Following Penguin 2.0 hit in May, my site experienced another big drop on August 13th

[mjk26]

Hi everyone,

my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May.  This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame.  On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google.  At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction.  So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner.

However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs :

Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site

I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added.  As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!!

I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached.  In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs.  So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business.

However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions)

My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process.  I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design.  I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  My website is ConcertHotels.com.

Many thanks

Mike

[TomRayner]

Hi Mike

It's quite difficult to say, but I would offer this bit of solace: When I've seen sites that have been hit with a Panda penalty in the past, it has happened a day or 2 after receiving a similar warning to the one you have reported.

And similarly, although not the same penalty, people have reported that they have received an unnatural link warning and then 2 or 3 days later have seen the big drop in rankings and traffic.

Both of these instances indicate that the notification of a possibly penalty comes before the penalty itself.  If (and it is an 'if') this is the case with your site, then the big drop in traffic can be attributed to the penalty that you thought was coming, rather than the action you took yourself.

It does sound like the crawl and the warning would result in potential duplicate content issues or low quality content issues, aka a Panda penalty.  I'd take out due diligence and make sure that you have not blocked any key landing pages via robots.txt file or by any other method - always a good idea to double check.  However, if that's not the case, I would say that the drop is because of the penalty that was likely coming, rather than what you've done.

The next step would be to wait until the algorithm refreshes - Panda updates rollout at least twice a month now so hopefully your efforts should be rewarded soon enough and the traffic will return.

However, it is worth considering that just because the Penguin algorithm updates on a given day, does not mean its impacted is limited to the day or the days that follow.  What I think we've seen with Penguin 2.0 is the impact of the algorithm updating has been spread out over refreshes, so we can't completely rule out this as Penguin action as well.  SERP volatility checkers like Mozcast seem to suggest that this probably isn't the case, all was quiet on August 13th on that algorithm, but it's worth bearing in mind.

I hope this helps - do take my advice with a pinch of salt as it's an educated guess from my experience rather than any definitive evidence.