April Google Update?
-
Since April 16 (when Jews ate Matzah) Google hurt one of our clients badly. They are well-known and beloved brand with hundreds of employees and locations across USA.
I can’t see any signal of organic update, or penalty (neither Google Places).- No message on GWT
- Nothing has been changed on and off site.
- All keywords' ranking are looking like this
- All tools showing good analysis: MOZ, Barracuda, MajesticSeo
- Content is good and not duplicated,
- etc.
Do one of you is aware of significant Google update?
What do you think/suggest? -
So here is your issue
run a review, start removing and disavowing all the bad links. A lot of penalties went out in April, e which is why Mozcast was so volatike, there wasn't a major update IMHO.
-
Good point!
I didn't think to check "manual actions" on GWT (because no warning found on message center). This is what I see there:
Manual Actions
Site-wide matches NonePartial matches
Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links
Reason
Affects
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.Some incoming links
Request a review -
Have you checked the penalty check tool in webmaster tools?
-
Hello MOZ Rogers – Tuk – Tuk. What about http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change ?
-
-
Barry Schwartz said there looked to be a Panda update starting to roll out about the 14th. These can take a few days to roll out. Lots of comments in the thread from webmasters complaining.
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-soft-update-18408.html
-
The subject brand is nothing to do with music. It is moving/storage company.
-
This graph looks awfully similar to yours.
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/april-2014-google-algorithm-updates-song-lyrics/
-
All of the keywords but brand.
Just-Discovered Links looks good - I have checked them all.
Going thru you "how to diagnose" list:
Something wrong with your analytics program - Nope.
Something to do with Google Algorithm or Webspam Team:
- Manual penalty - How can I know? No email has been received
- Algorithm update - The only thing we found is MP3 / Lyric update
- Normal Google fluctuations - Not seems like
Something to do with Webmaster Tools - Nope.
- There is (and always was) excessive link (on every page) from brother companies/websites. This is normal behaviour of brands.
- Zero warnings on GWT dashboard.
Something wrong with your website - nothing changed recently but I have checked it again. All good.
- In the recent days we found FOUR old "access denied" errors and we fixed them. Can't believe it is that.
-
Mozcast (http://mozcast.com/) shows that the 17th and 18th were pretty chaotic in the SERPs. Take a look at the metrics page on there too. I noticed a few drops on some of my client's profiles but not as significant.
Was this drop for all of your keywords or just one or a few???
Here is an article on how to diagnose a drop in rankings from the team over at ignite. http://ignitevisibility.com/diagnose-drop-in-seo-traffic/
If you haven't done so already. I would look into Google WMT and check out "recently discovered links" just to make sure none of them are harming you in any way.
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
-
Google Pagination Changes
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Google not indexing images
Hi there, We have a strange issue at a client website (www.rubbermagazijn.nl). Webpage are indexed by Google but images are not, and have never been since the site went live in '12 (We recently started SEO work on this client). Similar sites like www.damenrubber.nl are being indexed correctly. We have correct robots and sitemap setup and directions. Fetch as google (Search Console) shows all images displayed correctly (despite scripted mouseover on the page) Client doesn't use CDN Search console shows 2k images indexed (out of 18k+) but a site:rubbermagazijn.nl query shows a couple of images from PDF files and some of the thumbnails, but no productimages or category images from homepage. (product page example: http://www.rubbermagazijn.nl/collectie/slangen/olie-benzineslangen/7703_zwart_nbr-oliebestendig-6mm-l-1000mm.html) We've changed the filenames from non-descriptive names to descriptive names, without any result. Descriptive alt texts were added We're at a loss. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, and do you have any advice? I'd be happy to provide more information if needed. CBqqw
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Google not displaying meta description
Hi, one of my clients is receiving the following error in SERP - "A description of the page is not available because of this site's robots.txt". The site is built on WordPress and I realized that by default, the settings were checked to blocks bots from crawling the site. So, I turned it off, fixed robots.txt and submitted the sitemap again. Since, then it's been almost 10 days, the problem still exists. Can anyone tell me what should be done to fix it or if there's a way to get Google to recrawl the pages again.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mayanksaxena0 -
Is my site penalized by Google?
Let's say my website is aaaaa.com and company name is aaaaa Systems. When I search Google aaaaa my site do not come up at all. When I search for "aaaaa Systems" it comes up. But in WMT I see quite a few clicks from aaaaa as keyword. Most of the traffic is brand keywords only. I never received any manual penalty in WMT ever. Is the site penalized or regular algorithm issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Significant Google crawl errors
We've got a site that continuously like clockwork encounters server errors with when Google crawls it. Since the end of last year it will go a week fine, then it will have two straight weeks of 70%-100% error rate when Google tries to crawl it. During this time you can still put the URL in and go to the site, but spider simulators return a 404 error. Just this morning we had another error message, I did a fetch and resubmit, and magically now it's back. We changed servers on it in Jan to Go Daddy because the previous server (Tronics) kept getting hacked. IIt's built in html so I'm wondering if it's something in the code maybe? http://www.campteam.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregWalt1 -
Limit on Google Removal Tool?
I'm dealing with thousands of duplicate URL's caused by the CMS... So I am using some automation to get through them - What is the daily limit? weekly? monthly? Any ideas?? thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How do you find synonyms for a word in Google?
Hi, How would you go about finding a connection between words in the eyes of Google? So for example if I enter ~shoes -shoes I get a few things turn up in bold. Boots is one which makes sense and I would assume Google makes a connection between the words so using both in content would help semantically. BUT the other word it bolds is Store - this is where I get lost why would it make this connection unless Google is taking actual query data from users and making a different type of connection between words. How do you find a solid connection between words?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
Something I noticed in the Google news section, what is it?
I've noticed something like a quote whilst I was doing a search in News section. Does anyone know what is it called? Is it some sort of microdata or something you can manipulate or is it up to Google's algorithm to determine whether or not to display the section and the content of it. The section in question is highlighted in the attached image. Thanks in advance! MqdoW MqdoW.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0