I went into more detail in response to Michael, but most of Boutiques.com’s search problems are more related to a poor structure for search – no unique titles, descriptions or easily crawled URLS on individual products or category pages – than an algorithm shift.

On one hand, it at least makes you believe Google when they say they don’t give placement freebies. On the other, it’s pretty sad that no one figured that out before the paid traffic came to an end.

-YM

In this case I’d lean more towards paid deals ending. Even sites that got hit hard by Panda didn’t get hit at a level where they only had 6% of their traffic left. Also, some of the more established sites in the space (Polyvore, ShopStyle) have had fairly strong rankings on products and brands for a while. In keeping up with various terms – designer names and generic fashion searches, they never seemed to lose any positions to Boutiques.

Also, while new product seems to be coming in, people don’t seem to be updating their profiles/boutiques as often. Add to that what Fashionably Marketing noticed about the URLs for users (that they’re not really very search friendly) and multiply it by 10 and you’ve got the product and category URLs. Oddly, Boutiques has some pretty major basic optimization problems (no unique titles for products or categories, the URLs, no unique description) that I’m guessing they were trying to overcome with the social element. Except that the social thing is confusing and not fully social.

They could definitely benefit from better optimizing the site for search if they’re going to kill paid traffic (my guess), but search updates are the least of the problems here.

-YM