Massive Google Drop on two sites!
-
Hi All,
We have experienced a massive Google drop on Two of our eCommerce websites in the past week.
From Feb - July we were ranked 2 for various key words
In Aug we dropped to 8
In September to 96 if not lower.
We pay for monthly link building and add unique product info each week (but not much new content such as articles or blogs).
My SEO guys has not been that helpful and just sent me a link to the Panda update blog, which doesn't mean a great deal to me.
Obviously this has had a massive effect on business, and ideally i need to diagnose the problem and find a new startegy on moving forward, so most likely looking for a for a new SEO guy/company as well.
I need someone is proactive, communicates well and make constant suggestions about moving forward not just link building.
One thing I would like to add is these two site have a different homepage, category and range structure, but do share some if the 2000 product database.
Can anyone help? Any advice on sorting this would be gratefully appreciated.
Thanks
M
-
I think it's dangerous to speculate that you were hit by EMD without knowing all of the facts. EMD hit Sep 28. There was also a major Panda update Sep 27. But you mentioned that you started dropping in August.
Can you tell the exact date of your drop? If it was Aug 20 there was a Panda update then. You mentioned that your two sites share the same 2000 product database. If they have duplicate pages, or pages with significantly duplicated product descriptions then this is a big flag for Panda.
You mentioned that you pay for linkbuilding. Some linkbuilding has been punished by Penguin. Now, Penguin affected most sites on Apr 24 and many more on May 25. However, there are some people who have documented that a site may be able to be affected by Penguin at any time. (They still believe a refresh is necessary for recovery). So, if your traffic drop happened within a few weeks of a major keyword anchor texted linkbuilding campaign then Penguin is a possibility.
Have you checked your WMT for any warnings of unnatural links? This is a possibility as well.
Plus there are a pile of other factors. Check this list for a bunch of other possibilities for a ranking/traffic drop.
-
I'd say you probably need to look at how you are building links as well as the content on your site to see if it is spammy or not.
I haven't seen the site so it's really hard to tell what has caused the drops but in conclusion;
-
Look at your content, is it spammy, is it stuff users want to read or is it written for search engines?
-
Link Building, what kind of links are being built? are they spammy? (use open site explorer) look at creating a new link building strategy that focuses on quality.
If you want to talk further about it you are welcome to PM me and I can give you site a proper look over and see if I can help you
-
-
This has all been very helpful, thank you. So the questions Im left with are
What do I do next? - I am running SEOMoz crawl/report will go through everything with a fine tooth comb?
Do I need to do more link building and what budget would be good?
Do I need better site content?
Any major flaws?
Why was the main reasons the drop so big?Could anyone help to put a strategy together and take on this work?
-
Thanks guys for all your help, at least I have an idea of how to move forward,. I have PM the URLs over or shall i post them here openly??
-
Like Carlos said most likely the EMD update.
See - http://mozcast.com/metrics and tab 'EMD Influence'.
Regarding your SEO people, you may not have access to your webmaster tools account but you could put your website domain so we could take a quick look.
It wouldn't take very long to tell if your SEO people are doing a good job or not.
Just so you understand a little better, Google puts some weight (From what I have seen, a lot) on a website which has an EMD (exact match domain) and that also targets that term.
I have seen websites rank with an EMD on the first page with little to no link building.
Google has just turned the power on EMD's down. As you can see from my link.
The reason why the guys above are saying your must have a poor link profile is because even when Google turned the power down, the link building you should have should of held you up.
So... EMD turned down, poor link profile (which should have held you up) = drop
Answer - Build your link profile up.
But it maybe something else until we can see your site, for all I know your whole site is duplicate content and you have been penalised.
-
Happy to help. The first thing you need to do is find out if the SEO done to your site could also be the reason why your site dropped. Even with the EMD update, to drop from #8 to #96 there must be something else going on.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is the content on your site over-optimised?
Does your link profile look unnatural (exact keyword anchor text, low quality links, article directories, blog comments, link wheels, etc.) ?
Could you have any on-page issues (duplicate content, over-optimised meta, etc.)?
If you show us your sites we will be able to give you better advice.
-
PS webmaster tools is not showing anything, status is currently
No new messages or recent critical issues.
-
Thanks Carlos, very helpful. I'm thinking about finding some new help, any tips what i should start focusing on first and how long this may take to get back up?
-
Before the recent update from Google having the keywords in the domain helped a lot.
I'm sure that they still help somehow, but to get back to where you were you will need to build up the authority of your site (good links, social signals, quality content, etc - nothing new).
As Simon said, also check your WMT account and see if you have any messages from Google regarding unnatural links.
