Search Engine Optimization

[CannaShops]

Any seo experts please help! We have been on the web for 5 years now and when certain keywords were searched in the search engines we always popped up on top a new site 4 months old is now on top of the search engines with little content and we are totally off the front page of the search request? How can this be? Our site traffic has been greatly reduced because of this. Does anyone know how this could be happening?

[josh2007]

maybe they banned you for too many sitemap/site submissions. Is your sitemap set to send data often? If it is then that may be the issue

[motowebmaster]

This is just a guess, but you may have a problem with your cookie setting. Initially, my browser was displaying long session ids in the URLs. After I bounced in/out of your site it appears that a cookie was written to my machine, which removed the session ID and just put the basic post reference. Problem is that some spiders never have a cookie, so the session id be be a larger issue. URL Session IDs aren't good for SEO.

Change your style sheet setting (store stylesheets as files), so that all of the css code is out of the way.

There are a lot of ads on your site, but if they are all paying advertisers maybe SEO doesn't need to be that critical. However, if they were out of the way, it would help put more relevant content within reach of spiders.

Try using some conditionals to remove items guest users wouldn't need, such as the FAQ or Calendar. Remove the dynamic elements that display. Anything that would lighten the load for guest users, because that is what search engines see.

Don't display anything or any links that guest users can't see. For example, I clicked on an am image link and was presented with a registration page. It is expected in some cases, but you've got too many links that require registration to see, that doesn't help SEO either.

I'm a believer in vbSEO, because it's URL and HTML re-writing features can make a significant positive impact - probably more significant for you than most site owners. For example, it will wipe away virutally all of the comment tags in your HTML code. However, making such a change on the number of posts you've got will likely reduce your rankings for a while. You could have both old and new URL versions available, which is a feature of vbseo, but that doesn't help SEO either.

I took two year old site, installed vbseo, and killed that site's rankings. It recovered after six months. That site didn't have enough pages with unique/useful content frequently searched by users.

On another site, I installed vbseo and traffic increased exponentially every month. Technically I changed hundreds of thousands of URLs, which killed SEO for a few days, but that site had lots of unique content bits that were frequently requested on search engines. Google was quick to update it's indexes and move on.

Hope this helps,

[CannaShops]

Thank you Shawn!

[Brandon Sheley]

Without seeing your forum, we really can't give you a definite answer
Maybe there is a competing site that is taking over your keywords

[BSMedia]

Get more back links. Relevant back links will put you back on top.

[CannaShops]

Originally Posted by Loco.M

Without seeing your forum, we really can't give you a definite answer
Maybe there is a competing site that is taking over your keywords

How does that happen? Not only are we not on the top any more but most are not even showing up as if we were banned from google. I took down a marquee but quickly put it back since this seems to be the only content showing up in the search engines.:erm:

[imageconstrux]

@Canna - Why doesn't my plumbing work? It used to work yesterday.

Hard to know without being able to look at my house's plumbing, right? Post your URL and you have a better shot at getting some answers.

[CannaShops]

Originally Posted by imageconstrux

@Canna - Why doesn't my plumbing work? It used to work yesterday.

Hard to know without being able to look at my house's plumbing, right? Post your URL and you have a better shot at getting some answers.

sry www.CannaShops.com

[BSMedia]

Store CSS as file sheets
Reduce the amount of keywords to a maximum of 20 or so
add h1 and h2 tags to your showthread template
If you can remove all the links from above the content to a lower page spot that will help some
Submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
Get rid of the "Welcome new user" thread creator, its creating completely useless crap
Try to make sure your site isn't linking to online pharmacies that sell little blue pills
Remove or limit the number of forums in the forum jump menu
Create a robots.txt file to help reduce the number of duplicate content
Have your showthread/postbit templates validated: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0 190 errors isn't good.
Remove the scrolling marquee to below the content

There is a ton of changes and work you can start on, I expect to see it completed when I wake up or no cookies for you.