My site took a nosedive on google after some changes

Question

My site had started slipping in the search engines. So an SEO person told me to reduce duplicate copy on my main site and on other sites that were plagiarizing my site. My home page had first page standing on google for most of my keyword terms.

Now after few days of working on this, my site has pretty much vanished from google search for most of my key words in just a couple of days. I'd be grateful if someone could tell me what I did wrong. My site is http//www.ballmediainnovations.com

I did the following:

- I spent days getting people who had plagiarized my site to remove the duplicate copy. I've gotten at least 10-15 different sites to remove copied material.

- On my site, I changed the metatags on pages that are duplicates or out of date to <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/>

- I added a robots.txt file to block all of the folders containing pages I don't want indexed because they're either old test pages, duplicate pages or they're backups of other sites, and not related to my website.

- on two other websites that I have which had a lot of the same copy as my main site, I added the noindex and nofollow to every single page except the default pages. On those pages I eliminated any words that copy ballmediainnovations.com

- On my sitemap, I removed the www.ballmediainnovations.com/default.htm, and just left www.ballmediainnovations.com, so there would be only one home page reference. I resubmitted my sitemap to google webmasters tools (But today I put it back in case that was the problem, and requested google to index it again.)

Lastly, one thing I've noticed is that on my webmaster tools, google is giving me a 403 error message for www.ballmediainnovations.com/video. This is the file that contains many of my video clips. I have no idea why or what to do about it. I never touched that folder. It has only videos in it, and no web pages, and I checked my robots.txt file and it's not in there, so I don't think I inadvertantly blocked it, and don't know why google is saying it has no permission to get in there.  I'm not sure if this is related to the loss of standing in google. Please help! Thanks

Answer 1

Hate to tell you this, but this is not even close to being an EW question. This is clearly an SEO issue, and that is something in which, AFAIK, none of us here profess any high level of expertise beyond the basics. You would be much better served asking this on a forum focused on SEO than here. Really!

cheers,
scott

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Answer 2

Not an EW question.  But I will point out that it's not google giving the 403 forbidden, it's your site.

http://www.ballmediainnovations.com/video is 403 forbidden.  Try going there.  Check your permissions, ask your host.

Answer 3

Thanks folks - I know this is EW but I've found you all to be so knowledgable. Can you point me to a good forum for this type of thing?

Answer 4

I think I got this fixed through my hosting company. Thank you Kathy for suggesting I contact them

Answer 5

I see one very odd thing...There's no semantic markup. If you are concerned with SEO, that would be the first thing I'd address.

Of all the things you should do, that would be at the top of the list--marking headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) so that search engines know what the page is about and can index it better by giving more weight to the right text. I'm surprised that an "SEO person" didn't zero in on that first.

Meta name keywords have been declared as useless by Google a few years ago. They ignore them because sites played games by stuffing them. Ignore the keywords; Google doesn't use them and has posted a video explaining why. No search engine uses keywords for ranking; it's a waste of time to bother with them.

Your home page has a Title of:
South Florida Video Production Company serving Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, Orlando - Ball Media Innovations.

What Google displays in its search results is:
South Florida Video Production Company serving Miami, Fort ...

You get 67 characters, including spaces (but truncated at the last full word); that's it. Notice what's missing? Search engines differ in what they display, but the W3C standards recommend 64 characters.

Duplicate copy is fine, as long as it's germane.

Finally (at first glance), the use of old fashioned FP menus hurts you with search engines. A CSS-styled, unordered list menu is ambrosia to search engines, and your site should use that to help search engines index the site. It's what all modern sites use. That clunky, old, outdated FP navigation garbage code is killing you. And you could keep your current menu appearance; just do it properly.

We have no idea what your keyword terms are that you think people are actually searching for, but they need to be in the body text of the site, and having them marked semantically helps a lot.

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Answer 6

I'm surprised that an "SEO person" didn't zero in on that first.

Yeah, after reading that OP, I was kinda wondering what this "SEO person's" qualifications were. After all, in order to qualify as an SEO expert, it is only necessary to say, "I am an SEO expert." That's pretty much it. I think that before I started making major modifications to my site, I'd be asking for client references, examples, etc. Just sayin'...   ;-)

cheers,
scott

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Please remember to "Mark as Answer" the responses that resolved your issue. It is common courtesy to recognize those who have helped you, and it also makes it easier for visitors to find the resolution later.

Answer 7

An SEO expert would also have told you that keeping the old content on the site is the wrong move.  Use redirects to the current content.

Answer 8

Yeah. This SEO person sounds like someone who read a pamphlet a decade ago. You'd do better just reading the Google webmaster resources for that information.

Of course, a professional web designer would know all of the best practices and would have kept you from making those mistakes and having your search results tank as they have.

It pays to hire professionals to do web design just as it pays to hire pros to do video production. You get what you pay for. Just sayin'.

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Answer 9

first step, make sure your sitemaps are updated 

next content is king, no amount of BS will ever change that

as for plagiarism I see my hard work ripped off almost daily

http://www.hardcore-games.tk/about/search.php

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Windows MVP, XP, Vista, 7 and 8. More people have climbed Everest than having 3 MVP's on the wall.

Hardcore Games, Legendary is the only Way to Play

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Answer 10

Good lord, Vegan! What shameless self-promotion. This response has nothing to do with the OP's issue, and is nothing more than mouthing a couple of SEO truisms as an excuse for linking to your site. What a transparent boor you are...

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Please remember to "Mark as Answer" the responses that resolved your issue. It is common courtesy to recognize those who have helped you, and it also makes it easier for visitors to find the resolution later.

Answer 11

From Vegan's site:

"Today we are banned from most forums. Today we only participate on Microsoft forums who do not care about a link to this site."

This forum asks for links to sites for answering EW design questions, NOT for self-promotion.

Answer 12

EW design, there are lots of templates out there, but at the end of the day what google likes is an open question

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Windows MVP, XP, Vista, 7 and 8. More people have climbed Everest than having 3 MVP's on the wall.

Hardcore Games, Legendary is the only Way to Play

Developer | Windows IT | Chess | Economics | Vegan Advocate | PC Reviews