Sudden Large Traffic and SERP Drop

[TheNorthernOffice79]

Hi

This site www.militaryplaques.com

We have had steady traffic over a number of years with the site both on terms of impressions, click through rates, bounce rates, time on site and most importantly sales.

The site has remained fairly static over the last 6 months with no significant changes to content or structuire.

However, on July 11 our traffic and impressions crashed by over 90% and remain at this low level.

We have never been hit by Panda but this looks like such a case?!

Any insight or suggestions as to why the sudden "de-listing" may have happened?

R/

John J Morgan

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi John,

Your back links are not great I did a quick check

http://www.linkpartners.com/lparts53_23.html

http://blpdirectory.info/Business/Products/

http://freedirectorysubmission.in/Military-Plaque.html?cid=28338

http://blpdirectory.info/submit_article.php?c=709

Even dead or 404 URLs

http://free-listing.org/Military-Plaque.html?cid=157597

This stuff must go

Use tools link OSE & then http://www.removeem.com/ to get rid of the links.

FAQ

http://www.removeem.com/faq.php#suspicious

So you did actually received a notice of the problem from Google?

Using http://www.removeem.com/

Via only 1 data source, we estimate about 51 links with suspicious anchor text ignoring 373 safe links automatically. Some of these may need to be removed!

Check your MozCast every day it is a SEO weather map

http://mozcast.com/

Weather for Saturday, July 13

MozCast is a weather report showing turbulence in the Google algorithm over the previous day (or see the 5-day history on the left). The hotter and stormier the weather, the more Google's rankings changed.

Use one of the SEO listed here to fix your site if needed

http://moz.com/community/recommended

Hope this was of some help,

Tom

[TheNorthernOffice79]

HI Tom

Thanks for this.  I looked at the suspicious links and they seem to be false positives.  Mostly revolving around our brand name "military plaques"

Noted on the low quality /dead links - will have these removed.

[MoosaHemani]

I saw two major problems in your link profile... I won’t call the link profile too bad but there is no way I can call it a good link profile!

Your link profile got links from mediocre sources but very few links that are coming from high authority relevant sources and the other problem is that your link profile is not diversified and links are coming mostly from forums, blog comments and PR websites....

Rankings in the month of July in my personally opinion has shifted a lot so my advice would be to get good quality links from diversified sources and you will see a positive bump in rankings!

Hope this helps!

[TheNorthernOffice79]

Thanks for the responses.

We're still examining the change in traffic volume, source and search terms.

We have a couple of theories on what's going on and will revert back after the next Mozscape index update.

[ajiabs]

I looked at some of your main keywords. Looks like they are back to decent ranking. So did you fix the issue already? If so, can you share what you did? I had a similar issue around the same date with my site. Ranking has not been returned yet. This is the details of my specific issue http://moz.com/community/q/is-this-site-hit-with-penguin-or-something-else . If we can compare notes, it would be great