Google's Exact Match Algorithm Reduced Our Traffic!
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Google's first Panda de-valued our Web store, www.audiobooksonline.com, and our traffic went from 2500 - 3000 (mostly organic referrals) per month to 800 - 1000. Google's under-valuing of our Web store continued to reduce our traffic to 400-500 for the past few months. From 4/5/2013 to 4/6/2013 our traffic dropped 50% more, because (I believe) of Google's "exact domain match" algorithm implementation. We were, even after Panda and up to 4/5/2013 getting a significant amount of organic traffic for search terms such as "audiobooks online," "audio books online," and "online audiobooks." We no longer get traffic for these generic keywords.
What I don't understand is why a UK company, www.audiobooksonline.co.uk/, with a very similar domain name, ranks #5 for "audio books online" and #4 for "audiobooks online" while we've almost disappeared from Google rankings.
By any measurement I am aware of, our site should rank higher than audiobooksonline.co.uk. Market Samurai reports for "audio books online" and "audiobooks online" shows that our Web store is significantly "stronger" than audiobooksonline.co.uk but they show up on Google's first page and we are down several pages.
I also checked a few titles on audiobooksonline.co.uk and confirmed they are using the same publisher descriptions we and many other online book / audiobook merchants do = duplicate content.
We have never received notice that our Web store was being penalized.
Why would audiobooksonline.co.uk rank so much higher than audiobooksonline.com?
Does Google treat non-USA sites different than USA sites?
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Now this seems like a funny deal by Google...or maybe I am missing something but .com have a better link profile then .co.uk and as far as the anchor text on links is concern yes it is keyword orientated but the reason why Google cannot penalize this is because it’s their domain name as well so it will also consider this as their brand name...
The only thing that I think why.co.uk domain have a higher authority is because they are using content on the home page where as you have your website page with images only... not sure if it is going to help or not but try to add some content on the home page to see if you get any improvement in terms of ranking and traffic.
Just my 2 cents!
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I'll have to dig into both sites to determine if I can see what's going on. I'll take a look at it when I get to my office tomorrow.
Here's a few things I came across quickly:
You do have site links which is a good thing but I see your Title tag is a little long and your keyword isn't used at the beginning of it.
Hopefully some of the big guys jump on here and comment too.
I let you know what I find tomorrow.
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I'm wondering if this is more of a Penguin update issue then a Panda or EMD issue.
Have you check your back link profile. Penguin was all about over optimized sites that have tons of back links with the same anchor text. I did a quick search on OpenSiteExplorer.org and saw that the majority of your back links use your keywords. I didn't see much variation in achor text at all.
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