My website took an 80% dive in the impressions on google webmaster tools. Is it normal?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Arseniy Bolotsko: First, GWT is not that accurate and the impressions data is only stored for 60-90 days. Does the drop in impressions correlate with your organic search report and drop in traffic in Google Analytics? Have you made any drastic changes?
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  Glenn Bennett: +Arseniy Bolotsko Thanks for answering. No I have not made any changes. I was on vacation with the family and so little to nothing was done on the website in 3 weeks. ; Google analytics shows the drop in traffic as does my webhost. Just fell off the charts in one day. Not sure why. I went from about 350 - 500 impressions per day to less than 100. Traffic was around 200 visits per day to 35-40. ??? What can I check to see if I am doing something wrong.Most of my keywords are down and most of my everything is down. Just checked bluehost stats and they too show the drop in traffic. ??? ; Thanks
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  Jim Munro: Please post the link so that we can have a closer look at it for you, Glenn. You can disable the link by using a space instead of a dot.
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  Glenn Bennett:  ; +Jim Munro ; Thank you and by the way, my wife has a lot of family down under. We look forward to visiting them someday. ; She has so much family that we have not met. ; Her family was separated in France three generations ago and they found us 20 years ago.
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  Jim Munro: It's probably not related, Glenn but consider removing pages like ;http://search.cowlesmountainrealty.com/idx/linkshowcase and ;http://www.cowlesmountainrealty.com/del-cerro-san-diego/. They might be seen as a link scheme (Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking) ;
  
  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
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  Arseniy Bolotsko: +Jim Munro ;I was looking at that too. Those I believe comes from ;dsIDXpress IDX plug-in. I also noticed that it rewrites tags in the header exactly where SEO by Yoast writes its tags. Could be a conflict. So you have to plug-ins "fighting" each other.
  
  +Glenn Bennett ;It's a long shot but did you upgrade your WP core and plug-ins recently? WP released v3.6 about two-three weeks ago.
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  Glenn Bennett: +Jim Munro Thanks for the looksy. ; Link showcase is in lieu of a sitemap for links on my idx and del cerro san diego page is local businesses in my neighborhood that are also past clients. ; But thank you again just the same. Really appreciate your time. And btw, Good day!
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  Arseniy Bolotsko: Lastly, optimize your meta on the home page. Title is too long and there is no description.
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  Glenn Bennett: +Arseniy Bolotsko No I have not updated yet because I was visiting with family for 3 weeks. I was going to do updates today or tomorrow. ; But thank you for the info.
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  Jim Munro: Good luck with it Glenn. I could not find anything to add to Arseniy's good advice but maybe someone will pick up something additional during tonights HOA. :)
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  Arseniy Bolotsko: Hmmm I figured maybe you updated and there was a plug-in conflict or something. Anyways, in my opinion having two plug-ins perform SEO at the same time could be bad. I know that ;dsIDXpress IDX is not a SEO plug-in but it does have some SEO functions.
  
  Joost de Valk once wrote an article. A client had a template that did SEO along with his plug-in. Which resulted in two canonical tags per page.
  
  I would also get rid of <a href="#"></a> for your main menu. Just delink them completely.
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  Jim Munro: The social plugins need to be updated - one is linking to Google Reader.
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  Arseniy Bolotsko: I took a deeper look at your realty plug-in. Every single one of your listings is just scrapped from another website. Select one of our house descriptions then go to google and paste it in search inside " ". You will find 1000's of pages with the exact same description. Also, link structure on those is horrible. Meta description is 600 characters meta titles are 200 characters.
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  Arseniy Bolotsko: Lastly, search dot cowlesmountainrealty dot com has duplicate content. Urls are filled with a ton ugly variables.
  
  You will never be able to rank for anything and maybe even get de-indexed completely if you just going to scrape content. I mean think about it...there are 1000 people scraping from the same site. How are you going to get the upper hand on the competition?
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  Glenn Bennett: +Arseniy Bolotsko I am not scraping content and not too sure what you mean by search dot cowlesmou.... ; The idx is using content from sandicor for real estate purposes. I think it is time that I have to hire someone to look into a few things for me. I believe this is a little out of my league. But thank you +Arseniy Bolotsko I really appreciate your time.
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  Arseniy Bolotsko: +Glenn Bennett
  
  Always glad to help.
  
  "The idx is using content from sandicor for real estate purposes"
  
  That is what scraping is. Using a plug-in or a script to strip content from another website. Google hates that. Here is another example. Someone who runs an internet news outlet and instead of writing their own news articles they just take news articles from other places and post them on their website.
  
  I know that it is common practice for real estate companies to use big databases the display listing. It is convenient and fast but very bad SEO practice.
  
  "not too sure what you mean by search dot cowlesmou"
  
  I mean your sub domain "http://search.cowlesmountainrealty.com". This is where your listings are displayed. Search it in google with the " " and you will see all of the pages indexed. There are about 25 pages of them. And about 300 duplicate pages.
  
  So I think the reason you saw a drop in traffic and impression is due to google finally catching up to scraping, duplicate content and other bad SEO practices.
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  Glenn Bennett: +Arseniy Bolotsko You ; took the time to help out a total stranger. Thanks so much. ; I hope the good karma comes back to you 10 fold. I do the same as well.
   ;I understand now what you meant. ; You are talking about the subdomain for the idx. ; Got it. ; Yes, I believe I am paying for that service. lol ; I guess this is what all real estate agents and brokers with an idx feed are dealing with. Thanks for the insight.
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  Justin Y: +Glenn Bennett speaking of IDX, my recent workaround in WP was to create unique pages for multiple query types in IDX. I created unique queries using the IDX frame-in and then added each to their own unique page to have full control of the meta, title and on-page content to avoid any duplication. I also created a unique property search page for the standard frame-in so that visitors can search for properties from one location.
  
  It was very time consuming but worth it in the end considering that most realtors use the same plugins and proprietary systems.