Penguin or coincidence?

[ahyde]

We have several country specific sites set up as folders of our main domain. We use hreflang tags to get the relevant site served in each country, with mixed success. In about 60% of searches the US site appears.

Beginning in late October our rankings for the US have slowly, but reasonably steadily dropped. Each week we'll see 10 or so keyword rises and 15-30 keywords drop. Generally by 1-3 places. This is much more movement than we were seeing in the months prior to this.

Is this a result of penguin, or just coincidence? The US subfolder is the only one which has seen drops overall, the rest have actually improved slightly during this time period. I would expect any impact due to Penguin to effect the whole domain?

I've been checking through our backlinks and we do a have a handful of bad links, along with a 100 or so which look a little odd and not completely relevant. I have contacted sites and had some of these removed, and created a disavow list with the worst of the rest. I haven't asked for the site to be re-considered yet.

We haven't had any message in webmaster tools re: bad links or similar.

Cheers.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Until and unless someone directly from Google chimes in, it's always guess-work because we don't have access to their many algorithms, let alone the database that shows how an individual site is assessed by them.

In your case, it MAY be a Penguin issue, however if you're seeing a steady decline, that's not likely to be Penguin. Penguin is most often seen as an immediate major drop over a single day or a very short time-period.

On the other hand, I've seen countless sites that have had ongoing declines, and in every case, that's been due to a cascading trigger effect situation.

For example, if a site is weak overall, and then an algorithm update (one of their many algorithms, including but far from limited to Panda, Penguin, Above the Fold, EMD...) might flag a site as "deserves to have ranking drops".  Then once that happens, as the full spectrum of their other algorithms then get updated, that "now flagged" site is more vulnerable to those other subsequent algorithms that get refreshed.

If you go back far enough in the Google Analytics timeline for Google organic visits, you can often see where a decline first began and pinpoint it to being "near enough" to a known Google update as that "trigger" point. Yet you can't always because they make hundreds of updates every year, and most are not announced or given a name.

[DennisSeymour]

There was an algo update at the end of october that wasnt really reported on. About 3 days before the end of the month.

If it started there, then I dont think that's penguin. That's something else.

I can't really help with that if it did happen within that time frame. I don't have enough data to say what to specifically check so be sure to do the usual onpage audits/speed/links and go from there. If it happened to your subfolder, then I would worry about the whole domain. I would however, check the whole search results for the affected sub+keywords, what changed, where the competitors are, were videos added, are there more "authority" sites showing, were those ranking and linking to me affected and so on.

Good luck!

[ahyde]

What we're seeing is a lot of yo-yo'ing. This week we had 30 SERP drops and 17 rises, which has been typical for last month. Prior to that we'd see about half of this.

e.g. 'home security cameras' SERPs since mid-Oct has been: 4, 4, 8, 4, 7, 6. This is pretty typical of what I'm seeing. We've not made any real content or site changes in this time.

Traffic wise there has been a 3.5% dip in search over the last few weeks. So not huge.

[ahyde]

Looks like Page Rank for all our key product listing pages has taken a hammering. They're all getting a PR of 1, even though our domain authority remains ok (it has dropped too, but not as dramatic).