whisky and distilleries: victim of Google Dance?

[slainthe]

Hello everybody,

http://www.whisky-distilleries.info/index_EN.shtml

Untill 2 weeks ago, my site was pretty visited, and the number of visitors as well as the number of visited pages was growing an a very healthy way.
Suddenly, the number of visitors came down to about half of wat it used to be.
My website contains a huge amount of informations, and I followed the rules saying that content is one of the most important topics for good searc engines. The number of links pointing to my site has not decreased.
Some of my visitors told me they hardly can find my website with Google, which I did first not believe, as I used to be ranked in the very top with most of the relevant keywords. But ideed, they were right.
My PR get down from 4 to 3, and now from 3 to 2....
On the other hand, the number of enthousiast reactions i get though my guestbook is just increasing.
Does anybody have a suggestion? My site being just a unsponsored information site about scotch whisky and the distilleries over there, my only benefit is the satisfaction of bringing interesting information to as many people as possible. It takes me lots of time, and if I just must conclude the Google robots decide whether my site is important to the community or not, I'd better stop it, and spend my time to other interesting things...
I sound a little desperated, and in fact I do feel so...

If somebody has any idea to help me to increase my pages vues, please let me know...

Thank you

Slainthe

http://www.whisky-distilleries.info/index_EN.shtml

[cbp]

There hasn't been a Google dance in >12 months, so thats not the problem.

PR is a mathematical function of the number of incoming links. If your PR goes down, then you have lost links or the PR of the sites that link to you have gone down.

CBP

[slainthe]

Thank you very much, CBP for your reply.

If I'm not a victim of some Google dance, I guess there must be another reason.
I do not believe the incoming links can be the only reason. In the beginning of lauching of my site (about 10 month ago), I had a lot less incoming links, but I had a ranking of 4 quick after the first visit of Google on my site.
There must be something else.
And this is what I try to find out, as I believe my site can resume rather quickly, if I do the right things...

[happygolucky]

Sorry I don't know the answer to your question. Perhaps it is because your site is in French when you first visit? If that is the case I would think that you would be higher in the french only search results perhaps.

I liked the site but have to dispute the Ardbeg 17 year old! I'll add you to my favourites despite your Ardbeg 17 critism :-).

It wasn't obvious why the bars on the right were different colours. Perhaps you could add a key.

Such a shame whisky is more expensive to buy where it is made.

[slainthe]

Thank you Happygolucky for your post.
In fact this discussion should find place on the forum of my website...
I'm sorry if I prefered other Ardbeg versions to the 17 yo one. It is one of the few bottlings I bought more than 1 at the time. I probably well have to give it a second chance.
The other question is probably more interesting for this forum.
The menu on the right contains all the discussed distilleries (more than 100), and the color code indicates the production area. It is explained in the help, but not everybody goes to that page.
Before making a Javascript for the list of distilleries, I just used a single table with links to the pages.
I changed this into the current form, when I first saw the decrease of the visitors. I thought this could have been the problem: too many internal links on each page. Could be considered as spam by Google.
I'm not sure changing a table with links in a Javascript changes anything to that...
Anoter alternative could be reusing a frame (but frames give too many problems, specially if the page is loaded from a search engine, and not through the home page, because I need to rebuild the frame in order to make it available on each page.
I want people have the possibility to choose any distillery from any page.
Addtionnal problems with php rebuilding techniques are that I miss precious information in my statistics (this redirection kills all the information about used keywords, etc...)

The site was originally only in French, and I had much more visitors than now. This is not the problem.

Anyway, thank you for your reply, and I invit you to come and discuss about this marvellous topic which is whisky on the forum of the site. There is a English section (but not yet any activity on it.)

Slainthe

[happygolucky]

Originally Posted by slainthe

Thank you Happygolucky for your post.
In fact this discussion should find place on the forum of my website...

D'accord. J'essais parler francais mais malheuresment ce ne pas bien.

I'm sorry if I prefered other Ardbeg versions to the 17 yo one. It is one of the few bottlings I bought more than 1 at the time. I probably well have to give it a second chance.

