Help diagnosing a complex SEO issue
-
Good evening SEOMoz.
A series events, in close succession are making it somewhat difficult for me to diagnose a cause of fluctuations in traffic. Please excuse some of the stupid moves I made, but desperation got the better of me.
One of my most beloved websites was hit by Panda on January 18th. Pretty sure it was due to a CMS bug that is now fixed. The website site started to show great signs of recovery from April 19th - Panda 3.5.
I'm going to be as explicit as possible with the traffic for the days that follow. Traffic was stable previously.
April 20th +10%.
April 21st +5%.
April 22nd +5%. (half way recovered, also the first real fluctuation since the site was hit in Jan).
Due to the looming over-optimisation penalty, on the 22nd I changed the titles to unoptimise them a little. (fear is a dangerous thing at times).
April 23rd -10%.
April 24th -10%
April 25th onwards, pretty much levelled out.
The websites I've seen hit by Penguin, lost around 40% of their traffic, very steeply on 24th and 25th April.
So the drops aren't in keeping with my experience of Penguin. But they do coincide perfectly with the massive site-wide title change. I've haven't read anything definitive about a penalty for changing titles too often, but for obvious reasons, it makes sense.
The drop seems terribly soon after changing titles, but the site is very heavily indexed.
It's also worth mentioning that I did changed the titles BACK, incase it was purely the fact the titles had been slightly de-optimised, that caused the drop. I waited until May 5th. This had no positive nor negative effect.
It's a lot to take in but I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I'm feeling a little bamboozled looking at all the figures.
There was of course the above the fold update on the 19th Jan, but lets ignore that as we've only ever had a max 1 ad per page, most pages have none.
-
Anybody else any thoughts on this?
-
Sorry about that mistake, I forgot about the 10% each interval.
Have you exported your organic search results from pre-panda/penguin? I would export the organic searches and then compare them, and see how many keywords AND what keywords are no longer being indexed.
At best, you narrow down what pages are not getting as much organic search and you can try to fix the links by either optimizing the pages, maybe removing keyword stuffing, and requesting questionable links to your site(not saying you are doing any of these but just general idea of why penguin is hitting some sites).
-
Overall, we are now still 40% down from January Panda. We're talking hundreds of thousands of uniques a month lost. It's a big site.
The 10% increments and drops were per day, so we had a 10+5+5 increase after the April Panda update. Then I made my title change and lost the 20% that we'd just gained.
It's pretty hard to follow I realise.
-
Is your site in a competitive niche? The competitiveness of a niche can greatly impact the fluctuating rankings. Are you checking rankings for just the root domain or other sections of the site?
One thing that could be a factor as well is that some keywords you were ranking for pre-penguin, might not be ranking anymore post-penguin.
I have a site that was effected by penguin as well and one keyword we had that was driving 10-20% of traffic was not longer ever an organic source.
I would try my best to start building up instead of worrying about the drop if its only 10%. For the site I mentioned, we are just going to try to optimize other parts of the site and keep on building links.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Looking for an SEO Mentor
I do in-house marketing for a medium sized luxury architectural design firm. I have a good understanding of the moz platform and general SEO but would like to findsomeone to provide regular guidance and answer some specific questions regarding our SEO. Specifically, we want advising on keywords, blog content, and link building. Ideally we'd like to engage a consultant (remotely) on an hourly basis. We'v have had very poor experiences with big SEO firms so that’s definitely not something we’re looking for. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorkshopAPD
Caio0 -
Help Dealing with Sustained Negative SEO Attack
Hello, I am hoping that someone is able to help with a problem that is destroying both my business and my health. We are an ecommerce site who have been trading since 2004 and who have always had strong rankings in Google. Unfortunately, over the past couple of months, these have significantly decreased (I would estimate around 40% drop in organic traffic). We have not had a manual penalty and still have decent rankings for a lot of competitive keywords, so we think it is more likely to be an algorithmic penalty.The most likely culprit is due to a huge scale negative SEO attack that has been going on for around 18 months. Last September, we suffered a major drop in rankings as a result of the 302 hijack scheme, but after submitting a disavow file (of around 500 domains) on 12th November, we recovered on 26th November (although we now don't know whether this was due to disavow file or the Phantom III update on 19th November).After suffering another major drop at the end of June, we submitted a disavow file of 1100 domains (this the scale of the problem!). This tempoarily halted the slide, however it is getting worse again. I have attached a file from Majestic which shows the increase in the backlinks (however we are not building these).We are at a loss and desperately need help. We have contacting all the sites to try and get links removed but they are happening faster than we can contact them. We have also done a full technical audit and added around 50,000 words of unique, handwritten content, as well as continuing to work through all technical fixes and improvements.At the moment, the only thing we can think of doing is submitting a weekly disavow for all the new spammy domains that come up. The questions I have are: Is there anything we can do to stop the attack? Is this increase in backlinks likely to be the culprit for the drops (both the big drops and the subsequent weekly 10% drop)? If so, would weekly disavows solve the problem? Is this likely to take months (years?) to recover from or can it be done quicker? Can you give me any ray of light to help me sleep at night? 😞 Really appreciate any and all help. I wouldn't wish ths on anyone.Thanks,Simon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Do industry specific domains help SEO?
Hi everyone, I've looked for an answer to this but I can't find one. Hopefully someone can help! I have a new client that is a builder. They currently have a .co.uk domain (e.g. businessname.co.uk) Would it help them if the website was businessname_.builders_ instead? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebsiteAbility0 -
Have a Robots.txt Issue
I have a robots.txt file error that is causing me loads of headaches and is making my website fall off the SE grid. on MOZ and other sites its saying that I blocked all websites from finding it. Could it be as simple as I created a new website and forgot to re-create a robots.txt file for the new site or it was trying to find the old one? I just created a new one. Google's website still shows in the search console that there are severe health issues found in the property and that it is the robots.txt is blocking important pages. Does this take time to refresh? Is there something I'm missing that someone here in the MOZ community could help me with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | primemediaconsultants0 -
New domain purchase 301 and 404 issues. Please help!
We recently purchased www.carwow.com and 301 redirected the site to www.carwow.co.uk (our main domain). The problem is that carwow.com had URLs indexed like www.carwow.com/a-b-c the 301 sends them to carwow.co.uk/a-b-c which obviously doesn't exist so is a 404! What should be done in this situation? Should it be ignored and not re-directed at all, or is there a way to delete/disavow these dead pages? An SEO has advised we redirect all pages to the homepage, but won't that mess up the link profile? Any advice would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesPursey0 -
Shopify and multiple stores for seo
Hi, We have a potential client who has multiple stores targeting different countries using Shopify. He has set the domains for specific countries using geo targeting in webmaster tools. Anybody had any experience on how fool proof this is? (all the sites have the exact same products/content on them) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
Index, Nofollow Issue
We are having on our site a couple of pages that we want the page to be indexed, however, we don't want the links on the page to be followed. For example url: http://www.printez.com/animal-personal-checks.html. We have added in our code: . Bing Webmaster Tools, is telling us the following: The pages uses a meta robots tag. Review the value of the tag to see if you are not unintentionally blocking the page from being indexed (NOINDEX). Question is, is the page using the right code as of now or do we need to do any changes in the code, if so, what should we use for them to index the page, but not to follow the links on the page? Please advise, Morris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrintEZ0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Why do URL with .html or index.php at the end are annoying to the search engine? I heard it can create some duplicate content but I have no idea why? Could someone explain me why is that so? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0