Website hit by something, but not sure if penguin or panda?

[Taiger]

Hi my site was doing ok, last week, humming along and increase in traffic. We felt that all the work removing bad links had worked. then all of a sudden, bang traffic dropped and is still dropping day by day.

The strange thing as well is all the social media, bing and yahoo traffic has also dried up!

Has anyone else had something smiler?

[DennisSeymour]

There was an update 3 days ago. It's not reported but it looks like a big one. Maybe that's it?

I dont think it was Penguin, as my sites that little links but great onpage SEO and branding got some huge increases.

Im still checking the others to identify the common thing.

In your case, it's sounds weird that you will drop even for bing and yahoo AND social. So that's probably not because of google.

• Check webmaster tools - impressions, how much has changed?
• Crawl your site - check problems
• Did you move to https?
• What else, besides link removal, did you do?
• Maybe check your htaccess/robots/were you hacked? Injected by an invisible code? Check Google cache
• Check analytics code are you using the universal code? Or whatever stat tracker you are using, be sure that it's compatible.

[Chris661]

We also saw an increase in traffic and rankings around 10/17 and were feeling pretty cocky. One tracked keyword jumped from 7 to 1 and in the last 3 days has come down to 5. Traffic also reduced and I think it coincides with the 3 day thing Dennis mentioned. I just attributed it to the Penguin update "settling". But now Dennis makes me want to do better on page!

Impressions are up looking prior to 10/17 so I think that is a good thing overall. Have not had any similar drops on social or Yahoo/Bing.

[Taiger]

Thanks for your reply Chris661 and DennisSeymour. Where to turn that is the question. Its all rather confusing.

• in webmaster, my impressions went up considerably, then it went down .see pic http://i.imgur.com/NZnK7Vt.png

• We did not move to https.

• We did not do anything apart from removing some more links

• (Maybe check your htaccess/robots/were you hacked? Injected by an invisible code? Check Google cache) What should I look for for a hacked or injected code?

Yes we are using the universal code.

Thanks for your suggestions..

Taiger

[DennisSeymour]

What's the exact day of the drop? Normally, I wouldn't really be concerned with a drop in webmaster tool impressions especially after a bump up, but since you mentioned you lost traffic on Bing, yahoo and social, it does raise some flags.

IF that happened around the final 3 days of the month, then you were affected by the update I mentioned which nobody seems to be talking about....

Anyway, did you check crawl errors on GWT? Did you crawl the site separately ? Did you see any problems with the index/noindex/etc?

As for injected codes, the easy way is to load pages (that you lost traffic on) in google. Check the saved cache. If you got some injected codes, they'll show up there.

There's really not much we can do but assume things. I do hope you could find the reason for the problem.