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
-
Still seeing a terrible rank drop after last algo update?!
I'm still stumped as to why the ranking has gone so poor on a whitehat site. (see attached image) As you can see we've steadily been improving the ranking over the last 6+ months and then got hit with a massive change this month... I can't physically see any issues and Moz isn't reporting anything negatively that would have such a major effect.. Like not as if the drops were subtle... they've all gone into the 50+ section! Any insights into what may have changed in the latest algo update would be appreciated?! S0sD7d8.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | snowflake740 -
Blackhat Winners after Penguin 2.0
I know I'm not the only one that's seen this. After Penguin 2.0 some obvious blackhat SEOed sites flew up in the rankings. There's obviously a hole that hasn't been closed. I'm surprised it's been a month and that hole still hasn't been patched. I have no problem with other legit companies out ranking ours for various keywords. In that case I can feel alright knowing it's just something they were able to do that I wasn't but when I see complete blackhat sites ranking that's a whole different story. Estimated traffic before and after Penguin 2.0: http://goo.gl/gurXt What are they doing that's blackhat? Hidden text - compare the cached version vs. the live http://goo.gl/YYGDK 301ing lots of domains, many irrelevant. http://goo.gl/RjOJu Using a trade marked brand (steelers) - not SEO related but I'm sure the NFL wouldn't be happy. Linking between other domains they own. Notice how spammy these sites are. http://pittsburghwebdevelopment.org/2013/06/23/website-development-firm-website-design-pittsburgh/ http://seoinpgh.com/2013/06/23/website-designer-pittsburgh-affordable-web-design-in-pittsburgh-pa/ They were inflating their social presence. Wanted to show you but looks like twitter already took care of them https://twitter.com/seopittsburgh . Also making client sites link to them . http://pittsburghpaplumbing.com/2013/06/19/pittsburgh-plumbersplumbers-in-pittsburgh-paplumber-pittsburgh/ I've talked to other people and they've seen similar things. Thoughts, opinions? Can you find one good reason why this site would rank well for a competitive phrase?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eyeflow0 -
Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking - No Idea Why
Hi Mozzers, I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all. Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week. Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected. Suggestions? Advice? Answers? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
Preparing for Penguin: Delete or Change to Branding 25 small blogs, anchor text
Hello, This site has 80 root domains pointing to the domain, call it site X. 25 of them are tiny blogs the owner put up himself. The blogs consist only of 4 posts or so, where each post has a 2 keyword anchor text links to each one of his 4 sites. One link in each post goes to the home page and one goes to an internal page. Let's concern ourselves with cleaning up the anchor text profile of site X. All blogs are on private registration. Half of the blog domain names are furniture related and furniture is not relevant to this niche. But 3/4 to 3/5 of the content of each blog (2 paragraphs per post and 4 posts) is relevant. My concern is that even though the anchor text is varied and there's only 2 links going out to site X per blog, none of it is branded and so I'm concerned about Penguin type updates. Should we change these to branded or delete them? We're working on content promotion for backlinks in case we have to delete these blogs, but it's a small budget. What should we do? '
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How can I tell if my site was penalized from the most recent penguin update?
Hey all, I want to be able to see if my website was penalized from the most recent penguin update because we have several hundred websites built and at the bottom of each on it says something along the lines Website by, Web Design by, Hosting by and links back to our homepage. Could this possibly be penalizing us since these links have similar anchor text and on sites that have nothing to do with our services? Thanks, Ryan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
NEED HELP, Figuring Out Ranking Drop!
Hello, I need help from somebody, anybody, in trying to figure out why my site dropped so much for the keyword “wildblue” and “wild blue”. On the week of Feb. 13, 2012, my website jumped from middle of the first page to the fourth page, and then a week or two later jumped completely out of the index (or at least off the top 5 pages). We do not engage in any deceptive practices. Our entire website is centered around this keyword, and we are very relevant, and have informative and continually updated content for visitors. I thought at first we got hit by Panda, but our overall organic traffic has not decreased, it has actually been steadily increasing compared to same time last year. I have tried over the past several months to get us back up, or at least figure out what happened, with no luck. If anyone could advise me on what might have happened, how to correct it, or even has any ideas of how I could figure out what happened I would greatly appreciate it. Website is: http://www.mybluedish.com
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MyNet0 -
Penguine Recovery
Our site, www.autodealerchat.com got hit hard by Google's recent Penguin update (also known as the over-optimization update). For our main set of keywords including: auto dealer chat dealer chat car dealer chat automotive chat We lost placement across the board most notably on automotive chat where we were third and are today non-existent. If you look at our site, we were following former best practices and SEOMoz recommendations. If you look at our backlinks, we were playing the white hat game like everyone else. SEOMoz tools indicated that we were tops in terms of Domain Authority, etc. according to the old rules. Everything changed on April 25th. Going forward, what are some of the things that we can do to regain some of that lost ground? Thanks in advance for the insights.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | contactatonce0 -
Google rankings dropped like a stone
I've heard of this happening many times, but never to me. My client was Page 1 or 2 for 20 phrases, and they ALL dropped like a rock overnight. The site hasn't been banned by Google, as it's still indexed and the company name is returning results.There were no major changes done to tags or the code, and nothing black hat has been done. The only phrases that didn't drop contain the company name, and the results in Bing and Yahoo either stayed the same or moved up slightly since last week for all the terms. There's also no threat of spam, and it's very search engine friendly. The URL is http://www.universalaccounting.com. Help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesBSEO0