Does this look like a Penguin drop to you?
-
Hi Folks,
This is my first post here. Psyched to be part of this great community.
I have a site that's seen a steady drop in Google organic traffic since September of last year. Slow at first, then picking up speed in late January, then in a free-fall in May. Things are finally flattening out, but I'm left with 30% of my former traffic. See graph.
I've been thinking that this was caused by Penguin. Back in 2006-2009, I used free directory submission services, and it looked like I was finally getting penalized for it.
However, from the research I've done so far, it looks like websites hit by Penguin see a decrease in traffic over a couple days, not six months. Should I concern myself with disavowing those spammy directory links, or focus my energy elsewhere?
There are other plausible explanations for the decline. I haven't posted much content on the site in recent years, and have let my blog go fallow. Obviously, this needs to be fixed. My question is, in addition to my content development and quality linkbuilding efforts, should I be worried about those spammy links?
For the record, this is a high-quality informational site with lots of high-quality links mixed in with the spammy ones.
Thanks for any insight you can offer.
-
Still not convinced. Here's an example of a Penguin 2.0 traffic drop graph from 22 May. Much sharper drop away than yours.
-
Ouch. I'd say my drop looks consistent with that pattern, though much less dramatic.
-
Sure thing. Here it is.
I think the drop looks less dramatic in this shot--it's harder to see the change in trend--but over a three-day period from May 21-23 the traffic dropped by about 20%, discounting the gradual steady decrease in traffic happening at the same time.
-
This attachment shows what happened to one of my sites that was hit by a Penguin update. This is what I would expect to see (I've seen similar graphs from many others who were also hit).
-
I still don't see it. Can you post a graph showing just the two weeks either side of 22/23 May? Penguin traffic drops are, in my experience, usually pretty steep. This still looks too gradual.
-
David, the steep decline in May was over the 22nd and 23rd, so it does look like Penguin 2.0 nailed me. See screenshot of a more zoomed-in traffic graph.
It sounds like Penguin is at least partially the cause of my problems. Time to start disavowing.
-
Hard to give an answer without seeing the traffic graph for the time periods you mentioned the drops. If the drop in May was around the 22nd to 25th, it likely was a Penguin update. We got hit by it at that time.
Other things could've been dragging the site down over the last year and then Penguin may have hit and caused the free-fall. Definitely get rid of the directory links and any other links you think Google might penalize you for in the future.
-
Unless you can be sure that you have been actually hit by a penalty (manual or algorithmic) I would also take time to look at:
1. Google update collateral damage - your link profile could be full of devalued links which takes time to filter through.
2. on-page SEO is weak - page load speed, chained 301's, possibly indexed duplicate tag/query string pages etc etc (i've had over 50% improvement on organic traffic ensuring this area is spotless and as optimised as possible)
-
Interesting. I haven't been tracking my keyword rankings systematically, but the ones I keep my eyes on have dropped since last year.
-
Can't say I'm any kind of expert, but I have been dealing with Penguin penalties on a couple of sites and I can tell you that your traffic graph looks nothing like the Penguin penalties I've seen.
If you had been hit by Penguin back in late September you'd have lost 80% of your traffic over two or three days. Penguin penalties seem to apply very quickly.
This looks to me more like progressive slow discounting of your site in the search rankings (have you been tracking your keyword rankings?) which would be more likely to be cause by bad backlinks or association with spammy sites (by being in the same IP range). I think these are Panda rather than Penguin.
However, I have not seen the impact of the most recent Penguin "tweaks" that Google has been rolling out this year. The easiest way to check is to overlay the dates of the Penguin and Panda updates on your traffic graph. Any impacts will usually be seen within 48 hours of the update (when Google next indexes your site).
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
-
What would you say is hurting this site, Penguin or Panda?
