PPC seems to have had a seriously negative impact on organic rankings?!?

[Purestone]

We've been targeting a keyword on behalf of a client for the last few months. The page had good content and had been steadily climbing the rankings.

It reached a position of #12 and then suddenly dropped off. Within 2 weeks it was out of the top 50 and is now around the 10th or 11th page (useless).

This drop off matched exactly with the cleint switching on a low level PPC campaign, driving traffic from this specific keyword. The stats on this have shown a really high bounce rate (so we'll need to ask some other questions about content) - but could this be the reason that organic stats have taken a hammering?

If Google associated people landing n that page from that keyword (even though its paid) as not finding relevant content, I'm assuming this could have a negative impact on the organic rank?

Any Thoughts Welcome....!!!

[Sarbs]

While bounce rate and page engagement would play a role i'd be surprised if this was solely down to the PPC campaign, particuarly if its low level as you mention. Whats the URL of the problem page and we may be able to case more light on the matter / offer alternate potential areas to investigate.

[Purestone]

Thanks Tuzzel, feel free to have a look.

The Page is http://www.hut3.net/security-assessment/penetration-testing - and until a few weeks ago was climbing the ranks on the 'Penetration Testing' keyword.

Child Pages of Internal and External Penetration testing were also ranking in the top 3 of their respective terms (although search volumes are much lower).

[DavidKonigsberg]

My guess is the google algorithm updates happen to coincide with your lower ppc budgeting.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Hmm.  I'm doubtful that a PPC campaign would knock you down like that in the organic results.  When did the drop happen?  Google has done several updates in the past few weeks, including a Penguin update, that may have happened at the same time.  I noticed that in Open Site Explorer you only have two "external" sites linking to the page, cnsmosaic and cnsgroup.  From the links on the hut3 site, I'm assuming these are all part of the same company.

It's possible, however, that Google sees the links from those sites as external links.  Since it would appear that the links to the penetration testing page are sitewide accross the cns sites, I wonder if Google is treating those as external sitewide links, all with targeted keywords, and has penalized you for it, either manually or by algorithm.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[jesse-landry]

This is my guess as well. I'd be dollars to donuts that your drop in ranking happened somewhere around October 5th.

Can you confirm or deny that via GA?

[jesse-landry]

Here's the thing, you have 2 referring domains pointing to this page and one of them is pointing to it 298 times using the anchor text "penetration hosting" *(which I'm assuming is the keyword you are being penalized for.)

That's no good. BUT totally recoverable. If those links are internal, there are several things that can be done but the domains should be more important. Build some content, gain some natural links and make sure the anchor text is varied. This should happen on it's own if these links are built organically.

Build organic to gain organic.