Ecommerce sites 30% drop in organic since the spring

[JimLynch]

I help manage SEO for a number of large retail websites and we've seen a significant drop in organic traffic (upwards of 30%) since around May 2015. It's likely we were hit my Google's Phantom Quality update, but I don't understand why it had such a big impact. Can anyone explain that Google update in more depth and advise on steps to take to recover from it? Thank you.

[Ria_]

I noticed a drop with ecommerce rankings too earlier this Spring which I'm still trying to clean up.

Seems there was an "unnamed update" in February that affected quite a lot of ecommerce websites from what I've read. Certainly was noticeable that there was a change from February in the ecommerce sites I manage...

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

So between that and the Phantom, and from what I've seen in my analytics, I can only speculate that it had something to do with content quality / duplicate content (beyond just standard duplicate content issues, and looking at topically similar pages within large site structures that could potentially cannibalise each other based on theme alone). I'm still trying to sort out a better site structure to deal with these issues...

[KevinBudzynski]

Google told Search Engine Land: " no spam-related update had happened, there were changes to its core ranking algorithm in terms of how it processes quality signals." There is some conflicting information out there, but it appears to target sites with poorer quality content (thin content) and hub-type pages.

John Mueller discussed this update (in the video) and said there is no magic bullet for recovery and to increase quality on your site over long-term (site not page).

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, there was a lot of speculation around the unnamed February update, but not much solid data. Here's an analysis that SearchMetrics did:

http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2015/02/08/google-brand-ecommerce-update-causing-fluctuations/

I've certainly seen confirmed data that some big sites got hit.

When the signals are unclear, it becomes a task mostly of segmentation. Were specific pages hit? Were specific keywords hit? What's the pattern across those pages or keywords? Some quality issues are fixable, but these days, you run into situations where pages that probably shouldn't have ranked stopped ranking, and there isn't always something to fix.