Google Penalties not in Webmaster tools?

[iQi]

Hi everybody,

I have a client that used to rank very well in 2014. They launched an updated URL structure early January 2015, and since they rank very low on most of the keywords (except the brand keywords).

I started working with them early this year, tried to understand what happened, but they have no access to their old website and I cant really compare.

I tried the started optimisation methods but nothing seems to work.

I have a feeling they have been penalised by Google, probably a Panda penalty, but their Webmaster tools account does not show any penalties under manual actions.

Do people impose penalties that are not added to Webmaster tools? If so, is there away I can find out what penalties and what is wrong exactly so we can start fixing it?

The website is for a recruitment agency and they have around 400 jobs listed on it. I would love to share the link to the website but I don't believe the client will be happy with that.

Thank you in advance.

[GlobeRunner]

Issa, there are plenty of Google algorithmic penalties that a site can have, like the Google Panda and Penguin penalties, that do not show up in Google Search Console. These can be tough to diagnose, and even when diagnosed they're can be tough to fix or can take time to fix.

What I would do is look at the Google Algorithm change history (https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change) and compare the date(s) where the site had traffic drops with the dates of algorithm updates. That should help diagnose some of the issues the site is having.

[KristinaKledzik]

Eric is completely right - Google does not list algorithmic penalties in GSC. Definitely try using Moz's Google Algorithm Change History to see if you can match an algorithm change to the drop in traffic.

That said, you said that the rankings drop happened when they revamped the URL structure. It'd be surprisingly coincidental if an algorithm change hit them at the same time that they updated their URL structure. Here's what I'd do to figure out if the new URL structure could be the cause:

• Get a full list of inbound links from a site like Majestic or Ahrefs, specifically broken links (I wouldn't recommend getting this from Moz, because their lists of links aren't as comprehensive). See if they have a lot of now "broken" links that used to boost rankings of key pages on the old structure. Can you put in 301 redirects to get them to the right page? Can you reach out to those site owners and point them to the new versions of the pages?
• See if Wayback Machine has a copy of what their website used to look like. Is the internal linking structure really different? If it is (or if Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy of their old site), definitely do an internal architecture audit. It's possible that this new version of the site doesn't link internally as well as they used to, which has weakened their important pages.
• See if they had a web analytics software set up before they made the switch. If they do, find out what their top organic pages were before the change. Does the new site have a new page that answers the same questions that their old site did? It's possible that they removed key pages that were bringing in a lot of traffic. Or, possibly changed them, weakening their relevance to the keyword and ultimately losing their position.

This may be more than you were originally asking for, so I'll stop there.

Good luck on your search!

Kristina