Hi Everyone,

I wonder if anyone could give me a few minutes of their time to help me as i really don't know what to do next.

I have been running my website for a few years now ( www.pet-portraitartist.com) and it took me a year to get into google and i finally made it on to page one for my preferred keyword a couple of years ago. (in my business basically the only keyword that really matters) My site has grown quite a lot over the years and i overhauled it at Christmas with a new dhtml nav, a slightly different design and some new and modified text on various pages. I have been aware that because my site is so big my visitors were having problems finding everything on my site - hence me opting for the dhtml nav so that everything was accessible from every page in one place. My main aim really was to keep my visitors happy.

However i have all of a sudden dropped from page one in google to page 7 (i search in the .com and .co.uk from the UK) and because of this my visitors and enquiries have dropped and im worried im never going to craw back up. I'm not sure if i have done something drastically wrong, and wondered if someone could have a quick look to see if they would do anything different. Maybe i shouldn't have added a dhtml menu? Is it possible to have a successful website with this kind of navigation? I do have sitemaps xml and normal one and i submit them to the google webpmasters tool. Maybe its not even this that google has all of a sudden taken a dislike to.

I really need to get back onto the top spot , its almost life and death in my business to be there and i am really looking for some good honest advice.

Could anyone give any suggestions?

Thank you for your time.

Your menu is entirely written in javascript so is totally invisible to SE bots.

Is it possible to have a successful website with this kind of navigation?

Yes provided they are done correctly

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/
http://www.seoconsultants.com/css/menus/tutorial/

Hi there

Yeah chris is right, the menus are not good, they also disapear on a few of the pages not sure why for example http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/do.../downloads.htm the menu isnt there at all on that page lol,

You might want to tighten up ur title i feel its a bit long making it shorter should make it more relevant, maybe try to target a few keyphrases specifially as its important to know what keywords you would like to be number 1 for, of course make this look natural and dont just repeat things parrot fashion or for the sake or saying them, im sure others can give you better advice as im only a beginner myself.

Your site is v nice btw, its very eyecatching so good luck.

Woc

Hi chrishirst,

Thank you for replying to my post. I am currently using sothink dhtml menu system and looking at their site it all seemed as if they were saying it was seo compatible, but this has been my worry all along.
Thank you so much for the links, im going to look at them now. Im self taught and do everything myself so although it takes me a while to work things out as long as its not too complicated i can manage it. : )

Hi Woc,

Thank you for letting me know about the menu, i updated the template this morning and it somehow removed some ' ../ ' which was rather irritating. Its all seems to be back now - not that it probably makes a slightest bit of difference at the moment!

I will have a look at the title of my site, and thank you for your compliments.

Melanie I don't think the navigation is the problem. Googlebot might be tripping up on the dhtml menu, but you have an html only menu at the bottom of the page that Googlebot can crawl. I also see you have a link to a sitemap so Googlebot isn't having any problems finding your pages.

Was the menu the only thing you changed? You mention a new design and new text. Quite possible either or both has something to do with the loss in rank.

How long has it been since you dropped? Has it been awhile. If it's only been a couple of days my first advice would be to remain patient. I'm not saying there's nothing wrong, but sometimes there isn't anything wrong and making changes can make the situation worse.

It would help to know the keyword. I can understand if you don't want to post it, but if you want to send me a PM I'll take a look. You'll need to post a few more times to have PM privileges. 5 posts should do it.

There are many reasons why you might have dropped in ranking. It could be temporary, it could be something you changed, or it could be an algorithmic change Google made.

By the way the phrase I would think would be the most important for your site is returning your site for me at result #5 and #6. Another similar phrase shows you as #1 and #2.

I'll also suggest that while you may think there's only one important keyword phrase odds are there are hundreds that can send quality traffic to your site.

Thank you so much for your reply. I giggled when i read your post this morning that it probably wasn't my navigation as I have been working on my site yesterday afternoon and have now implemented a css navigation.

Overall do you think this is better for seo than the dhtml one? I am happier with the workings of this one, however as i have so many pages there seems to be an awful lot of code for each page now. I hope this is ok for the search engines, can they penalise you for having too much navigational code?

I did my redesign over Christmas and so i uploaded probably about the end of January, so we are looking at about 4 to 5 weeks. I moved my site from adobe golive to dreamweaver and so minor design changes were made on all pages. I only rewrote new text on a few main pages so cant see that this would be too much of a problem.

I did implement lightbox though and so now my larger images open up within the lightbox rather then going to a new page. I deleted the larger pages which would amount to about 20 to 30 pages. Do you think this could have contributed to it? I have only just thought that this could be an issue.

My site is so big and i have a forum attached to it, i thought the changes i was making would improve my ranking and seo as i was 'tidying' things up, i didnt dream it would drop. As long as the experts here cant see anything terribly bad with my site, or see something that i have inadvertently done wrong, do you think this is just a waiting game? If there are any improvements i can make don't hesitate to tell me, i strive to make the site as best i can.

The issue with dhtml navigation is that search spiders have trouble crawling JavaScript so if all your internal navigation is done in JavaScript search engines probably won't find and index your pages. In your case the navigation at the bottom is html only so spiders can easily crawl the site.

You would lose any benefit from the internal links through the dhtml menu, but I don't think it would be enough to drop your rankings as much as you're seeing.

An html only menu is better from a search engine perspective, but I don't think it's causing your problems.

