Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?
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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).
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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.
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As the drop coincides perfectly with Penguin, then it's definitely a backlink issue.
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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.
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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
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At the heart of every algo change is revenue not fairness. To believe otherwise is to be naive.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Hey Georg,
I was just reading this thread and was wondering if you're back on top again.
Is there any change since the end of april?
Bye, Steven
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Hi Grace,
thanks for your long post and for sharing your experience! Well, I am using a different software / content mangement system, so I am not able to have the same issue as you.
Best wishes,
Georg. -
Hi Steven,
in the last days it got even worse (!). We lost the number 1 position of our main keyword. Also keyword combinations. So we have lost again half of our remaining traffic.
I am pretty frustrated, I need some time to analyze this new situation. I will post the new findings here in some days.
Best wishes,
Georg.
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Hi Peter,
were there any major google ranking updates in the last days? (end of july?)
Best wishes,
Georg. -
Definitely some turbulence at the end of July, and around Panda 3.9. If you haven't seen it, keep an eye on our new project, MozCast:
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Our rankings are still fluctuating wildly. Up and down 10 to 35 places from Moz campaign crawl to the next crawl. This has been going on for months. It makes little sense. A keyword that is up 10 one crawl might be down 35 the next and the same keyword might then be up 45 in the next crawl. It is just non sense.
Are others experiencing this crazy swing up and down ?
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Oh, very cool site! Thanks for the info!
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Do you rely on branded keywords for which you arent the brand owner? Ive seen alot of movement for these kinds of terms recenty.
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Hi Andy,
no, thats not the case at my site.
Best wishes,
Georg.
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Still no progress. So we have decided to rename our main urls and run into the next mess, have a look here: http://www.seo-stories.com/post/31927940673/google-penguin-penalty-duplicate-content-problem
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Sorry to hear things are still bad for your site. We are still suffering reduced traffic and have done a ton of work on backlinks, created a list of very old ugly backlinks and a few new ones that frankly must be negative SEO (yea all you people that want to jump in and say no it is not negative SEO ....that is very rare to non-existent...dont bother....I dont want to hear it....your are wrong...you are as niavie as you are a fool).
We have now sent 1000s of emails and or filled out contact forms for link removals from these sites .....and gues what.....ZERO reponces so we are creating a disavow file and will try and come back here and let you know how it goes.
More on the negative SEO.....we have some recent links (according the MAN himself) that are super suspect. We did not ask for them and there is really no reason for thse site to link us except competitors trying to pile on the already diminised ranks. Hey negative SEO guys.....Get a life...
I would love to throttle some penguins.
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