Anybody dropped rankings on 17th January 2013?

[ryfiger]

This post is deleted!

[Marcus_Miller]

Lots of folks saw results suffer on or around the 17th and this could be in relation to the Panda update announced on the 24th of Jan going on previous form and pre announcement shock waves.

It's probably safe to say that you have been affected by Panda or a similar issue and need to review your site in more depth. Assuming Panda is the culprit look for duplicate content and running your site through copyscape.com would likely be a good place to start.

Also, dig into your analytics, look at the two weeks before and after the 17th and then look at landing pages, see which pages have been most affected and use that information and anything from copyscape to help understand what may be the issue.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[Brian-H]

My understanding is it was a penguin refresh (although not acknowledged by google) as sites that seem to be affected also have unnatural backlink profiles.

If you want me to take a look pm me the website url.

Brian

[ryfiger]

Hi Marcus,

Thank you for the info. I will try your suggestions.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Brian

Where did you see that? Historically, before Panda updates we see some fluctuations a little earlier and this is fairly typical with that. I would be interested to see any analysis on this though if you have a link?

A problem here is that most sites with spammy content, also have spammy links so we have to be careful not to jump to conclusions on the back of internet rumours. Correlation is not causation remember!

Really, in this kind of situation - a site needs a full SEO audit to understand any problems and irrespective of whether it is panda / penguin or anything else then any quality problems need to be identified and rectified else if this one didn't get you, the next one will!

Marcus

[Marcus_Miller]

No problem, let us know how you get on.

[ryfiger]

Yes I will.

[Brian-H]

I agree full site audits are essential however it's often by looking at the backlink profile that you can get an idea of the cause.

I've run analysis on 11 sites affected on the 17th and all but 1 have found common cause (and all but two I can say are unique in their field so not a poor quality content issue - the others were ecommerce as often a lot of content is the same between sites due to shared product descriptions)

I had a look in this case and, guessing which pages would be affected, one page had 48% keyword anchor text and the other page 94% anchor text one keyword (when taking only do follow links in to account). This to me looks like the most obvious culprit but I agree you can only know by spending a decent amount of time looking at every aspect.

The reason why I offer a preliminary audit is the more sites I see the more I can find common causality.

[ryfiger]

Hi Marcus,

I used copyscape and I found out that there are 4 copies of the contents of my site's homepage, 2 of them copied almost everything and the other two just the first paragraphs. Is this critical?

The other thing I noticed, before 17th January, our target keywords are pointing to our homepage, today when I checked, many are pointing to the different pages of the site. Do you think it is time to review the keyword density of the site for each page?

Thanks in advance.