Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?
-
I took "simply falling down in the SERPs" to mean that it's preferable to an actual penalty. We are all rising or falling in the SERPs for every keyword every day according to what changes happen in and around our sites and in and around other people's sites.
Google is trying to use a bunch of signals to imply authority and quality and along the way they are bound to judge some well intentioned sites wrongly. Someone I know has a site full of original and useful content. But he also has a whole bunch of duplicate content pages lying around which he forgot about from months ago, and a long list of duplicated archive pages due to poor use of tags in WordPress. He's placed a large ad above the fold on every page and has a high code to content ratio on the page. He has poor but not non-existent social interaction on his site and his site as a home-made feel to it - it also looks dis-organised - which I tend to think prevents people from ever engaging with his stuff as they can't see the article for all the surrounding clutter. He uses GA so G knows about his bounce rate too. You can't fault him on his content, but in the past when he didn't know better he did some fake link building but he doesn't do it any more.
He lost 75% of his traffic on 24th April. At least if this a result of "simply falling down in the SERPs", he can simply climb back up with a few changes. Except for the bad links.
I'm not sure what anyone can do about those, but then I am (reliably) told Penguin had nothing to do with inbound links.
Liz
-
Here is the complete analysis why we have lost our rankings: http://www.seo-stories.com/post/22524770229/how-to-get-back-the-rankings-after-the-penguin-update
Furthermore I've described all our actions so far to regain our rankings after the penguin ate the half of our fish.
-
"...Internal anchor text (linking within your site) is rarely penalized."
I agree that it's rarely penalized, but based on some things I'm seeing, I think a site with exceptionally high percentages of exact match internal anchor text links to category pages can (perhaps unintentionally) be caught in the Penguin net. Not conclusive just yet, but it really looks like this is the case with a site I'm working on.
The term "collateral damage" comes to mind.
-
Hi Josh,
Our site was also hit. Will you take a look at our site: www. butterflycraze.com
-
This post is deleted! -
For everyone's privacy/security, we'd prefer you not share emails and account info via Public Q&A. Please use the private messaging system. Thanks.
-
Good additional info on Penguin from Danny Sullivan today:
http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463
Looks like it is on an "offline" data update, like Panda. So, recovery could be delayed in many cases.
-
This post is deleted! -
Hi Peter,
thanks for the link!
Well, that are really bad news
Quote:
- Wait for news of a future Penguin Update and see if you recover after it happens
- If it doesn’t, try further cleaning or consider starting over with a fresh site
We can't change the domain - that is our brand...
Do you know the cycle of the panda updates? What do you think, when will be the next penguin update?
The good news this week: Some of our rankings are coming back slowly.
Best wishes,
Georg.
-
Hi Georg, I read through these posts and felt as though our issues are almost identical. I got hit a month or two ago and wasn't sure why. We have been in business for years and never had an issue (of course our rankings have moved up and down over the years). We lost (like no where to be found) at least two huge keywords on our home page and about 25% of our overall business. I have 5 people and already had to lay off one. The scary part is we have no idea why. While I am sure we are doing some things wrong, we don't know what. I have had a bunch of great suggestions and have been addressing them (but everyone has a different thought as to what is causing it). Still no luck with getting the keywords back. I have reduced keywords, reduce crawl errors, changed content, etc, etc.
I will keep watching this thread in the hope that I learn something as panic is an understatement at this point!
-
+1 on the same thing happened to a few sites we work on. We have now made all the changes we can to on-page and technical and will let that stew for a few weeks before we consider anything else. Some traffic has returned but there is a long way to go.
In the mean time spending non-ROI money on PPC. Ugh
Would sure be nice if the webmaster tool recommendations would keep sync with Algorithmic changes so you could properly react to all the silly black and white creatures.
-
Agreed. Except I refuse to spend more on Google PPC - I went the other way and reduced spend. If they penalize us for no reason the last thing I want to do is give them money! I could understand if we intentionally did something wrong, but that fact that a dozen top webmasters have all given different advice and can't point to anything concreate leads me to believe that everyone is to some extent guessing (even though some thoughts were excellent and everyone was well intentioned).
-
That's nonsense. Talk to Google about what? The automatic penalty that was applied? That apparently they cannot do anything about.
It's nice that you presume those that have been hit, have done something wrong. It seems common among those who have managed to dodge Panda, to presume they safe and that the rest of the world has done something to deserve their fate.
