The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting).
The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month.
The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages.
Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools.
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I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates
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We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away.
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We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions.
My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings?
I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either.
If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated.
Best,
Carlton