Would you say this is both Penguin and Panda and no penalty has ever been lifted? What would be your general recommendations for this site? seWnoQm
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
New Domain Name or Keep going - Help not Recovering after Penguin
Hi Moz Friends I wonder if you can help me , a while ago we had a Penguin Penalty and lost our Rankings. After Months of work Disavow and Reconsiderations , Google sent me a message in Webmaster Tools to confirm the Penalty had been uplifted. Since then we havent recovered. I have been working with Bloggers to build relevant safe links, each having a DA of between 10-30. We have developed a Mobile Friendly Website and ios and Android Apps. We have improved Site Speed and moved to a Server within the same Country. We add lots of content and believe we have ticked all the boxes for onpage optimisation. However our DA and PA seems to have dropped slightly after Moz update today. We seem to be jumping in the serps, one day page 4 for "fancy dress" the next day nowhere to be found. I'm not sure what to do next. I'm not expecting to jump back to page 1 for the main keywords but some positive movement would be nice, especially as there are Lower DA Website, not mobile friendly or as fast above us in the serps. What I am looking for I guess is any ideas from you and also what you think about this idea A few people have mentioned that we might stand more of a chance using our domain name example.com instead of example.co.uk. example.com has never been used and is totaly clean (no penaltys ect..) Do we use example.com and move the website and content away from example.co.uk ? if so do we use redirects or would that just pass any hold thats on example.co.uk to the .com version Ideas Welcome Thanks Adam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AMG1000 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aronwp0 -
My Site having a drop in traffic with eash passing month
Hi, I'm running a text message site mixsms.com from 2009. It was performing good till Oct 2012. In the end of Nov 2012 I noticed a drop in traffic and then with each passing month I'm getting 1500-2000 unique visitors drop. In Oct 2012 my daily unique visitors were 15000+ each day and now it is just having 2000 after Feb end. I've done several things to improve my site. I changes the template, removed all unnecessary html elements, changed seo structure (optimize with all modern seo techniques). Stop backlinking from Nov 2012 but instead of getting improvements I'm continuously having a drop in traffic. I'll highly appreciate your time if you look into site deeply to findout exact issues that are causing for this drop. I'm even ready to hire any seo consultant if he is pretty sure to get 100% results. Thanks in advance for your support
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | intelmixx0 -
Penguin link removal what would you do?
Hi Over the last 4 months I have been trying to remove as many poor quality links as possible in the hope this will help us recover. I have come across some site's that the page our back-link is on has been de-indexed, goggle shows this when I look at the cached page... 404. <ins>That’s an error.</ins> The requested URL /search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGNI_enGB482GB482&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fforom.eovirtual.com%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D4%26t%3D84 was not found on this server. <ins>That’s all we know.</ins> If goggle is showing this message do I have to still try to remove the link, or is it a case goggle has already dismissed the link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0 -
Partner Site Hit with Penguin - Links hurt me
I work for a network of international websites, the site I work on is for Canada. Our partners in Australia were hit by penguin hard because they hired a black hat SEO guy and didn't know. He was creating profiles on highly authoritative sites and keyword stuffing them. Now, they've completely dropped off the SERP. This is where the issue occurs, because we are all international partners we are all linked together on the header of every page so visitors can choose their country. Now, because they were hit hard and we have reciprocal links (not for rankings but for usability) will we be affected? It seems like we have, but I just want some opinions out there. Also, should we go ahead and stop linking our sites between countries to avoid this mess?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?
Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully. I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both. I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smckenzie750 -
Why is the rankings for certain targeted keywords dropping sharply in the past few weeks?
Excuse me here I can't reveal the website url here due to the confidentiality. Background: This website has about 100+pages, and is a wordpress site. Out of 15 targeted keywords, there are few ranked first on Google.co.uk. others are ranked between 3rd and 50+. In the past couple of weeks, we have been submitting to various websites/directories. and 4 main keywords' rankings are improving steadily from 50+ to 20+. We don't buy links, or pay for link exhcanges. We only exchange links on rare occasions. Symptoms: 1. 2 out of 4 main keywords dropped its rankings from 20+ to 80+ 4 weeks ago over night. 2. We kept on acquiring links from directories and websites, and 2 weeks after the drop, the rankings of 2 affected keywords had gradually made its way back to 20-30. Just we thought the glitch was over, these 2 keywords has dropped rankings to 50+ once again. 3. The change of rankings looks too suspicious to us, so we went to use the Moz tool, and discovered the domain authority has also dropped 25% of its value in a month time. We never experienced such violent changes in terms of rankings in such a short period of time. My question is: what factors there are to have caused such violent shifts? Why the value of the domain authority is dropped by 25%-30%? What elements affect the domain authority the most?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robotseo0