Help diagnosing a complex SEO issue

[seo-wanna-bs]

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.

[seo-wanna-bs]

Anybody else any thoughts on this?

[William.Lau]

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).

[seo-wanna-bs]

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.

[William.Lau]

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.