Greek Web Masters

I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES
My site’s URL (web address) is: http://www.black.co.uk
Description (including timeline of any changes made):

Hi There

Sometime between Thursday 21st October 2010 and Friday 22nd October the traffic our site recieved from Google organic searches was noticeably reduced. On closer inspection of keyphrase positioning on the SERPS, it appeared that many search terms we had previously ranked on the 1st page in both the long term and short term had dropped. In some case the reduction was severe as 60 ranking places.

To put this situation in to context i will give a brief overview of our site history and recent SEO activity.

www.black.co.uk is four years old and recently (Mon 18th October 2010) had a Page Rank upgrade to PR4. In addition to this the number of pages indexed by Google between August 2010 and now increased from 340 to 533. These signals suggest to me that Google likes our site and is crawling our site more often and more deeply.

Recently,using only ‘White Hat’ methods, are ranking for the following keyphrases improved to the extent that all appeared on page 1 for organic search on Google.co.uk:

1. mens cashmere scarf
2. mens cashmere scarves
3. women’s scarf
4. ladies accessories

On Friday i noticed they had all dropped in ranking by at least 40 places overnight. For example, the search term ‘mens cashmere scarves’ not only dropped from 7th to 61st place, the landing page did not match the search query. It used to direct visitors to a department page showing a range of cashmere scarves and other cashmere accessories to a product page showing a pair of leather gloves with cashmere lining.

Also many long tail keyphrases that we have been on page 1 of organic search for Google.co.uk experienced a similar but not as dramatic fall mainly 20-30 places dropped overnight. These phrases include:

1 ladies long leather gloves
2.mens leather driving gloves
3. black cashmere scarf

When i last ran a search for the term ‘black cashmere scarf’ (now ranked 10th down from 1st position last week) i was interested to see what qualified the sites listed above to outrank us on this terms as this product in particular has very strong SEO elements such as:

1. our domain name has ‘black’ in it (www.black.co.uk)
2. the url has the search term in it e.g. http://www.black.co.uk/product/burlington-black-cashmere-scarf-100-cashmere-1167.cfm
3. the image file name, the H1 tags, meta description and the body copy all have the search querey in it.

When i looked at the 9 pages that outranked us for this term, i could not find on single black cashmere scarf. There were striped scarves, black and white marble scarves, black wool and cashmere mix scarf.

If i was using google to find a black cashmere scarf to buy, i would be very disappointed and suprised with the results it returned to match my query.

We don’t think we have been penalised by Google we still rank highly for terms such as :

1. luxury accesories
2. luxury gifts
3. women’s cashmere scarf.

We would love to find out what has caused our rankings to change so dramatically so we can take the necessary action.

– an alogrithm change?
– google indexing problem?
– penalisation