Drop in non-branded organic search April 1

[CIEEwebTeam]

I saw an intense drop in non-branded organic search for major pages on my site on April 1st this year. The homepage wasn't affected and it's not an annual thing. I've attached a screen shot showing the drop.

I'm new to the company and recently learned that they had hired a pretty black hat company last year and I'm worried that this is Panda...although the timing seems wrong. Has anyone experienced panda effects between the two updates?

I'd love to get some feedback!!

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[HDI]

What's the URL?

[CIEEwebTeam]

ciee.org. ciee.org/teach was affected the worst, but also was .org/study, /highschool, etc.

[SteveOllington]

I can't explain the reason for the drop, but if you want to get it back up you need to get some more links for the individual pages. You've got some great links into the domain, plenty of domain trust and authority, but the pages themselves such as /teach don't fair so well. This means they'll get passed link juice internally but they certainly do do with more external links coming in, and with keyworded anchor text at that (though don't over-do it and make it look unnatural):

Currently, for that page you have: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ciee.org%252Fteach%252F/a!anchors

It would be well worth you changing the anchor text on internal links too. i.e. at the moment, it's just "learn more" from the main link on the homepage.

I'd use the campaign tool on here and run a crawl test too, whilst the site looks great... it seems problematic in many ways (gut feel from a brief look), I wouldn't be surprised if you got a lot of crawl errors back in the report.

Maybe take a look at Rand's stuff on keyword cannibalization too, your page titles have many similar keywords in. i.e. "Teaching English Overseas" on pretty much every title for each country. Whilst there are different keywords in the titles too, I don't think this would help... maybe "Teaching English in <country>" would be a better option.</country>

[KeriMorgret]

What happens when you look at non-branded organic search by engine? I want to make sure that we're talking about a Google dropoff here, and not that suddenly you've been de-indexed from Yahoo and Bing and we're looking at the wrong issues.

Were there any code changes to your site recently where something might have gone wrong?

Did you run Adwords or some other type of paid search advertising that wasn't correctly tagged (thus showing up as organic) that ended and is now showing a huge drop?