Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?
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I took "simply falling down in the SERPs" to mean that it's preferable to an actual penalty. We are all rising or falling in the SERPs for every keyword every day according to what changes happen in and around our sites and in and around other people's sites.
Google is trying to use a bunch of signals to imply authority and quality and along the way they are bound to judge some well intentioned sites wrongly. Someone I know has a site full of original and useful content. But he also has a whole bunch of duplicate content pages lying around which he forgot about from months ago, and a long list of duplicated archive pages due to poor use of tags in WordPress. He's placed a large ad above the fold on every page and has a high code to content ratio on the page. He has poor but not non-existent social interaction on his site and his site as a home-made feel to it - it also looks dis-organised - which I tend to think prevents people from ever engaging with his stuff as they can't see the article for all the surrounding clutter. He uses GA so G knows about his bounce rate too. You can't fault him on his content, but in the past when he didn't know better he did some fake link building but he doesn't do it any more.
He lost 75% of his traffic on 24th April. At least if this a result of "simply falling down in the SERPs", he can simply climb back up with a few changes. Except for the bad links.
I'm not sure what anyone can do about those, but then I am (reliably) told Penguin had nothing to do with inbound links.
Liz
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Here is the complete analysis why we have lost our rankings: http://www.seo-stories.com/post/22524770229/how-to-get-back-the-rankings-after-the-penguin-update
Furthermore I've described all our actions so far to regain our rankings after the penguin ate the half of our fish.
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"...Internal anchor text (linking within your site) is rarely penalized."
I agree that it's rarely penalized, but based on some things I'm seeing, I think a site with exceptionally high percentages of exact match internal anchor text links to category pages can (perhaps unintentionally) be caught in the Penguin net. Not conclusive just yet, but it really looks like this is the case with a site I'm working on.
The term "collateral damage" comes to mind.
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Hi Josh,
Our site was also hit. Will you take a look at our site: www. butterflycraze.com
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Good additional info on Penguin from Danny Sullivan today:
http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463
Looks like it is on an "offline" data update, like Panda. So, recovery could be delayed in many cases.
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Hi Peter,
thanks for the link!
Well, that are really bad news
Quote:
- Wait for news of a future Penguin Update and see if you recover after it happens
- If it doesn’t, try further cleaning or consider starting over with a fresh site
We can't change the domain - that is our brand...
Do you know the cycle of the panda updates? What do you think, when will be the next penguin update?
The good news this week: Some of our rankings are coming back slowly.
Best wishes,
Georg.
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Hi Georg, I read through these posts and felt as though our issues are almost identical. I got hit a month or two ago and wasn't sure why. We have been in business for years and never had an issue (of course our rankings have moved up and down over the years). We lost (like no where to be found) at least two huge keywords on our home page and about 25% of our overall business. I have 5 people and already had to lay off one. The scary part is we have no idea why. While I am sure we are doing some things wrong, we don't know what. I have had a bunch of great suggestions and have been addressing them (but everyone has a different thought as to what is causing it). Still no luck with getting the keywords back. I have reduced keywords, reduce crawl errors, changed content, etc, etc.
I will keep watching this thread in the hope that I learn something as panic is an understatement at this point!
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+1 on the same thing happened to a few sites we work on. We have now made all the changes we can to on-page and technical and will let that stew for a few weeks before we consider anything else. Some traffic has returned but there is a long way to go.
In the mean time spending non-ROI money on PPC. Ugh
Would sure be nice if the webmaster tool recommendations would keep sync with Algorithmic changes so you could properly react to all the silly black and white creatures.
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Agreed. Except I refuse to spend more on Google PPC - I went the other way and reduced spend. If they penalize us for no reason the last thing I want to do is give them money! I could understand if we intentionally did something wrong, but that fact that a dozen top webmasters have all given different advice and can't point to anything concreate leads me to believe that everyone is to some extent guessing (even though some thoughts were excellent and everyone was well intentioned).
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That's nonsense. Talk to Google about what? The automatic penalty that was applied? That apparently they cannot do anything about.
It's nice that you presume those that have been hit, have done something wrong. It seems common among those who have managed to dodge Panda, to presume they safe and that the rest of the world has done something to deserve their fate.
In my niche, it's image heavy and low on textual content. This is by nature and not due to any wrong doing. My user metrics are amazing and yet my website was hit by Panda recently.
I don't want to come across as being harsh, but I do feel your response was a little presumptuous and insensitive.
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As the drop coincides perfectly with Penguin, then it's definitely a backlink issue.
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I agree with your point about the aim of websites. Google penalising low text when a lot of sites are there and enjoyed by people because they are image heavy - they don't want a load of text. Or news sites, they may just want short snappy news in one place they like going to but a lot of small news sites (like my own although we have a lot of comment also) seem to be being hit.
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Hi Matthew, these are good tips but what if you have a news site with a load of different content that has been hit? You can't make sure that words don't come up more than a couple of times in titles or you would end up not writing about things. Any ideas there as we seem to be being hit with the penalty stick also.
We haven't done link building full stop and only have a few hundred links to us that are organic
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At the heart of every algo change is revenue not fairness. To believe otherwise is to be naive.
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Hi Georg, That's a huge decline, isn't it? But how about your conversion? If the decline did not cause a big impact to your ROI then I think there is nothing to worry that much. If it did, then there is really something wrong going on.
What I would recommend is that you review you Google Analytics (or any other analytics tool you are using) and determine which particular pages got the biggest declines (you can run the comparison feature of GA - like this month vs. last month) and try to check if these pages are still indexed on Google, try to check also if these pages still rank on your targeted keywords. Then do what is necessary to bounce back.
Regards,
Roy
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Hi Roy,
yep, the turnover also went down. But not 50% but like 35%. We are still working very hard to get the turnaround...
Best wishes,
Georg.
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