Site dropped after recovery

[Blink-SEO]

Hi everybody!

I've been working for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com for some time now. They came to me as they had dropped heavily for their main term, "boot camp".

This turned out to be due to a manual penalty, which was in part due to their forum being hacked, as well as some bad link building. Here's an example of the dodgy forum links - http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html. The anchor is "microsoft". They've all been 410'd now.

Also, we cleaned up the other bad links as best we could, and got through the manual penalty. The site then returned to #5 for "boot camps", below its pre-crash peak of #2, but OK.

Over the past few weeks, it has started to slide though. I'm certain it is not down to a lack of quality links - this site has great PR and links from national newspapers and magazines. There's been a few on-site issues too, but nothing outrageous. I'm getting a bit stumped though, and any fresh eyes would be much appreciated!

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hello,

There are rumours going around that Google has launched a mobile algorithm that ‘punishes’ sites for not being mobile-friendly by ranking them lower in the SERPs.

After 3 months of increased organic traffic, revenue and rankings from my white hat SEO techniques, SERP positions for a website I've been working on have dropped over the last couple of weeks. After much deliberation, I have deduced the drop may be due to the fact the site isn't optimised for mobile/tablet users. So, in an attempt to remedy this, we’re designing and building a responsive site as I speak.

If you've exhausted all the usual avenues and are still stumped, build a mobile-friendly site and see if that helps. My guess is that it probably will. Google has been chattering about improving the experience for its mobile users for quite a while now.

I hope this helps!

Lewis

[Blink-SEO]

That is a very good point! One thing though, these drops probably started in November - would that be too early for a mobile site penalty?

[PeaSoupDigital]

Who knows? There's been no official word from big G, so it's purely guesswork really. But if you have the budget, get a responsive site sorted as soon as possible. It can't hurt!

Check your Analytics to see what percentage of visitors are accessing the site on mobile or tablet, the result will probably shock you. Mobile/tablet made up nearly 70% of my client's January traffic. So, in the eyes of Google, we can't really complain for being punished when we're not catering for the majority of our visitors!

[Blink-SEO]

Fair point! I'll get cracking and post here when there's some news.

[Blink-SEO]

Hmm, very strange. Just checked out the top few competitors, and most of them don't have a mobile site. Will keep looking!

[PeaSoupDigital]

Well, get ahead of your competition!

Also, you probably need to ask the sites hosting the dodgy links to remove them. Failing this, collate and them all to the disavow file on WMT.