It's hard to know the effect of the changes you made without being able to compare the new to the old. The changes might have been minor, but they also might add up to something major. More likely some of the changes were good and some bad, but I suppose they all could have had negative effects on ranking.

Did you change your page titles when you rewrote the pages?

The change to lightbox could have made a difference. Do you know if a lot of your Google traffic was coming through image search? Do you have some kind of analytics package in place? If not do get one. Google Analytics is free and offers some good statistics.

Your hosting account may also come with some kind of stats package, probably awstats. See if your images were getting a lot of traffic or if Google's image search was a top referrer.

I'm not an expert on seo for images, but lightbox is using JavaScript to display the images. Google might have been sending good traffic to the images before, but now might not be.

I just looked at your site and you still have plenty of images that aren't part of lightbox so maybe it's not really an issue.

By the way you're site is nice. It's easy to use and it has some good information. The portraits are great.

I'm not seeing a forum. Am I just missing the link?

You mentioned making changes 4 to 5 weeks ago. When did you notice the drop in rankings?

Hi

The website addy to the forum is http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/forum its in the 'for artists' section of the nav.

The title tags haven't changed at all, although my dire mistake at the start was that in the change over from adobe golive to dreamweaver it took away all the title tags and so my site was online for 2 days without them. I reapplied them as soon as i noticed. The problem was i was spiderd in between and this probably added to my downfall. With them being back as they were (and only being missing for 2 days) could this still be having a detrimental effect, even though they are back and have been for the last 5 weeks?

I noticed the drop in rankings pretty much in the first week of the new site going live. So about from the first few days of February.

Hi there

I just had another look at your site today, but cant seem to access it via my IE6 your homepage just comes up with the banner then the menus under this, the rest of the page is blank, if i goto other pages from the menu they are the same, dunno if its just my Ie6 thats the problem ( seems ok on other sites), or this might be clue as to whats going wrong.

I checked it on firefox and ur site was fine.

Woc

You're a pretty good artist. How much do you charge on average for a portrait of your pet?

Keep posting links.

Do not worry, diversify, you cannot put all your energy into one keyword.

Oh no! I'm using IE7 and firefox and i can see it fine. I may need to check this out as the only change i have made since you looked last was to do a 301 redirect (from advice about a canonical issue) so it goes directly to www.pet-portraitartist.com rather than //pet-portraitartist.com. Do you think this could be causing the problem?

Originally Posted by usearchme

Hi there

I just had another look at your site today, but cant seem to access it via my IE6 your homepage just comes up with the banner then the menus under this, the rest of the page is blank, if i goto other pages from the menu they are the same, dunno if its just my Ie6 thats the problem ( seems ok on other sites), or this might be clue as to whats going wrong.

I checked it on firefox and ur site was fine.

Woc

Thank you! It varies so much depending on budget and size and medium. My prices are at the link below. Do you have a dog?
http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/pe...ait-prices.htm

Originally Posted by freelancevote

You're a pretty good artist. How much do you charge on average for a portrait of your pet?

I'm not quite sure why your site slipped in Google, but I do have a couple of suggestions for getting it back up in the rankings. Create one or more videos of the creation of one of your portraits (you can do either time lapse or speed op the frames per second (fps) so it looks like it's in fast forward). Make sure you put your website address on the bottom of the video. Upload the video to a lot of the different video sites (like YouTube) and if you can, create a link from the video description back to your site. Then, once you've done that, submit the video to multiple socialbookmarking sites like digg.com. If you make it a tutorial video, even better, because people love tutorials, especially from someone as talented as yourself. You'll be driving traffic AND increasing your site's search engine ranking, all in one shot.

Hope that helps.

I messed up in google a couple of times with white text lol

I was told to do it by an seo, I had no clue what I was doing. Anyway, they let me back in from complete ban.

Google is nice you just have to email them. Write them sincerely, don't write them with an attitude. Be nice and explain what happened, and if it was caused by a third party then all the better ;-)

Hope this helps!

Originally Posted by usearchme

Hi there
I just had another look at your site today, but cant seem to access it via my IE6 your homepage just comes up with the banner then the menus under this, the rest of the page is blank, if i goto other pages from the menu they are the same, dunno if its just my Ie6 thats the problem ( seems ok on other sites), or this might be clue as to whats going wrong.
Woc

Hi Woc,

Thank you for letting me know. I had not checked it in IE6 and i have now found the css wasn't compatible with IE5 and IE6. Not being experienced enough at modifying it i have reverted back to yet another navigation. If anyone would be willing to test it out for me that would be wonderful.

Originally Posted by VirtuosiMedia

I'm not quite sure why your site slipped in Google, but I do have a couple of suggestions for getting it back up in the rankings. Create one or more videos of the creation of one of your portraits (you can do either time lapse or speed op the frames per second (fps) so it looks like it's in fast forward). Make sure you put your website address on the bottom of the video. Upload the video to a lot of the different video sites (like YouTube) and if you can, create a link from the video description back to your site. Then, once you've done that, submit the video to multiple socialbookmarking sites like digg.com. If you make it a tutorial video, even better, because people love tutorials, especially from someone as talented as yourself. You'll be driving traffic AND increasing your site's search engine ranking, all in one shot.

This is brilliant advice especailly the tutorial part. i teach so this shouldn't be a problem. Thank you!