Google Drop
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I started using SEOMOZ due to a sudden and huge drop in Google for two main keywords (hair bows and baby headbands). Our site (BloomingBows.com) has held a top three spot for years with these words and then in the last few months has dropped down on the first page and now they are completely off the charts. Is there any insight as to why? Also, we have been very active using the data from here in the last week or so to clean up and improve anything listed, but I am still seeing keywords drop into the 40 - 60 position and our traffic is drying up. Starting to panic and wondering if I am missing something or going about this in the wrong way. ANY insight is appreciated at this point!! Thank you!!
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For the past year or so, Google has been using two algos to identify sites that they want to hold back in the rankings.
PANDA targets sites with lots of duplicate content. That content can be duplicated on other sites or duplicated from page to page on the same site. Retail sites have had problems because many of them use product descriptions from manufacturers or data feeds. They also have very similar content on many pages because the products are very similar.
You may have a duplicate content problem. See here.
PANDA also targets sites with lots of thin content. Many of your product descriptions are quite short.
PENGUIN targets sites that have done link manipulation. If you have lots of links with keyword anchor text or lots of low quality links from forums, blog posts or article syndication.
The two most important parts of diagnosing these sites is determining when your traffic drop occurred. If you have google analytics the answer can be there. If you have log files they can be analysed to look for the answer.
There are free quizzes here that you can use to input information from your site to quickly determine if you are a candidate for these problems. In my opinion you are close to a Panda problem because of thin content that has been duplicated on and off of your site.
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Thank you! So, if this is the big issue that is effecting me (the most drastic drop happened around the 18th of February), would the best/quickest way to address it be updating the content/descriptions on my site (since I can't really effect that in the other search results)?
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blooming bows
These anchor links would not bother me very much because they are either the domain name or the domain name in words. Local PR companies and guest blogs scare me a lot more.
If this was my site I would be working on writing very unique product descriptions that are of substantive length.
I would also explore dropping individual product pages for product groups such as "bitty bows" to a single page. Before I did that I would be looking to see if they were pulling in traffic (pre drop). If they are not pulling traffic then those product pages would be merged to show many of these similar products on a single page.
Doing that will reduce the number of pages on the site and make each remaining page more substantive. An alternative would be to use rel=canonical to attribute the individual pages to the category page, again, I would know my analytics and traffic sources before doing that.
IMO it is impossible to give good content modification advice without data from analytics.
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I'm really sorry to hear about your drop.
Did the drop coincide with any other changes? (Site Redesign, etc...)
Do you have a Google Webmaster Tools account? If so have you checked for any recent messages and/or new errors on your site? https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Did you notice a similar drop in your google and bing rankings or just google?
Some likely reasons your site might drop:
Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm: http://mozcast.com/ is a great tool to see if your drop coincides with other search engine changes.
Malware or Hacking, Penalty Server Problem:, Webmaster tools is the best place to start looking.
Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity, or Canonicalization/Duplicate Content Problems: Use your SEO Campaign to see if you have any duplcate content issues, or changes in backlink profile.
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I consult on a few eCommerce sites and over the last few months I have led them in doing a complete overhaul of their product descriptions and their linking structure. Their issue was they had so many products and for years just relied on description feeds to populate the content on each product. So after getting them to understand the whole valuable unique content idea we got to work. That's a check for panda safety now for the penguin.
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I agree with Mike.... and beefing up those descriptions can bring in a lot more long-tail traffic if done smartly.
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Thank you!
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Thanks Jason! There was no change to the site at the time of the drop. The content has basically stayed the same for years except for the adding and deleting of products. I thought is was fairly solid and we had strong serp rankings for years, so honestly I didn't think I need to change much. But since the drop I have corrected errors found in SEOMOZ as well as GWT crawl errors, re-submitted a new site map, turned on the canonical link feature, etc. and as you can imagine my rankings are either dropping or all over the board. Thank you so much for your input - I don't mind the time or the hard work, but was getting nervous I was chasing the wrong path. Your input is so appreciated!
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Thank you, Mike! Valuable lesson learned in the last few weeks. I was not even remotely prepared for the Panda & Penguin updates. Your insight is greatly appreciated!
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No problem I love this stuff!
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Hi Jason
I'm in a similar-ish position to Carol in that I've seen my rankings drop (from #1 to between #6 and #25 for various keywords).
This may be because for about 9 months, for family reasons, I ignored the site, so a lack of link-building/social engagement in that time could be to blame.
