Conflicting advice from so-called SEO's

[enesral]

I am new to this forum but hope to get a little advice please. My website, http://www.Prepare4Disaster.com, used to rank on the first 2 pages of G and Y for almost two years. In January of this year I disappeared back to pages 20-26 on G and completeley from Y until 2 monthes ago. I've had to resort to PPC advertising to get back on the front pages and after conflicting SEO optimization schemes I'm afraid my site is royally screwed. Would someone please tell me if I can fix this myself or do I need to start all over. My site is mostly dynamically generated and all metatags for those pages are set the same and can't be changed. Also, all horizontal and vertical Links are dynamic as well. Should recreate those links by text links on all static HTML pages? Any suggestions would be helpful!

[KeithO]

The title tag makes no sense.

[bhartzer]

My site is mostly dynamically generated and all metatags for those pages are set the same and can't be changed.

That in itself is going to be your problem. Your pages are considered to be duplicate pages--and until you have unique meta tags and title tags most likely you will continue to suffer problems with rankings. Not only that, your pages are probably going to be end up being removed from Google.

You're going to have to fix this duplicate content issue yourself--or get your programmer to fix it for you.

[enesral]

Thank you for the responses so far. Everyone keeps telling me that the dynamic pages are not a problem since the the end of each link difers with a category, product, or page name tag. That's what's so confusing about the different SEO reports I get. They say it doesn't matter but 90% of the charges they want to fix this are PPC advertising funds, not page optimization charges. Also, is this something the search engines started knocking this year, because originally my first two years I had no problems reaching the first pages of G & Y with my content? Thanks again!

[bhartzer]

Google in particular has been "cracking down" on duplicate content and duplicate pages lately. It's not the URL that's duplicate, it's the content on the pages.

Other "SEOs" are pitching PPC because they simply don't know how to optimize your site and get it back in the rankings.

[enesral]

Thanks bhartzer for that clarification, the good news is that I can change the Title for each page maybe that's the only thing keeping my pages from being dumped completely. Most of my pages do show up under the site: search, so they are mostly indexed but my keywords are very hotly contested. I started this business 3 years ago as a second income and it quickly took over my life. Now, I'm trying everything I can to save my business but am running out of money to throw at the problem like the IBM commercials, and have to resort to saving it myself. Thanks again for your advice and I may have to consider moving my site to a software that gives me better control.

[bythevineyard]

What cart are you using? Is that SiteLink from Dydacomp?

[bhartzer]

change the Title for each page maybe that's the only thing keeping my pages from being dumped completely

Just changing the title tag won't do it. Each page needs to be at least 25 percent unique from any other web page.

[brian.mark]

My site is mostly dynamically generated and all metatags for those pages are set the same and can't be changed.

That's one of the worst cop-outs that I've ever heard. Our site is totally dynamic, but I can modify the meta tags either automatically based on page or manually based on page. A properly set up dynamic site should be easier to change, not more difficult.

Brian.

[enesral]

Yes, unfortunately until it worked fine until now! So, I started experimenting tonight and captured my main page with all the dynamicly generated product links and cut out the body saving the rest as a template of my own and I am little by little replacing every page except for my product categories pages with statics created from the template I made. Only drawback is if any of my links change or I add new ones, I'll have to add those links to every single page. I thought I gave up writing HTML years ago! Oh well, thanks for the comments and any suggestions about my keywords or saturation levels would be appreciated, it's been a long time since I did this by hand coding but it's my bread and butter so back to the trenches! Thanks again for help so far.