Advice required regarding falling SERPS
- SEO |
Hello. I'm new here and actually a bit of a novice to the whole thing. But I'm after some advice. I have a site which is around 2 years old. 500 pages +, written all by myself, with some good content. I had some terms really well ranked up the search engines, getting over 1,000 visitors a day. In fact looking back at the logs, I had better traffic over 1 year ago when there were just 100+ pages.
Now, overnight, some of these links got slapped way back down. On checking the logs, some survived, but the majority are either ranked low or in some rare cases, not at all. Traffic has dropped 75%.
I got Webmaster tools, and it mentioned duplicate meta-tags. This was caused by a plugin I used (the translator) which caused loads of copies of the same page. I got rid of that now, but how long does it take for G to stop complaining about that?
There are other things I think may be contributing to it but I would like some comment about it:
1) Use of another URL in the 'Site Title' (that wordpress gives). I am going to shift it to another domain shortly but I wondered if this has any effect.
2) Similar titles. I would blog under categories, so a typical blog title may say: blah blah blah: the title of the post. So where the title is different, the 'blah blah blah' bit is always the same in the post.
3) Post count. I have been blogging a lot recently, and churning out about 20 posts a day. They are not short posts and vary between 400 to 1000 words.
4) Links per page. I use the SEO smart links plug-in to link pages together. On an especially busy page there may be quite a few links, plus all the text links on the sidebar (to latest posts, etc).
To anyone else: I have not even begun to explore this weird world of SEO, basically I am just a guy who wrote stuff because I liked it. But now, I'm seeing that this is really important. I have done nothing to improve my SEO, what should I be doing as a start point?
Thank you for any pointers.
Now, overnight, some of these links got slapped way back down. On checking the logs, some survived, but the majority are either ranked low or in some rare cases, not at all. Traffic has dropped 75%.
I got Webmaster tools, and it mentioned duplicate meta-tags. This was caused by a plugin I used (the translator) which caused loads of copies of the same page. I got rid of that now, but how long does it take for G to stop complaining about that?
There are other things I think may be contributing to it but I would like some comment about it:
1) Use of another URL in the 'Site Title' (that wordpress gives). I am going to shift it to another domain shortly but I wondered if this has any effect.
2) Similar titles. I would blog under categories, so a typical blog title may say: blah blah blah: the title of the post. So where the title is different, the 'blah blah blah' bit is always the same in the post.
3) Post count. I have been blogging a lot recently, and churning out about 20 posts a day. They are not short posts and vary between 400 to 1000 words.
4) Links per page. I use the SEO smart links plug-in to link pages together. On an especially busy page there may be quite a few links, plus all the text links on the sidebar (to latest posts, etc).
To anyone else: I have not even begun to explore this weird world of SEO, basically I am just a guy who wrote stuff because I liked it. But now, I'm seeing that this is really important. I have done nothing to improve my SEO, what should I be doing as a start point?
Thank you for any pointers.
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Ed H -
Thanks
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