Question: If I've no notification of errors/messages in GWT, does this mean I can definitely rule out a Penguin/Panda hit?
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You've gotten some good advice in this thread. I was tracking along with everyone else thinking that this was a Panda issue as many e-commerce sites using stock descriptions have been affected by Panda. However, if you are pretty certain that the drop was Feb 18, there was no Panda refresh on that day.
Have you checked your WMT for any messages? I see that a large number of your links come from followed blogroll links. This could possibly invite an unnatural links penalty. The reason for this is that the Google guidelines say that excessive reciprocal linking is considered a link scheme. (They don't explain what "excessive" means though.
It wouldn't be an algorithm based linking penalty like Penguin because it didn't happen on a Penguin refresh date.
There could be other quality issues though. I only had a quick look and I see the footer is extremely keyword stuffed. And, you've got sentences like this one that are written only for search engines:
"Our hair bows, baby headbands, infant headbands and baby bows are the softest, most comfortable hair bows, baby headbands, infant headbands you will find."
Unfortunately I think there are several reasons for your traffic drop and it is not going to be an easy thing to fix.
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Well I would never definitelyrule out a Penguin/Panda hit. They should stay on your mind always and you should always be running regular audits to keep up with things and stay clean. the fact that you ignored the site for 9 months which in our world is like 2 years absolutely had an effect on your rankings.
Since you are back now and focused on the site, I would take a lot of the focus off of rankings and move energies towards usability, unique content, brand engagement and semantic markup. Ranking is losing its luster as searches are now tailored to the user so when you rank you really rank differently for different locations and different people.
Our buddies at Google want ranking to be an unintentional effort so instead of I want to rank for "Children's Toys" it's Oh I rank for "Children's Toys" hooray. This is evident by Chrome moving to secure search and soon the "Not Provided" will take over the land and leave us all to focus on the stuff that matters...the visitor and the journey we take them on.
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Great info Marie, and that's why I love this community. Yeah I think the moral of this story is that if you think your site needs an overhaul it probably does. I think that Panda and Penguin have the names so are always the first to be spoken about, but your post did something great it brought me back to the little things that I missed in the above post. The devil is in the details I guess.
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Hi Ainsely, as other have suggested, you can never rule out alogrym changes contributing to changes in your organic search. Penguin & Panda are just two categories of many. It just so happens that Panda and Penguin effected a higher percentage of all queries and so we get a bit more information about them.
When you have a dramatic drop, some combination of three things happened:
1. Google changed it's algorithm (or their crawler) in a way that effected you.
2. You changed your site in a way that effected what google sees.
3. External ranking factors (backlinks) for your site changed.
As far as I know, Google doesn't send you a message via GWT that says you've been effected by Panda or Penguin, but they are getting much better (IMHO) at transparency to web owners and we're starting to get very useful messages via GWT. So it's very important that you monitor it.
In the case of the original poster, they felt didn't make any changes that could have triggered #2, and the drop didn't sync up with a major observed alo change. So you'd be inclined to rule out the most likely suspects.
The challenge is that business owners don't have time to act as full time SEOs. So even though Carol noticed the drop around 2/18, that may not be when it actually occurred. That's why a a tool like SEOMoz's campaign monitoring is so useful, so you can see dramatic changes in your profile.
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Thank you so much Marie! I was estimating the date for the drop and when looking at GA and GWT it looks like the significant drops were around Dec. 8, 14 & 23. Originally I just assumed that these were the drop in searches as the holiday approached. Then another big drop was around 1/15. So, I am not sure if the P & P updates would show an immediate drop in traffic or if it would adjust within 2-3 days of the change. So, with that said, what do you think should be the top priority to focus on in the coming weeks in my recovery effort? I had actually added some of those links in the footer within the last week hoping to optimize those pages and work on keywords that were less competitive. Now I am thinking that may have caused additional drop. Thoughts?? Thank you!!
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None of those dates coincide with Panda or Penguin. And yes, a Panda or Penguin related drop would happen immediately coinciding with that day. However, sometimes there can be a drop that gradually follows a Penguin or Panda day if sites that are linking to you have been affected. I'm guessing this is not the case for you though.
It's really hard to say what to work on because you still don't know the cause for your traffic drop. At this point it really would be just a guess. It's never wrong to work on making unique product descriptions so that may be a place to start, but again without knowing the cause, there's no way of saying for sure that that is going to help.
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