Looking for some help from the WPW big guns.
I am starting some
SEO on a website called:
http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/
The website is a WP back end, but is basically a directory to drive traffic to web hosts. Nothing big on that.
The website used to rank for lots of great keywords "cheap web hosting" and "expired domains" up until about mid-July of this year. The pages that ranked well for these kind of keywords were the home page and the domain page:
http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/expired-domains/
We went through a redesign on the news/articles pages around the time of the drop and the programmers didn’t have 301 redirects in place properly for about 2 weeks. We caught the error and fixed it so the 301 redirects worked. We figured we would see some traffic loss because of it, but not on our big keywords because the pages that were ranking for those were not affected. The pages that were redirected were news/articles pages that basically received minor long tailed traffic.
Well the short tailed traffic (“cheap web hosting" and "expired domains") is what disappeared right away. Then the rankings/traffic struggled to come back. We saw ranking come back on and off for about 8 weeks after the mistake, but at the beginning of October have completely disappeared. Check out the graph below:
Obviously we are focusing on Google for this particular issue. Maybe Google saw all the dead pages and demoted the website? Maybe the fact that hundreds of pages disappeared which all link strongly to the home page effected its overall rank? Hard to think internal rank messed up the rankings that bad?
We didn’t notice any dramatic changes in back links during this whole period of time.
Any ideas or theories?
Thanks!