Seo advice / plan ? penalized ?

[gfxpixeldesigns]

I built an ecommerce site for a client of mine just over 9 months ago now. To begin with the serps were great, everything was listed in the results but for some reason a few weeks in all the results vanished from google and now we're lucky to find anything. I've been as far as page 200 and havent found any results. Its been like this for a solid 8 months so i can only presume that the site has been penalised in some form. Searching for unique phrases from the site doesnt even return results.

The website in question is = http://goo.gl/A6Gz2
keywords we're aiming for = coloured contact lenses, fashion contact lenses
Target = Google UK

Now im not really an seo guy but regardless of this my client has hired me to see whats going on and correct it. I've been scratching my head thinking all sorts of things but none of which im certain about so i'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction before i do anything drastic.

So to begin with here are some of my suspicions which i personally think are affecting ranking and possible penalisation.

#1 - Too many links on the page
#2 - Possibly over optimised
#3 - Lack of content on the product and category pages
#4 - Lack of backlinks and links in general coming from other sites

My main concern is the lack of links from other sites and the odd link coming from low quality sites. I've also just found out that my client has been using an automatic link submitter which i've always thought of as a big no no. Some of the sites these links have been submitted to have nothing to do with the keyword we are targetting and are sort of spammy sites containing all sorts of links. Im wondering if these poor quality links could have caused the site to be penalised, google may be seeing it as a spammy site due to this.

Whats your opinions on the above, are my suspicions correct and can this be recovered ?

My planned course of action is to be as follows:

#1 - Re write the content currently on the site so that it is better written and include more keywords, especially long tails since i think these will help bring the serps up.
#2 - Write detailed category and product descriptions as well as making sure every page has some well written content with links and keywords.
#3 - Keep the above pages to one main subject / keyword so that google doesnt get confused.
#4 - Get some links on popular and relevant sites, the only problem here is the lack of fashion contact lens sites. Does anyone have any advice on how to find these or where i should be getting links placed. Are directories worth while ?
#5 - Get more involved in the social side ie facebook, twitter

I will be building on the above over time, aswell as running google ads moderately for our chosen keywords.

Is there anything i have missed, anything i shouldnt be doing. Please advise.

Thanks.

[SteveOllington]

Cool

I hope it keeps heading in that direction then... and now you know all about link juice too

[gfxpixeldesigns]

Thanks again,

The search results have vastly improved since reducing the number of links, the majority of phrases on the site now show up in the search results so this is a major improvement.

I do agree with you on the page quality as there isnt exactly alot of content on there and as you have suggested the amount of links way out numbers those not linked. With this in mind im going to have some quality content wrote up, a couple small paragraphs for the homepage as we dont want to over do it. I'm sure the other pages would benefit from this also so i'll have something wrote up there too.

The crawl error tool did find a few issues but nothing serious, its warning about the too many on page links and the odd long url and title.

[SteveOllington]

I would certainly think it will help what you've done already but looking at the site again, I'm swayed to suggest that some of the links come out of the body as well... I can't say for sure that I'm correct but intuitively I just have a sense that Google wouldn't be too keen. It's almost like there's more linked content in there than there is non-linked content. So to an extent, it's not even about the link juice in this case but Google's view on page quality. Hopefully somebody else will chime in here as I'm far from sure.

Aside from that, I'd still look at other possible factors too.

Have you used the crawl error report tool on here? If not, certainly check that out: Crawl Tool

[gfxpixeldesigns]

Thanks Steve.

So what your saying is that the fewer links on page x the more equity or juice is passed onto page z etc. I can see the point in this now, more so after watching the video explaining the water.

So what i've now done is reduce the category dropdowns to just 2 levels, overall this has reduced the number of links by around 100 so compared to the 238 before theres now around 138 links on the page. Would you say this is a more reasonable figure or should i aim at reducing more links ?

[SteveOllington]

Google can do better than 100 links per page now, but it's not about the crawling that I'm referring to, it's the spread of equity.

Your homepage has x amount of equity, which it passes through to other pages via links. Due to the sheer number of pages linked to, that x amount is only able to pass y amount to page a, where-as if there were less links then page a would get z amount of equity.

Look at this:

Old Moz Image

Disregard the stuff on that page about NoFollow helping to retain linkjuice though, that turned out not to work that way and you still lose that link juice anyway even if it is nofollow.

[gfxpixeldesigns]

Im having second thoughts on reducing the links, is it really such a big factor ?

At the moment we have approx 238 links on the site, more a less all of which are coming from the category dropdowns. Now from my understanding the number of links doesnt affecting ranking directly but google can only index around 100 links per page so they may be missing the other 138 links.

However, with the above in mind how does google index a page, is it from top to bottom ? If this is the case it really shouldnt be too much of a problem as the category dropdowns are absolute positioned so there right at the bottom and google should be getting to those last.

I could easily reduce the dropdown categories to show only 2 levels but i personally feel the dropdowns add to an overall better user experience. Also, just looking at the competition that is ranking on page 1 the majority have a similar number of links, that is around 200.

Also, as another sub question what would be the best strategy for writing good content for the homepage. Baring in mind that the sites main focus is to sell fashion contact lenses but with the odd other bits in there too. Should i keep the homepage stricty to contact lenses or is it worth mentioning and linking to the other products. How indepth should i be about these other products ?

Any advice anyone can give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[SteveOllington]

I think you're right about too many on-page links, I'd address that first for sure... spreading that link juice way too thinly

And yeah it's a little shy on links & link diversity, etc... and of what it has got, there's no deeplinks.