Impressions Fell off a Cliff, No Manual Action, What Gives?
-
Hi Moz crew,
We've got a bit of a riddle on our hands here at Flightpath. You see, we're an agency that specializes in digital services like web design, social media and SEO. Unfortunately, we seem to have been hit by an a algorithmic penalty on February 28th, 2014. This is a first for us - we've never had to deal with a penalty (manual or algorithmic) for our site or any of our client sites.
Here's the situation:
- We were averaging around 1,500 impressions per day before the drop. Since 2/28, we see closer to 250 impressions per day.
- No manual action notice in WMT
- Branded keywords did not lose rank. It was primarily our the service-oriented keywords that we lost rank on (ex: "digital agency", "digital agency nyc", "social media agency nyc", "web agency new york" - we were page 1 for all of these, though "digital agency" wasn't as secure as the others).
- Backlink profile looks ok. We did a clean-up (disavowed a few hundred domains) as soon as we noticed the drop, but there wasn't anything in there egregiously offensive. There definitely wasn't anything NEW that was problematic. Not a lot of non-branded anchor text at all.
- No major changes to the site in 2014
Any ideas? The site is http://www.flightpath.com
And here's a horrifying WMT screen grab: i.imgur.com/EY4OBG1.jpg
UPDATE: We recovered nearly all of our missing rank/traffic/impressions for a 3-day period between 4/15 and 4/17.
WMT Screenshot: http://imgur.com/V1fI1MQ
During our brief recovery, we did lose a small amount of rank (just a few positions, only for a handful of keywords) compared to where we were pre-crisis. That makes sense though, we were pretty ruthless in disavowing domains and almost surely caught a few "positive" links along with the bad ones. Aside from that, it appeared to be a full recovery - every single one of our generic keywords was back for just over 48 hours.
Any ideas? Was Google rolling out a new algorithm tweak, only to pull it back due to bugs? Or was it the opposite: Google rolling back the update that hurt our site to fix a few bugs before pushing it live again?
-
HI Dan - thanks for looking into this.
Our traffic from organic search has indeed dropped (Google only, rankings and traffic from Bing/Yahoo have remained stable).
Hopefully we've taken care of all the shady back links via disavow. Like you said, however, it could be awhile before we know if this has had any effect. Most of the links you referenced, and most of the ones that needed to be eliminated, came from websites linking to content that existed on our domain prior to the agency purchasing it almost 10 years ago.
You're right about the unusually high amount of indexed pages. The inflation is from our blog "tag" pages. We've put a dofollow/noindex on all of these pages. They're pretty deep on the site though, I expect it will take awhile for them to be crawled again for de-indexing.
We actually had a 2-day recovery just over a week ago. Then, as quickly and inexplicably as the recovery came, we again lost rank on our generic terms. I'm going to add some of this info to the main post now. It certainly is bizarre, so I'm hoping someone might be able to identify what might have caused the site to recover and then drop again over the course of 48 hours.
-
Hi John
First thing - have any other metrics changed? Traffic via Google search? Rankings (do you track these independently of WMT)?
Do know that the disavow can take 6+ months to fully process and have an effect back in the SERPs. I do see some suspect links. With Google being so aggressive lately, I could see only a few bad links hurting the site;
- http://wiis.tu-graz.ac.at/people/tom.html "jazz online server"
- http://enn2.com/nitelife.htm "internet cafe index"
- http://public.homeagain.com/faq.html "found pets"
The more I look in OSE there's definitely a lot of link issues. I know they may be old, but it's possible some could have come back to haunt the site.
I would be extra certain you've disavowed all the bad links. Greenlane SEO has two great posts on the process they use;
- www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/01/step-by-step-disavow-process/
- http://www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/04/how-to-uncover-those-harder-to-find-links/
The site design LOOKS great - terrific actually. So it's almost easy to assume everything is technically OK on-site, yet there are definitely some issues there.
For example there are almost 800 pages indexed - which seems like a lot for this site (I could be wrong). There are lost of really long titles and descriptions etc. So as Andy suggests, I'd take a good look at cleaning up anything on-site as well. It may not have caused a penalty, but anything to help Google re-processes the site will help
-
"If only we knew when the next refresh was going to be."
Maybe you found it!
It could also be another algorithm update that has tipped you over the edge. You might have been borderline for something for some time, then an update comes along and pushes you over the edge.
Do a site crawl with Screaming Frog as well, to see if anything glaringly obvious jumps out at you.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the feedback. Only updates would be blog posts (original content, no guest posts or anything).
And yeah, our current thinking is that this is probably Penguin rather than Panda related. If only we knew when the next refresh was going to be.
-
Hi John,
That is a big drop off!
The first question really, is if there have been any changes to the site recently? Any development, new pages, SEO work, content, link building, etc.?
Edit-- Sorry, just seen that you said no major changes to the site - but does this mean that there have been changes?
