shanemcdonald.org

Found out that the site had duplicate content titles and descriptions, as well as about 200 files not found, from the links directory.

This may be why the site had a huge drop in Google Rankings – so I have done the following (if anyone else has had these problems)

1. Added the links directory to robots.txt so that the outbound links php file is not indexed
   Some of the pages in the links directory are dead links and are therefore not found.
2. Removed WordPress plugins which created dynamic urls which caused indexing problems
   Also added these directories (the dynamic ones) to robots.txt as they served no real purpose.
3. Created a New XML Sitemap and submitted that to Google Webmaster Tools
4. Cleaned up the PHP scripts in the pictures gallery so that there was less chance of having large numbers of duplicated title, description and keywords content
5. Analysed the error.log file for any pages which may have being causing problems.

Hopefully these steps should help in getting the site traffic back up…. Heres Hoping!

For some reason the site is way down in the Google Rankings. The sites traffic has dropped from 4,000 page views per day to about 1,300 and Google only brings about 15% of the sites traffic compared to 80% in September last year.

It could have been placing shanemcdonald.com and shanemcdonald.org on the same server, when shanemcdonald.com had Google Guideline problems – due to an SQL injection exploit on the previous servers.

Over the past 6 months I have had problems on both servers, leading to me moving to Blacknight, where all the problems has been resolved.

Anyway – I have submitted things to Google Webmaster Tools now so hopefully things will fix themselves in time.

Here’s hoping!