Any Obvious Reasons Site Dropped?

[powsurfer]

Hi all
I have recently found that after 5 years on page 1 on Google for our main search term 'ski chile' our site Snoventures has dropped to page 2.
It was #1 until 12 months ago, then dropped to #5/#6 until earlier this week when it dropped to #13 and now #14.

Can anyone offer any advice as to why this may be?

I have recently changed the following (since the drop)...
I found a number of new html warnings that were removed yesterday
Added nofollownofollow to meta robots tag on 3x links pages (just now)

-Could the fact that 'ski' appears lots on the index page be penalising for keyword stuffing?
-Are there too many links away from the home page (including duplication of links) be penalising us even though the pages are within our site?
-Any other suggestions as to why this may be happening or how we could improve the site would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance
Regards
Pow

[mpilatow]

From a quick look, the body text on your home page looks a bit spammy. That text in the footer is damn near invisible and pretty much worthless since it is really spammy too. How is that useful to visitors? I barely noticed it. I am not 100% sure that Google considers it hidden but I could see it causing a problem. Your title tag should be shortened and made more concise and you really should make your description an actual sentence and not just a collection of keywords.
I would clean that stuff up and also check on your backlink situation. If the above mentioned issues are not hurting you (which IMO they are at least contributing) you may have lost some backlinks or had some backlinks become devalued.

[RegDCP]

I would say that having the word ski some 58 times in 530 words on your main page is WAY overkill and will be regarded as keyword stuffing.

Reg

[chrisJumbo]

Reduce your use of "ski" and make your title tags more succinct. You may want to make seperate pages to target skiing and snowboarding. In this case you would need to be careful with duplicate conent.

Or just shorten your title, "Skiing and Snow Boarding in South America" and then in your text highlight the different areas.

[craigmn3]

One out of 8.5 words on your site is ski

have to go with the flow here...

3-5% is a good keyword weight your running over 12.8

did that change?

[DaveG]

As I see it, in addition to the comments above, there arre issue with your tags I believe need to be straightened out.

1. Page Title - This is supposed to be a page title - not a repetition of keyword entries.
Currently you have: <title>Ski Chile, Ski Argentina, Ski South America, Snowboard Chile, Snowboard Argentina</title> whereas <title>Snow ski destinations</title> would do.

2. Too much similarity between THREE of your meta tags:
a: Title
b: Keywords
c: Content

They all basically read the same if not using the same words exactly - they are not really different. I may be wrong but I've not seen such a close group before.

Dave

[powsurfer]

Hi All

Firstly many thanks for taking a look and providing feedback.

Of all the comments mentioned not only is there consistency, I feel very comfortable that they are all relevant points.
I have been a little paranoid about changing things when the site was doing so well for such a long time.
Strangely I am still getting about 80% of the previous hits, so assume the other search terms are a greater proportion than I had previously acknowledged.
The footer text does get us a good number of hits from the spelling mistakes, however point taken, I will reduce this too.
Not sure what is happening with the backlinks. I guess some of them have been devalued and we need to establish an ongoing campaign for quality links rather than quantity (as previously acquired).
I also wonder if we are linking to any sites that have been blacklisted. I have now removed the front page link to our links page(s) and added 'noindex, no follow' to all but the first links page.

We also have a site Edass aliasing Snoventures at the domain level - could this be being counted as duplicate content?

Q: Can you be harmed by duplicate content from individual pages on several websites pulling from the same database, if the website structure is not the same e.g. Snoventures has ski resorts in South America, we are building another website for ski resorts in 'The Americas' so about 10 pages will have the same main paragraph?
Should we try to have totally different ski resort text (main para) on the different websites?
(I guess if not it would be possible to build a website duplicating a competitors main content and get them penalised - not something I am suggesting, however this would be very concerning if possible?)

[powsurfer]

I have now made some of the suggested amendments. Hopefully the site will now be more effective. Lots more work to do on the internal pages.
The header tags are now analysed as 100% effective in WebCEO so I guess now I need to wait and see how Google sees the site after the changes.
Thanks again

[scanmonkey]

chileanski.com, now #1, has Google sitelinks (the sublinks under the top listing) which means that they are now the authority for "ski chile".

