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It definitely looks like you've got yourself some bot traffic, my friend. Here are a few examples that stand out to me the most: Over 99% of visitors to your website are considered first-time visitors. Your Bounce Rate is at 99%. Page Sessions are a little over 1 page per session. Avg. Session Duration is 2 seconds. All these reasons listed above are usually tell-tale signs of bot traffic. 99% of new visitors for direct traffic doesn't make much sense. That would mean almost every user is finding you for the first time by typing in your exact URL. Bounce Rate being at 99% also doesn't make much sense unless the page the users are landing on isn't working. Additionally, the average user only stays on the page for 2 seconds and then exits the site. Obviously, this isn't the case. In order to protect yourself against some of the bot traffic, make sure you have “Exclude traffic from known bots and spiders” in the "View Settings" of your Google Analytics. Hope this helps some!

I agree with you James. Even Google ignore them at a point; but may consider with overall link profile. I tried hard to find about this negative SEO when our website dropped in rankings without any onpage changes. I tried and tired to figure out anything out of the thousands of backlinks and hundreds of new backlinks adding every week. Finally we started diverting our energy to onpage rather than worrying about this offpage where we wouldn't be getting any help from anyone. If we go for routine SEO consultancies, they will start creating new pages. If you go to some penalty removers, they will disavow many backlinks. Not sure what's going to workout.

The website linking to you shows a low spam score. I don't think this is the cause of your problems. Seems you are looking for a cause of the ranking drop but I doubt it is because of this website with a low spam score. I can't read Polish but just analyzing the site that is what it is telling me.

Hi James, Thanks for your respons.i checked a few pages and I don't see a schema markup on our website for twitter? where did you found them? generally, will this solve the issue? or do you see some other points to improve? is it an idee to remove the schema markup and use the data highlighter? Kind regards, Jeroen

Thanks both. Very useful and much appreciated.

So, we all "nofollow" most of the external links or all external links to hold back the page rank. Nofollowing links does not mean you retain link juice or page rank. That page rank gets dropped rather than being transferred to another location. Is it all same about external links and nofollow now? I don't understand your question but if you mean should all external links be nofollow, the answer is no. As Google has suggested, you should still tag trustworthy destination links with the follow attribute.

Hi, "nofollow" doesn't mean that we don't trust them. We do apply nofollow to just not violate Google policy guideline. Thanks

Funnily, I saw this topic pop up yesterday on twitter. The advice is to still disavow: http://searchengineland.com/google-responds-mass-negative-seo-extortion-emails-200689 https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/849298085230637059

Hi Patrick, Thanks for the answer. That's where we are confused. We been giving the suffix as "brand & primary keyword" like how most of the websites do. Example is "Page topic xxxx | vertigo tiles" where "vertigo" is brand and "tiles" is our primary keyword to rank for. While choosing the same suffix for all pages, "primary keyword" is at the end of every page title. I think how it will work if we bring "primary keyword" along with topic and give just "brand name" and suffix. Like.... "black colour tiles | vertigo". I wonder which suffix will make more impact at Google. General public search with our "brand name" and only 10% search with our "brand name and primary keyword". So do we need to change the suffix to just "brand name"? Will it helps?

I'd question that timing. I recently uploaded a disavow file containing a few hundred domains and saw an uplift within a week.

The interstitial update only affected mobile browsing, from what I can remember. This popup doesn't appear on their mobile site and thus, I would assume it shouldn't have any impact. However, I would recommend increasing the wait time to pop the message up,  so that it acts as a form of help to a user, rather than blocking their browsing immediately.

Most of these links might help in technical SEO but not something users might be visiting. And I think this way, before link reanimation, we lost many links. Does this hurt?

If you launch a duplicate site, Google will sniff it out and neither site will rank because they will treat them as one site with duplicate content. I had an issue like this for 2 legitimate sites with the same content and different brands. When we went with cross domain canonicals, we started ranking in a big way. Without improving Backlinks, Content Quality and UX, your site will not achieve it's old rankings. The site was getting ranked because of link spam, and when those links spammy links go bye-bye your rankings go with them. With the new "kinder & gentler" penguin, stick to 1 site and focus on making the current site awesome and acquiring high quality backlinks.

Hi Matt, Thanks for the link was a good read, I initially considered the effects of Possum however I would have expected to see some other sites perform better then so still not sure what could have caused this sudden jump. Thanks OUT

Adding your contact number is allowed, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it -- especially if you use tracked phone numbers on your website to track the leads coming in organically, direct, paid, etc. i recommend mkaing your meta descriptions catchy and include a call to action that will entice them to click through to your site, which is where they will find your contact information.

Hi Ruchy, That's fantastic deep crawl is a great tool. I was talking about two different types of cloaking one using an URL with a  C name for hidden cloaking  e.g. https://www.rebrandly.com/ Thank you for the kind words.  Giving good answers and thumbs up or thumbs down definitely does make a difference I have outlined a lot of it below the official MozPoints URLhttp://moz.com/community/mozpoints Yes marking anything as a giving thumbs-up is telling somebody they have helped you and in the event of thumbs up is their response was valuable and maybe contributed to answering your question. In the case, of giving good answer person has answered your question giving as well as thumbs-up is the way anything is a way of saying thank you. Welcome to the most community, and I look forward to seeing you here. All the best, Tom

Thanks Patrick, I read that last year and it is the best ressource so far on the web. But I am not sure it applies to my case. Thanks.

Hi there If you're guest blog posting to give your audience relevant and topical content, then guest blog posts will not be an issue. Just again make sure that it's not a tactic strictly to gain or influence link signals. Danny Sullivan actually wrote a great post on the issue back in 2014 which you can reference here. Just make sure that you and your partners are on the same page that your guest blog posts should be topically relevant and provide real solutions. Make sure links reference data points or solutions sourced for your posts. If you keep on the path of "is this information or link necessary?", then all should be well. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck! Patrick