Oops - the subject was meant to be ‘Various SEO/design/content issues and Penguin 2.1’.
In the last 2 years, the number of visits on my web site <snip> has dropped from 800-900 per day to around 200 per day. In that time I have updated the content to keep it fresh and current. Part of this may be an organic drop in visits but in part I’m sure it’s down to a loss of page ranking on account of successive Google upgrades and stricter rules.
My web site has a number of potential issues. I list those I know about below. Which of these do you see as most significant with regards to Penguin 2.1 please?
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Frames based - not ideal for linking to individual pages as one loses the menus etc. unless one navigates to ‘home’. This is probably the first thing on my short term radar to fix.
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Long pages - As the site grew, I didn’t split up the pages but kept all the articles under the same page/topic. This makes page loading times longer and makes it hard to read/navigate. Also poor for SEO compared with splitting the pages up.
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Too many links per page - Because the pages are long, and because of the natural of the articles, linking to other sites as sources etc., there are a large number of external hyperlinks on many of the pages, typically over 100. I am not sure if this might be treated as a link farm. I put a rel=“nofollow” in each link, not sure it makes much difference. I have some actual links pages, and disallowed them from Googlebot with the robots.txt file.
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Duplicate content - I had the poor judgement when I first put the site together to quote Wikipedia rather than write it in my own words and list the original citations/references at the end of the article etc. I am working towards deleting nearly all quotes from the web site.
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Coding Errors. I have done a large amount of work on the site in terms of correcting the worst of the coding errors and broken links etc. but still I use block and in line commands incorrectly. Needs reworking using a stylesheet.
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Business Directory Listings. I discovered after a year of having purchased the domain name and having the site up that my domain was included in business directory listings for a previous owner, in maybe 20-30 places. I have contacted all of them now and had the domain name removed from most of them, and hope to get this finished soon. The domain was associated with a physician/medical services listing, but in some cases the word ‘pharmacy’ appeared.
Many thanks!