Would it be spammy of me to say www.basekit.com?! It has everything you need. It's either us or SquareSpace - we're regarded as the best. All the others are pretty lacking or use flash. Even Wix's recent HTML5 push is still very much flash-based.

Really helpful. Thanks very much, Sha. Much appreciated!

Yeah, that seems to be the consensus - thanks, Aaron!

Back to the drawing board diagnosing this drop - avg rank over our top 200 keywords has gone from 80-something to 120-something. Not good at all!

Chris

Hi Sha,

A combination of things, really. We rebuilt and got rid of a load of legacy pages so there's a few for that reason. We also have a lot of time-limited pages like competitions and special offers that require specific landing pages. The majority are caused by broken links on external sites though - links that never existed, or that have been crawled and added to an autogenerated page incorrectly. The usual nonsense.

So, in brief, there isn't really one cause!

Many thanks for your reply.

Chris

Hi All,

We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example.

Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place.

We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs?

If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs?

Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s?

Thanks, all!

Chris