A Sinking Ship!

[marknc]

I am posting here because I am looking for help. I have been running an online shop for 10 years. I am not an expert and my html and coding ability is average or less. I have always done my own seo with some success over the years. We have always been heavily dependent on Google who drive around 80% plus traffic to our site.
The long and the short of it is, since March 15th or therabouts, our visitor numbers dropped to half over the following 15 days. Our 2 MAIN keywords are now redundant as we have been relegated to oblivion.
The hours in the days now pass and no orders come. This is not just a worry but sad to watch such a great business that has experienced some measure of success over the years, just fade away. I am at a loss as to what to do!

[marknc]

Sorry, I realise I haven't given much information here. To be more specific my url is www.madaboutjewellery.com. I have recently completely redesigned the website and gone from a black background to white and brought the entire navigation system up to date. We lost our customers for our main keyword "jewellery" with the algorythm change back in November 2010. Much more recently for people searching for "costume jewellery" - which is our "raison d'etre", and for which we are fully optimised - we have completely disappeared - and I mean completely! I have looked as far as page 20 in the search results and not found us! This makes no sense at all. Now put the word "big" in front of it, ie "big costume jewellery and we are number 3 on page 1 in the organic results! For "costume jewellery" both Bing and Yahoo place us on the first page of results. I think this might explain why I am at a loss as to what to do!! The same goes for "fashion jewellery" by the way.

We are implementing a plan to increase content which will change and be added to on a daily basis but this doen't start until mid-may. We are hoping that this will improve visitor numbers. The company we are using for this exercise have proven results so we are confident that this will work. But our current problem is this keyword/phrase issue. We have talked to two professional seo companies and both have told us they can't help us! So if there's anyone out there who has any ideas as to how we can restore our 1st page position I would love to hear from you.

[claybutler]

Look at your site here. This is how a search engine bot reads your site.
http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php...6&button0.y=15

Your site actually isn't heavily optimized for costume jewelry. There are a few things you could do that would help.

For one, you should code the template so your logo is actually a hyperlink of your sites title tag that point to the home page. That's not only smart SEO it's also smart for visitors. The logo should always be a default home page button.

[chrisJumbo]

Might you have a problem with your link profile
http://www.madaboutjewellery.com/link_pics.html

That seems to be a big issue these days. Google has been devaluing certain kinds of links and you practically advertise that you "paid" people for links. It is interesting that two companies said there was nothing they could do which makes me wonder what problems they saw.

Until you can work out problems maybe run a PPC campaign. But, I'm just shooting from the hip on that one. I know there are a number of professional SEOs who visit here so if you haven't tried contacting any of them, you might give that a try.

[PoisonJam]

I've just had a quick link through your backlink profile and you have a crapload of links all with the anchor text "jewellery". It massively outweighs your brand links and all other anchor text which looks very unnatural and spammy. Most of the links are from comment spam also.

From the quick look I've had it looks like you've been slapped with a penalty.

Are you still appearing for secondary terms? Look at your Analytics. What are your organic keywords sending traffic (now)? To what pages (now)?

[carstensch]

Hey marknc,

im sorry to hear that. Well when i take a look at your Link metric i can cleary see that the strongest links are from comment spam!

Google stopped indexing "hard money key links" and is downgrading many of such links! A new Age is about to began.

You should get serious about seo and plan out an effective long term linkbuilding strategy.

- More Brand Links "www(dot)madaboutjewellery(dot)com", "madaboutjewellery" ...
- More Compound Links "Are you mad about jewellery", "costume jewellery by madaboutjewellery" ..
- No more Money Key Links!
- More unique Keyword related Content on your site
- More Backlinks out of Keyword related Content to your site
- More Backlinks from Keyword related Domains and best again out of Keyword related Content to your site
- More Authority and Trust Links!
- More Social Shares, Retweets, Likes, +1 ...
- Add unique Desciptions to each of your products and take care of long unique descriptions!
- Maybe you can start a Blog on your Root Domain to deliver fresh unique content
- Maybe adding some short (25sec) Slideshow Videos to the product desriptions might help as well!

{removed links}

[claybutler]

Might you have a problem with your link profile
http://www.madaboutjewellery.com/link_pics.html

Yeah, I noticed that too. Not so good to advertise that way. I also wonder why you optimized for Jewellery when the vast majority of the people spell it jewelry?

[PhilipDunn]

I would go through and re-write the titles for the internal pages. "WHAT'S NEW The Square Sunflower Brooch," which seems to be a typical title for your internal pages, is really not well optimized. What are the most prominent keywords for your site in GWT (Google webmaster tools)?

[PhilipDunn]

Yeah, I noticed that too. Not so good to advertise that way. I also wonder why you optimized for Jewellery when the vast majority of the people spell it jewelry?

After looking at the site, I thought I just didn't know how to spell jewelry

[clumberman]

Yeah, I noticed that too. Not so good to advertise that way. I also wonder why you optimized for Jewellery when the vast majority of the people spell it jewelry?

Both are correct. One ell is Americanized and two ells is Queen's English, IIRC.