In my niche, it's image heavy and low on textual content. This is by nature and not due to any wrong doing. My user metrics are amazing and yet my website was hit by Panda recently.
I don't want to come across as being harsh, but I do feel your response was a little presumptuous and insensitive.
-
As the drop coincides perfectly with Penguin, then it's definitely a backlink issue.
-
I agree with your point about the aim of websites. Google penalising low text when a lot of sites are there and enjoyed by people because they are image heavy - they don't want a load of text. Or news sites, they may just want short snappy news in one place they like going to but a lot of small news sites (like my own although we have a lot of comment also) seem to be being hit.
-
Hi Matthew, these are good tips but what if you have a news site with a load of different content that has been hit? You can't make sure that words don't come up more than a couple of times in titles or you would end up not writing about things. Any ideas there as we seem to be being hit with the penalty stick also.
We haven't done link building full stop and only have a few hundred links to us that are organic
-
At the heart of every algo change is revenue not fairness. To believe otherwise is to be naive.
-
Hi Georg, That's a huge decline, isn't it? But how about your conversion? If the decline did not cause a big impact to your ROI then I think there is nothing to worry that much. If it did, then there is really something wrong going on.
What I would recommend is that you review you Google Analytics (or any other analytics tool you are using) and determine which particular pages got the biggest declines (you can run the comparison feature of GA - like this month vs. last month) and try to check if these pages are still indexed on Google, try to check also if these pages still rank on your targeted keywords. Then do what is necessary to bounce back.
Regards,
Roy
-
Hi Roy,
yep, the turnover also went down. But not 50% but like 35%. We are still working very hard to get the turnaround...
Best wishes,
Georg.
-
Hi Georg, let me begin by stating I am new to SEOmoz and quite a newbie when it comes to SEO but I too was hit terribly at the end of April. I'm not sure if my situation could also be the reason for your issues. I thought I would throw it in the mix just in case because through my search for answers I found many others were experiencing the same issues and because of the algorithm changes most were faced with the question "Did I get hit by Google?" My site dropped out of search, pages where I once appeared on the first page were either on page 55 or I couldn't find them or I gave up looking after page 60. I would search for exact post title and either I wouldn't appear or my homepage would appear. I reached out to my web developer and he insisted that it was probably a penalization from Google. I didn't believe it could be true because I never participated in any type of link programs, I didn't know what cloaking meant and I couldn't redirect a url even if I wanted to. Then I received a crawl error for this page /wpp-app.php/service. I reached out to the developer again and he stated that Google should not be crawling that page. I remembered the developer had performed quite a few plugin updates and I think there may have also been a WordPress update around the same time. Through my search I ran across the SEOmoz keyword analysis tool, when I tried to enter one of my keywords it wouldn't return a report. After trying several keyword density tools and not being able to run a report I looked into my page code and I found that my All In One SEO plugin was no longer loading properly and apparently it had a conflict with WP Super Cache. It started to make sense because at one time Google would return my generated meta description whenever I entered a keyword into search now they were generating a snippet. Also none of my SEO titles were displaying. I also found that my sitemap was not updating properly. That's when I ran across this thread - http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/o9VYAneofdM As it turns out there was a problem with the plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) already generating a virtual robots.txt. Also I found with the updates changes had been made to my .htaccess code. In fact, Antonio, the WP htaccess Control plugin developer jumped in to help me (thank God). He changed my robots.txt to add blocking for the /wpp-app.php/service. Within two weeks my pages started to return in search, in fact the other day I started searching for each of my posts and they all seem to have returned to where they once were. I was very concerned because none of my posts published from May 12 on had page rank but Stuart Kerr (a member here) told me that the page rank toolbar tool doesn't update daily but a new update should be coming through soon. I am hoping that each of the new pages will rank once the update is in place. Through all of the researching I decided to reach out to Google to inquire about a manual penalization and thankfully they returned with "no manual site penalization". It's taken from the beginning of May up until just a couple of days ago to get this issue cleared up. I may be totally off base and I apologize if I am but is it possible that you could be experiencing the same? I've read through all the comments above but unfortunately I don't understand most of the discussion but I would feel terrible if I didn't mention my experience just in case it could be the answer to your problem.
-
07142
-
06164
-
06396
-
07228
-
05137
-
16333
-
08263
