Google SERPs changes

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I wonder if anyone knew of any changes to the Google SERPs appearance in August 2015?

We dropped in over a thousand visits to the homepage on brand so I wanted to find out why.

Also, our DA went from 36 to 34 - does Google panda affect domain authority at all?

Thank you

[rjonesx. 0]

Hi Becky, thanks for your question...

1. The DA of your domain shouldn't really have a huge impact on brand searches. Also, that 2 point loss is fairly insignificant. I would be highly surprised if that were the culprit.

2. Panda does not impact Domain Authority

3. There was no major update in August of 2015, although display may have changed.

4. Was it specifically your brand name? Or a group of brand related keywords? I see images, a side knowledge panel result, etc. that may have impacted you, although probably not to the tune of 1K+ visitors.

[BeckyKey]

Hi Russ,

Thank you for the reply.

Using WMT data I saw brand impressions were high but clicks were down that month, this is on a range of brand keywords both brand name and variations, difficult because the brand name is key industrial, but can just be called 'key' which is generic.

What do you mean by the images?

[Mobilio]

Just as Russ says - many things may happen. I will add few more:

• Panda 4.2 https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change#2015 even was on 17 July in UK SERP can be delayed to August. You also can be hit from Panda at any time. Just recovering is slow.
• Penguin can hit you any time. You need to check and keep one eye on your backlinks. Just recovering is slow.
• You can be hit from hosting infrastructure, CMS theme update, CMS plugin update, etc.
• You should investigated previous searches in SearchConsole and compare this to actual one. You can use archive.org and see historical changes in site and it's pages.
• You should check website log. Similar to "ship captain's log book" you and team there should log every change to site and it's pages/content. And even small change can invoke disaster after 2-3 months or even longer.

I wrote few things that need to be seen. I can wrote even longer but sometime there are even outside of SEO events. Imagine that you're auditing something as "Rover cars" and there is sudden drop... because company is now defunct. You also can be hit from negative campaign, rumors, etc. As you can see it isn't hard to explain what's happening without know this customer, it's niche, competitors and social networks.