-
Yes they are out of three words in the domain, two are the search term, for both sites. Is this something you help with?
-
Sounds like your SEO guy doesn't really pay much attention and his attitude towards you coming to him with that query suggests that he might be doing some poor link building which might have got you penalised by Google.
Do you have access to webmaster tools? if so you may have a message about unnatural links.
Whats the website and maybe I can have a better look for you.
-
are the domains "exact match domains"?
if so, you may want to have a look at this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data
If it is a Panda or Penguin penalty you will have to conduct a link review and remove links to your site that could be triggered the penalty. More on how to do that here: http://www.branded3.com/b3labs/cleaning-your-links-a-step-by-step-guide/
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
-
With MFI, should we delete our mobile version of our site?
I'll start by stating that a brand new responsive site is under development and will be launching early 2019. Until then, with Mobile First Indexing, we're curious if we should remove our mobile site altogether. Looking at Google guidelines, it looks like we have Dynamic serving content, so when a mobile device is used, a VERY TRIMMED down version of our site content is presented. I read that if a mobile version doesn't exist, google will use the MFI indexing on the desktop version still, since that is what is rendered on a mobile device. If Google starts using our mobile site for its indexing, we're not going to be looking good. At this point, are there negative affects to removing our mobile site and having the desktop version render on all devices?
Search Behavior | | Technical_Contact0 -
Export Google Search Results
I would like to export a list of pages indexed by Google and other search engines. According to our site search with google, we have over 300,000 pages indexed. Anyway to export a list of all of these pages? Tools like ScreamingFrog (which I own a copy of) can crawl your site but does not tell you the pages indexed by a search engine... I've tried using tools that will let you export each page of the results. However, this won't work for a 300K page website. Thanks for your help!
Search Behavior | | Evan_Wright0 -
Wanting to see when a user exists form site and its jopurney while on site please
Hi there, Wondering if you can help please? I am needing to know bounce rates on a landing page and also wanting to know if they landed on that page and went from that page to another and another... how can i look at that on MOZ please? Thanks Cass
Search Behavior | | AITLtd0 -
My satellite website is ranking better than my actual site. Why and what to do?
This is our website: www.sauspiel.de and this is the satellite website. As the satellite site has a better ranking for the keyword "schafkopf" since two or three weeks we wonder how this could happen and what would be best to change it or improve the situation. Shall we take down the satellite site, redirect to the "real" site or try to downgrade? And what would you consider to be the (strongest) reason? Any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your help and assessment!
Search Behavior | | sauspiel0 -
Getting People to Leave Product Reviews, When they've reached our site in search of reviews
We have a product review website that has been showing a steady increase in organic traffic. However we seem to be having a disconnect between what happens when a visitor arrives. We essentially want a visitor coming to our website in search of a review, to LEAVE a review for another product they may have used... Any suggestions on ways we might encourage this? We are kind of newbies at this!
Search Behavior | | Sarah_Frantz0 -
Google Instant Search? REALLY?! Why is this the result???
First, this is one I thought I would never ask, but: Could this be true? I had noticed my MacBook Pro was eating some power and wanted to see if I could optimize my settings so to take advantage what battery life was available. (I swear that is the truth). So, I am at a Starbucks on someone and typed into Google search bar the following query - Best way to conserve - and, received the following instant search results before I could type - power on a macbook pro I am not putting it here as I want you to ask yourself what came up. I have attached a screenshot. My colleague arrived and without prompting she retried and got the same. So I am curious: Do you get the same result and why do you think that result is so predominant? This is funny. efuts.png
Search Behavior | | RobertFisher2 -
Pro/Cons of JUST using Google Analytics
I find myself in a situation where I am having to defend why purely relying on just Google Analytics for site data i.e. exit pages, keywords, bounce rate etc... is not good practise. So I thought/wondered if other people have come up against this. What are the Pro and Cons for ONLY using Google Analytics for your site data....
Search Behavior | | JohnW-UK0 -
How to test a site for usability with hundreds users and get genuine feedback?
My question is twofold; firstly is there a recommended company that I could use to get feedback on my site usability. Ideally I would like this company to arrange a focus group of a couple hundred people that fit into the right demographic and organise a report on the opinions of the group and the issues faced. Secondly an in-house understanding of usability Now I would like to think that when I review a site for usability I am not biased in any way. But I believe that if I look at the page that I have created or even collaborated on that I will always miss usability issues as I frankly think my/our creation is amazing. I'm interested to know how people rank and check their site usability and what factors rank highest in their assessments i.e. the tools you use and how you use them.
Search Behavior | | Stefan-Thorpe0