wants to share them in this forum, then they can walk away knowing I think they're above the level of awesome. And that's somethin' I can tell you. Thanks all, most appreciated.
Well I've only just picked them up, so No. From what I can tell, there has been nothing done that should affect SEO in the way it has. He's only added a blog post here and there and done nothing to his product listings or their information.
The site does not have very much backlinks, I think if you build enough high quality backlinks the traffic will improve.
Yeah, I'm sure I could work on that, but the immediate problem is that, without changing anything, the guy's rankings just start to tank with no explanation really. I was just hoping somebody would look at his source code and say, "Hey! You've got an outdated contentsomethingsomething tag in there! The last Google update said not to, didn't you read the blog?!?!" I'm going to just suggest some code cleanups and some consistency throughout all of his modules. Thanks anyway though.