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Yea thats what I am trying to figure out.  Are we losing organic clicks due to seasonality, or is it something else.  From what I can see based on that our position in the SERPS on average has gone up, then I imagine its seasonality but was hoping someone can provide some better insight.

Is there anyway to run a report on a list of keywords and look at searches performed through google last month vs this month, etc? More recent trends than say the last 2 yr period.

The company sells a service not retail products.  Here is the website.

Hey all, I am a bit stumped here so looking for some insight.  Our site was starting to rank well for many keywords, and we were getting roughly 25k visitors organically per month.  Now we are down 30% over the last thirty days, and I am trying to figure out why. This downtrend started I would say about mid August.

1. No messages in webmaster tools.
2. Our linking building is very good, no spammy links, never black hat.  We did have someone attempt negative SEO on us back in July.  We disavowed those links as soon as we saw them. Basically all our links come from link baiting to quality content.  Many .edu links
3. Content is good and fresh, always adding new stuff to the site.

When I look in webmaster tools and look at my search queries for last thirty days, our impressions are down dramatically, but the change in average position is increasing.   Our top 25 keywords we saw 15 rise in average position, 5 fall, and 5 unchanged.  This makes me think there is just a reduction in the amount of people searching for what we offer, though maybe that's wishful thinking? Is there a way to see search volume this month vs last month?

What should I be looking at here? Hoping to stop this downward trend ASAP.

If you are not changing your domain, I dont think you have much to worry about.  If the new host is faster, it should help both your SEO, and more importantly your users experience.

Thanks for the great replies everyone.  Its much appreciated.

Another question or something interesting I just noticed is that almost all of these bad links are nofollow, which kind of defeats the purpose of doing negative SEO, no? So either the person doing the negative SEO is really lost, or there is some kind of bot scraping info and reposting it over a network of websites?

Any idea why these would be nofollow links? Only three of the links are dofollow

Any advice on how to get this to stop? Seems like it could be a never ending problem that will take a lot of time to combat if it doesn't stop.

We have been doing our own internal link building for the last year and getting nice backlinks.  As of the last few days, ahrefs is showing a lot of new links that seem very spammy.  We have not hired anyone to do link building for us, and these are all being created on these sites under the same user name.  There is a good amount of them popping up, and I fear we will be subjected to a google pentalty for unnatural links if its not addressed.

My first question is, am I correct thinking this is negative seo, and not some random sites that picked up our content and is going across their affiliate websites?

If so, then should I preemptively disavow all these links?  Are there any good ways to stop this? How can I track who is placing these garbage links? Here are some examples of these bad links. I know I can find the webmaster via a whois but I think that really wont get me anywhere, but I could be wrong.

Here are some examples of the links that started popping up yesterday and today.

http://pligg-cms.info/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-relief
http://www.sharklinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://factson37.com/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-forgiveness-website
http://social-marker.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-debt-forgiveness
http://makingbookmarks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://bookmarkingforseo.com/story.php?title=top-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://jadelinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options

There are quite a bit more and they don't seem to be stopping.  All of them look pretty much identical to this.

Thoughts?

Also wondering this myself.  Has there even been an update in awhile? My site that has been up since April is still showing 3 backlinks while we have a lot more than that..

Are there any negative effects on getting your blog posted on alltop? Good SEO value or not?

Great so there really isnt much to be lost as long as the redirects are all done properly, thanks!

My company is thinking about rebranding and moving over to a new domain.  While we dont have a lot of backlinks, we do have some very valuable ones that we hate to lose.  That being said, I think we are in such an infancy that the backlinks we have shouldnt prevent us from rebranding if thats what we choose to do.

I am just trying to get an idea of how moving to a new domain will effect the domain authority if we redirect all the pages?  Is the best thing to do simply re-direct, or should we reach out to our most valuable links and let them know the domain/link has changed and hopefully they change their link to us?

How much is lost by simply 301 every page? We are getting around 70 organic clicks per day and would rather not start from zero again

Yea I agree with you, if this is how you try to compete then its shows a huge flaw in your business practices.  Regardless, I have to try and see how to prevent this in the future as BING was unable to prevent it.  Would appreciate feedback anyone can offer!

This morning a competitor of ours decided to go on a PPC rampage against us.  Basically our budgeting money was spent within the first hour of going live on bing.  Its pretty obvious whats going on as we had a tremendous amount of clicks all from the exact same keyword within a short period of time.

Obviously first step was to contact bing and they are going to refund me a credit once they go through their process, but they didnt really give me confidence about the future.  It seems they may not be able to prevent this from continually happening.. ?

The attacker used some sort of IP spoofing as the clicks were all from different IP's which is probably why it snuck pasted Bing.  Wondering what have you guys done in the past to prevent this or combat it?

Thankfully it didnt happen on google

Yea that's what I figured.  I haven't paid anything to the developer so will wait for his response to removing that clause from the contract.  The contract states he will license it to me, which makes no sense to me.  Why would I paid you to program something for me, then it gets licensed to me.  Then at anytime you can stop the licensing and hold my site hostage.  Makes no sense..

In development of a website, is it typical for the developer to retain rights to the CSS, Markup and other Coding? If so, why is this done?

I have the same issue

I just sent in a support ticket .. Extremely frustrating especially when you are on a mobile device often, and have a long email address

Thanks didnt know that existed in WMT.  Yea I do have authorship on all my articles, thanks!

I am not certain if my authorship is working or not.  If I go into google incognito, and search for my exact  title of a new article, or any of them that are over a week old, then I will see my image and 'by My Name' which tells me its working.

When I go to structured data testing tool and I enter the URL, I will get:

Authorship Testing Result****Page does not contain authorship markupNow on my webpage NEWS section, it has a 'by My Name' at the top, and if the user clicks it it will bring me to my G+ account.  When you go further into an actual article that link no longer works.http://bit.ly/14k8Zys you can see here.So is my authorship working or not? Seems to me it is or I wouldnt find myself when using chrome incognito, but I find it wierd that googles tool is telling me authorship is not working

Anyone else with some feedback?