Gobbled up by the Google Monster

I have read a lot of positive posts arising out of the recent Google SERP updates. Here is a negative one to throw into the mix...

I own a site entitled law broker which has been around for almost 2 years - a lawyer referral service. I created city specific sub pages in which the content was virtually identical with the exception of the city titles. The first few months as I was slowly building links I was almost 100% reliant on Adwords for traffic. By 6 months I was getting organic search hits for some long tail key words which constituted about 20% of my traffic.

At month 8 I added a blog to the site and wrote regular posts with lots of original content of keyword rich posts. All of a sudden I was getting some good relevant links to the blog any my serp rankings were dramatically improving. The blog content generated many important keyword hits.

By month 12 my city subpages were consistently ranking in the top 30 for important long tail keywords. Organic search results now constituted 75% of all my traffic. The blog became the number one landing page, constituting 50% of all the visitor entry points into my site.

By month 16 things were really going well. My individual city pages were now on page 1 for most of my important long tail key words. Some were the very first hit. I was competative and in some cases even outperforming my main competitor Lawyer Shop, who is a large corp with 10 the resources I have. Lawyer Shop also had tons of duplicate content but had tons more links than I had.

By month 20, I ceased my Adwords advertising. I was high in the Google Serps - in some cases number #1 for critical key words. I figured the site was running itself now so I diverted my attention and efforts to a new site I had built, Agent For Me, which I based on Law Broker. I diverted my Adwords budget to the new site as it was getting 0 traffic. I stopped building links for Law Broker. My blog posts grew more and more infrequent.

I became a little worried after reading Google's warnings on duplicate content. So, I recently individualized the meta kewords and descriptions for all the individual sites (they were previously identical for every page).

Starting about 7-10 days ago, the Google Monster gobbled me up. While my Pagerank of 4 remained the same (as apparently did the PageRank of the city subpages) I plummetted in the Serps for the same long tail key words I was ranking 1st on. For example, 7 days ago I was #5 in Google for the term "Hamilton Personal Injury Lawyer". I am now #81. My blog still generates traffic for my site - that seems unaffected. However, my city pages are not doing well at all on Google. My main competitor seems to have improved in its rankings.

Any thoughts on what caused the dramatic plunge?

This can be a real problem. We have a site built long ago on a similar template. The pages dropped out for a few weeks, came back, dropped out for a few weeks, came back, dropped out... then we reauthored completely and have not seen any problem for two years.

It is strange though especially since your PR has remained the same.

Your site is also too old to be in the sandbox

Hmmm. very strange

PR may have been affected, it just isn't showing yet.

Sandbox is a made up term for those unsuccessful at SEO looking for an excuse.

Why don't you try writing some content for each of your city subs? It's my belief that duplicate content doesn't hurt you. It just doesn't count for anything. Those pages shouldn't be worth anything. Now if you wrote a little content for each page to go with the other listings, you'll probably be in good shape so long as it's quality stuff.

One thing you must consider is your having stopped doing seo. If you want to keep your position and remain competitive, you can't stop. Google may have seen the abrupt lack of "natural" linking as a sign that people are losing interest, or there's a better alternative to your site. You can slow, down, but don't stop. Continue to write in your blog, and promoting link building. Building a new site may not be as important if this older one means something to you.

Thanks for the suggestions.