It is worth a second chance. I haven't tried the older version yet though.

The menu on the right contains all the discussed distilleries (more than 100), and the color code indicates the production area. It is explained in the help, but not everybody goes to that page.

I didn't bother going to the help page. I suppose I should have guessed but despite knowing my whiskies I didn't. I think the blue talisker (a lovely smokey island malt incidently) confused me as I tend to think of Islay whiskies in a similar vein.

I want people have the possibility to choose any distillery from any page.

Yes it is useful when I want to check out a whisky I found cheap somewhere or remind myself what to buy for christmas.

The site was originally only in French, and I had much more visitors than now. This is not the problem.

I suppose it depends who your target audience is. Would you prefer lots of French traffic and less english speaking traffic or the other way around?

There is a English section (but not yet any activity on it.)

I do prefer to post to busy forums but I'll perhaps give it a go.

[slainthe]

I am desperately trying to find out why my Google traffic dropped so dramatically. My page is generally found after 10 or 15 pages on Google (for common keywords) since about 2 weeks.
The effect is that only people who know my site are coming back, and they form now about 90% of my traffic. I must say I'm happy to have such a faithful public. It reinforces mmy feeling that my website is good...
I discovered something yesterday, and as I'm not a SEO specialist, I'd like to get some feed-back by specialists on this topic.
1. The first version of my website did not use any Server Side Includes, and all my pages had the extension HTM.
2. A few months ago, I began using SSI and had to rename all my pages in .shtml.
3. I kept both versions for several months, just to avoid some error messages (404 errors), and systematically linked from the .htm pages to the corresponding .shtml pages. To be sure Google does not keep indexing my .htm pages, I added the metatag "Robots: noindex, nofollow".
4. After a while, I dropped my .htm pages, after having checked that my pages were listed on Google with the shtml extension, with the exception of index.htm (which links to index.shtml).
5. ONe day I also dropped my index.htm. This was nefast of course.
6. I still had an old version of this file, and restored it.
7. Yesterday I discovered by chance that this file also contains the keywords "robots: noindex, nofollow".


My question is: can this be the reason why Google decreased my PR from 4 to 2 and why my pages are hard to find?

I put the question, because I could imagine Google just dropping my whole site in this case. But if this could cause my current troubles, I could go back to the enhancing of the content of the site, rather than trying to get all kinds of new incoming links, and other trikky things, like repeating my keywords in the first lines of each page, usint <h1> tags (which is not evident with the use of CSS in combination with templates) etc...

There is however one good thing about the decrease of my traffic: I am now listed on dmoz.org and Zeal (which seems to be important for good rankings).

Please let me know what you think about this possible explanation.

Slainthe
http://www.whisky-distilleries.info/index_EN.shtml

[happygolucky]

Originally Posted by slainthe

2. A few months ago, I began using SSI and had to rename all my pages in .shtml.

I understand that if you rename a page, effectively it is a new page but i don't know if this is the case changing from html to shtml. Anyone else know?

Where are all your links to? If they are to the index "www.yourdomain.com" then they should be ok but if there were links to "www.yourdomain.com/ardbeg.html" then these may have gone.

[slainthe]

Changing a page from mypage.htm to my page.shtml means indeed for Google thta it is a new page.
I got a very useful answer about the problem, which explains nearly everything.
If Itype in Google "http://www.whisky-distilleries.info " I can see all my pages, but just about 10% of them seem to be indexed.
The question remains "How is that possible?", but it explains why I lost nearly all my google visitors.
When I look at my stats, I see that the only pages which are found by Google are indeed the 10% indexed pages.
I just have to be patient, as I now know Google has my pages in their database (with .sthml extensions). I just have to wait for the next indexation, an my figures will be OK again.
I can go back to the content of my site, as the problem is not really SEO related. Just a mistake from me (renaming all the pages - even if I waited for at least 2 months to remove the .htm pages), and some mystery at Google: why are the pages not yet indexed, after such a long time...
Thank you for your suggestions

Slainthe