Google rankings in free fall

[VicheVIP]

Hi Guys,

At its peak our site has received over 10,000 uniques (per month) 1/4 of these from Google organic search results.

In the last 8-12 weeks, however, we have noticed a significant decline in our Google traffic - almost free fall. With a steady descrease each month.. From 2700 uniques in November last yr down to 700 in April.

I have decent ranking software that monitors our rankings and these has always shown movements up and down, but whats been the most obvious is the number of keywords Google is indexing us for - back in the peak we were found for over 1200 keywords. This is now down to 300.

I'm at a loss as to why this is happening....We have a successful blog, we have invested heavily in basic SEO practices over the last 2 years and we take link building seriously.

I've had some recent SEO advise from different consultants and heres what they think it may be:

• Footer full of internal links (I've recently removed this but we did have over 50 links in our footer)
• Lack of keyword and description tags on our product pages
• Lack of H1 and H2 tags
• Lack of consistent link building when compared to our competition
• Google sitemap set up to tell Google we update everyday -instead of when we actually update the site (this has recently been fixed)
• Title tag structure (product name should be first - then targetted keyword(s)
• Our coding has errors and is not W3 compliant
• Our main product images need to be renamed to reflect our keywords
• Our site images need to be optimised to increase the speed of our site (on average our site loads in 3 seconds) - is this too slow for an e-commerce site?

Can anyone can shed any light on these issues?

Cheers

Cheryl
www.vichevip.com.au

[Martin Goulding]

Hi Cheryl, will take a look next few days or so, but "off the cuff", would say very few of the points listed would be relevant (some may be)

[VicheVIP]

Hi Martin

Recently we asked our web developers to create a google xml sitemap.

We've noticed a drop off in the number of pages Google is indexing us for so we thought this might help improve that.

This is what they come up with:
http://www.vichevip.com.au/googlesitemap.aspx

Is this an ok format for Google? Should it be XML?

Thanks

Cheryl

[Martin Goulding]

Hi cheryl, yes it should be a an xml file, of course Google ( or any search engine) will index any files, but specific to the Google sitemap (or any search engine), this is their required format. It is submitted through Google Webmasters tools, you can create an account if you have not already got one.

Also here is a free xml sitemap (up to 500 pages, more you have to pay)
it's quite good.

And more info on sitemaps

Also in regards to the drop off of your longtail search terms, there was a big change with how Google is doing this came to a crisis in May read about it here

[jagz]

i think this new change is only affecting more micro niche spammy sites.. i have not seen much change in my blog rankings or earnings