You mentioned that you have disavowed some links - if this was Penguin related, it could take a little while before you see any changes.
-Andy
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
-
25% of expired domains came with a Google manual penalty
25% of expired domains purchased came with a Google manual penalty, even when Moz spam score was 0 . Read the whole case study here: http://www.authoritywriters.com/2017/10/google-manual-penalty-on-expired-domains.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bluishclouds0 -
How long for a Disavow file to take affect for a non-manual penalty?
Hi guys, hope you're all good, quick question in regards to a Disavow file. A page of ours recently crashed from page 2 all the way to page 7ish. It's weird that it happened considering it was ranking on the 2nd page for around a year, then all of a sudden it came crashing down. I identified an affiliate link which was placed in a sidebar, webmaster tools picked up 24,000+ links coming from the site so I have decided to disavow it. I disavowed the site around 3 days ago, and in the mean time we have managed to grab ourselves some very good do-follow links from very authoritative sites. At the moment the page has gone up 1 page, sitting at 4-5th page, but the rankings have been very inconsistent. Any ideas to when we may see an increase in ranking for this page? I am being very impatient, at the moment my workload has been dedicated to get this one page ranking again. All comments greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Manual action penalty revoked, rankings still low, if we create a new site can we use the old content?
Scenario:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar. Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website? We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?0 -
Change domain whilst under a partial manual links penalty
Hi there We're currently under a manual penalty for some unnatural links to our domain and have been working on fixing that but had our first re-consideration request rejected so we're doing a second round of link removals The issue we have is that we were planning to change our domain before the SSL certificate expires in a couple of weeks and renew the certificate with the new domain but are unsure whether to stop working on the reconsideration request, change the domain and wait until the manual penalty moves to the new domain before continuing the link removal. Alternatively try and use the domain change to select which links are 301'd to the new site and leave behind the bad links in the hope that the manual penalty wouldn't be applied to the new domain Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Manual Action Email Notifications
Is it me or you don't get (and not supposed to) email notifications when your site gets a manual action penalty? I mean I can see it in the Google Webmaster Tools interface, but I never get notifications in my Inbox. Is that how it works or I just need to set it up somehow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VinceWicks0 -
Will a Google manual action affect all new links, too?
I have had a Google manual action (Unnatural links to your site; affects: all) that was spurred on by a PRWeb press release where publishers took it upon themselves to remove the embedded "nofollow" tags on links. I have been spending the past few weeks cleaning things up and have submitted a second pass at a reconsideration request. In the meantime, I have been creating new content, boosting social activity, guest blogging and working with other publishers to generate more natural inbound links. My question is this: knowing that this manual action affects "all," are the new links that I am building being negatively tainted as well? When the penalty is lifted, will they regain their strength? Is there any hope of my rankings improving while the penalty is in effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | barberm1 -
Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
A friend was hit with a manual penalty for unnatural links-impacts links. (see attached) I'm thinking it may be because they copied their entire wordpress.com site over to site.org/blog. (without redirecting it, so they have duplicate content as well) Out of 76+k links, nearly 11,000 are from their wordpress.com blog. If that's the case is the problem solved by upgrading within wordpress.com to redirect to site.org/blog? (then making a reconsideration request?) Or do I risk negatively affecting their site somehow? They saw a significant increase in traffic when they moved the content over but I'm thinking that was more a matter of increasing content on their site than increasing backlinks. The .org site ranks relatively well, whereas the wordpress.com blog doesn't really rank at all.Worth noting: it's a partial match, not a sitewide match. Does that negate my theory about the wordpress.com blog being the cause in any way? Since many of the links from it are sitewide? The wordpress.com blog has a header link to the .org homepage, plus individual links to it in posts. There are also three links in the header to pages on their .com website which redirects to three corresponding pages on the main .org site (the whole .com redirects). There are 23 footer links from the blog to the targeted .org pages as well. In the attached screenshot of who links most from Google Webmaster Tools, note that martindale.com links most, but it's a lawyer's site so they naturally have referring content there. Could that be a problem?Thanks everyone! 🙂M8JVEI6.jpg?1 M6gYE90.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Can I redirect duplicate blogs to give credit to one?
I have two sites that have no duplicate content (yet). One ranks better than the other but has a crappy hyphenated domain name (Domain A), and the other one is the "brand site" with a better domain name (Domain B). I'm creating a blog with technical articles and corresponding videos. I want the videos to refer to the better domain name (Domain B) because I can't see referring people to a hyphenated domain (it would sound horrible). But, the hyphenated domain has a better chance of improving it's rankings (long story why). Can I duplicate the content and just use a canonical tag on Domain B to give the credit to Domain A? If I do that, is it done on each post? Or the blog's main page? What I think would happen is any links to Domain B would pass the juice to Domain A. Is that correct? I know Canonical's are tricky and I don't want to screw this up, so I'd greatly appreciate some advice from the experienced people on here. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PhoenixDev0