Google ranking - Gone

[gibby]

Im totally confused!
A few days ago we had a great ranking with google for many categories.
Ive done a check today and we have basically gone.

I was wondering why things had gone a little quite in the last day

I notice the google bot last looked at our site in June, its usually every couple of days.

I did slow its search down as we had site problems.

any ideas?

G

[mcol]

are you inadvertently blocking it with a robots.txt file? You can check in Google "webmaster tools" if you have an account

Is the site relatively new, new sites do come and go from the index.

Have you been buying links or doing anything to upset the mighty Google.

Is it unique content or are you dupliacted by another site?

If you post the url I'll be happy to take a quick look.

[luckyg]

I went from no 5 in google page 1 to no 8 at the end of last week so perhaps google done some sort of reshuffle?

[mcol]

I went from no 5 in google page 1 to no 8 at the end of last week so perhaps google done some sort of reshuffle?
There was a page rank update last week, happens about every three months or so.

[gibby]

www.alternativestores.com (http://www.alternativestores.com)

the only thing I have done was to switch the crawl rate to slow as we had a traffic problem.
The site is not new - running with the current cart for 6 months

any help would be appreciated

[wood1e2]

What keywords were you ranking on?

What else have you changed? What were you doing to get the ranking you achieved previously?

It could be that you were ranked higer, but with recent Google changes you are no longer competitive in a highly competitive keyword/phrase niche. It maybe that you content is no longer sufficient for Google to rank higher.

[fisicx]

Give an example of a keyword you ranked well for and the landing page then we can see if the page is still in the index.

Try changing the crawl rate back - if it's every 6 months you are telling google that the site really isn't that important.

[gibby]

Vegetarian Shoes
http://www.alternativestores.com/ethical-shop/vegetarian-shoes/cat_9.html


Ta

G

[fisicx]

You're still there (but way down the ranking) and the listing is for your homepage.

I'd hazard a guess that google has simply decided that the site no longer warrants being on page 1 for your keywords.

Have you made any changes to the site in the last 6 months (apart from fiddling with webmaster tools)? Have you been doing any linkbuilding?

I did note some spammy titles/alt text and the massively overly complicated navigation that eats up over 1000 lines of code. I know if I were a spider I'd get fed up long before I got to the main content.

[gibby]

Nothing major, just adding in new categories & updating pages.
Our traffic has been going up n up lately.

Cheers

G

[UKSBD]

See this all the time with sites that use fancy navigation and which emphasise
the navigation to much.

All the pages are just too similar from a bots point of view.
If a page is about Vegetarian Shoes make it about that only, and drop off
90% of the other content.

[streetslocal]

Veggie shoes:eek:

:D:D:D

Do people search for that?
If so why?

Im sure you could have a number 1 rank in days if you put your mind to it

[mcol]

Have to agree about the navigation. If you get all your page title and urls in some massive dhtml mess, then that's one helluva lotta words before a spider reaches your content. If you must do it, use a two column layout, define the content in column1 nav in column 2, then float the nav over to the left.

The whole site's light on centent, you should add several paras of text (at least) to each category, explaining all about what that category is. At the moment you look awfully like a thin affiliate site generated from a datafeed, and Google hates those with a vengance. And customer reviews (real ones of course) are always good to help bulk out the pages.

[gibby]

thanks for all of that.
Im using cubecart which quickly jumped our ratings up when we switched to it compared to our previous cart software.

the navigation is all built in but Im still confused as to why its suddenly fallen to bits
Am I better not using the floating menu system?

Ive had to switch adwords back on.
AM i better when Im targeting vegetarian shoes with adwords - directing that campaign to the front page or the actually section - vegetarian shoes?

G