Authority links are increasing in value. I see that
chileanski.com has link on CNN.com

[powsurfer]

Well thanks to the above tips, we have got back up in Google to #6 for our main term ski Chile, thanks again.
We do still need to do a lot of work to further improve but getting back on teh front page is a big relief.

Scanmonkey - how do you get a site to have the Google sitelinks? Is this paid for or is it that their spiders have classified them as this?

Edit: I also notice that in searches where we come #1 on Google e.g. snowboard chile or snowboard south america we don't get any sitelinks listed.

[scanmonkey]

Originally Posted by powsurfer

Scanmonkey - how do you get a site to have the Google sitelinks? Is this paid for or is it that their spiders have classified them as this?

The algorithms pick the sites

The websites that have the sitelinks have authority for the search term.

Try to get more quality links. The competition is always getting better and sometimes its not so much as you dropping but they are rising. Check your competitors backlinks in yahoo and see if you can find some good ones. Here is one that looks good to me Interesting Links - VisitChile.com

[incrediblehelp]

powsurfer,

Doubt the changes made to much a difference. Rankings normally fluctuate. Moving from #6 to #12 could be VERY NORMAL for your website.

The days are gone of stagnant or stable SERPs. I have been saying this for over a year now on WPW.

With search load balancing on close to hundred G datacenters, localization and personalization of search...we will not see stable results anymore.

As everyone can see it is just getting worse for those of us that run ranking checkers and use it as a metric for personal SEO gauges or for clients.

[powsurfer]

Thanks again for the assistance.
I have requested a link on Visit Chile, however I think it is affiliated or the same company even as our competitor. We'll see how they respond.

I certainly have to get working on more quality IBLs

[kauzy]

Just follow simple white-hat SEO rules. The text is bit spammy. Try not to group keywords. Sentences or well-written description will enhance your search engine results.

[powsurfer]

The text was totally spammy before so it has improved a lot. May have to go through it again.
We've got the site back up to 6/7th now, so an improvement anyway.

[idansh]

maybe google updates their servers and this is the temporary situation that the rank drops

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by idansh

maybe google updates their servers and this is the temporary situation that the rank drops

ugggh

more insight from idansh

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

ugggh

more insight from idansh

What is the problem brother? Did you see the font size of the link in his signature? I already reported to the admins. I guess he is just trying to promote himself.

Let me send him a warning, and you calm down. OK?

[Webnauts]

Some basic tips.

Get rid of the following redundant meta tags:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Edass Ltd" />
<meta name="distribution" content="Global" />

Replace this <div id="header1" class="headnote"> with a heading tag <h1>

First tag in head: Because your title tag is the most important tag on your page, you need to place it at the very top of the "head" section, right after the opening HTML tag. For SEO purposes, no other tag should appear before the title tag.

Description Meta Tag: Use your keyword phrase only once in your META description tag, to be on the safe side.

You keyword density is too high. I know what you are trying to achieve, but you only can achieve the opposite. Make your text readable for humans and not search engines.

These tips maybe seem to be little, but they will show a difference in your rankings.

For sure there might be more issues, but others might like to have a further look. :

Good luck.

[powsurfer]

Thanks again for the advice.
I have made some more changes from the suggestions and have much more ongoing work to do I guess!

[powsurfer]

I have also just found through Google webmaster tools that this site for sale buy board fanatic board fanatic mast neil pryde board tiga board bic board starboard
(thisis just one of the pages) is linking to us hundreds of times, although if you go to their pages where the links are supposed to be there is nothing there.
It appears to me that they are using rollover links that are somehow hidden, but just hiw I do not know.

Anyone have any thought on this?
Could these links be doing us some harm? or even some good?

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by powsurfer

Could these links be doing us some harm? or even some good?

Doubt it. Just a scrapper to me.

[powsurfer]

The site seems to have found it's level (for now) and although not as good as originally, we are back and consistently on the front page.

I am now thinking we need to get more text on each page to increase the content to code ration.

Thanks again for all the above help.