How can you tell if you were hit by the Pay Day Loan update in 2013?

[Citybase]

Hi All,

I have a feeling that our site was hit by the Pay Day Loan update in 2013.

We have a website offering serviced apartments - I have seen lots of talk in forums about porn, apartment rentals and finances being among the websites hit by this update.

Can anyone offer any advice on whether this is the case and what action might be needed in order to get this penalty taken off our site?

Thanks guys!

Laura

[taryn_s]

Hi,

Can you tell us why you think you were hit by that specific update? Did you see a drop in organic traffic from Google around the date the update went live? If you use GA you can overlay your traffic using Barracuda's Panguin Tool which will show you when your traffic dropped and how it coincides with Google's algorithm changes.

Are there any particular search terms you've lost ranking for?

I've taken a very quick look at your back link profile and it looks okay, just a few spammyish looking links like the highly optimised one here.

Also, have you checked GWT to see if you have a manual penalty?

There looks to be a few on-site issues (multiple H1 tags etc) but nothing that would point towards a penalty. If you could get back to us on the points above, we can take a closer look for you.

[Citybase]

Hi Brendan,

Thanks for the reply!

We did see a significant drop in organic traffic around the time the update went live.

We have lost traffic for generic phrases like "apartments in london" and "london apartments".

We haven't got a manual penalty.

Thanks so much for your help

Laura