Any Advice on my Severe SERP Drop? Here's my situation...

[bradfitz]

Hello. I'm another guy with a site that has been severely effected by this current update and I'm not exactly clear as to why. Of course I'm hoping that I'm one of the innocent ones and I'll recover a bit when the update is complete.... but I'm also a realist. :)

Here's my situation: My site is www.bradfitzpatrick.com and I have a stock illustration section located here: www.bradfitzpatrick.com/stock_illustration (http://www.bradfitzpatrick.com/stock_illustration/_stock_illustration_home.htm ) I created individual pages for each of my images. I've optimized the pages for a few specific keywords relating to that image... I'm now wondering two things... Have I over-optimized these pages and/or are the pages too similar to each other and considered "duplicate content". I should note that about 90% of these pages had SERP's in the top 10 on Google, now they are in the 100's if I'm lucky.

I (prolly like everyone else) feel that my pages should stay at the top because of their relevancy. Before If someone typed in "cartoon sheep" I was found number one and I had a very nice cartoon sheep (http://www.bradfitzpatrick.com/stock_illustration/cartoon_sheep_001.htm) to offer them... just what the searcher was looking for. Now the results don't bring searchers to specific "Niche" results... they seem more general and a lot less specific. This is a bit confusing because I thought "Niche" was "in" for Google.

And of course I realize I could be being premature with this since the update doesn't yet seem to be complete, but either way I should know if I'm doing something wrong.

Also I should point out that I've noticed a lot of blogs (including mine (http://www.bradfitzpatrick.com/weblog/)) have been weeded out of the top rankings as well which seems surprising.

Thanks in advance for your time and wisdom!

[sootledir]

Brad,

I had a site that was affected that has navigation like yours. Let's face it, you really have hammered the word CARTOON home, haven't you?

I think regular content sites are being mistake as adsense scraper sites because of the navigation structure and page naming conventions.

[bradfitz]

Brad,

I had a site that was affected that has navigation like yours. Let's face it, you really have hammered the word CARTOON home, haven't you?

I think regular content sites are being mistake as adsense scraper sites because of the navigation structure and page naming conventions.

Yeah I used the word cartoon a lot in the anchor text on the index page, could this be part of the problem I wonder? However that's not the page that concerns me so much regarding SERP as does the individual specific pages which were the ones that got all the traffic from Google. That index page with all the links did not get much traffic before the update.

[sootledir]

I can't say for sure, but looking at your site design, it appears to be very similar to mine. I lost a site on 2/2 with the same structure but I went ahead and got diverse anchor text links and it came back in about 6 weeks.

I'm going to attempt the same thing for the 2 sites I lost this time around, rather than change pagenames, et al.