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
-
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Title page google serp
Why does Google change the titles automatically? I have <title>Canyoning Açores - São Jorge | Discover Experience Açores</title> but google show Discover Experience Açores: Canyoning Açores - São Jorge
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tiagoarruda0 -
Google Search Console
abc.com www.com http://abc.com http://www.abc.com https://abc.com https://www.abc.com _ your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Google update this wknd or page title issue?
Hi, I've seen a big ranking drop for many major terms, for a particular site, just on Google. This happened Fri 20th or Sat 21st just gone. I don't see any news on an algorithm update over the weekend.I had changed many of the sites major page title protocols 2 weeks ago but a) I would have expected any negative effect before now and not all at once b) the protocols were carefully crafted to avoid traffic drops for major terms and c) i'm seeing traffic drops for keywords that still start at the beginning of the page title d) im seeing drops for some pages which are still using the OLD page titles. I had even tested the protocol on a number of pages in advance to ensure it wouldn't cause problems. As a bit of background - the title protocols were changed to make them more user friendly and less keyword heavy. CTR from search improved so was hoping for better not worse rankings! Ideas, gratefully appreciated.Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Company name causing Google penalty?
Hi all, Once of my clients has a keyword as part of their company name, and it seems like the website is being given a penalty in the keyword SERP because of the amount of websites linking back using the company name? Is there anything i can do to prevent/balance this out? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyHall0 -
Google Local oddity
So I spotted something a little weird... one of my client's Google Local placements in blended results has the domain name - complete with the .com extension appearing where the business name typically appears: Businessxyz.com www. businessxyz .com of Google reviews Has anyone seen this? I setup their Google Places account quite some time ago and used the business name - not the url. I also setup their Google+ and Local page - using the name. None of the page titles on the website contain the url. I simply can not pinpoint where G is pulling this from or why for that matter. All competitors are appearing with business name - only my client has the domain name visible for the particular local search query. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Google Freshness Update & Ecommerce Site Strategies
Just curious what other ecommerce SEO's are doing to battle fresh content. We've been having our clients work on internal blogs, adding articles one click away from landing pages, and implement product reviews when possible but I don't know that it's enough. Our bigger customers have landing pages (usually category pages) with very competitive keywords. So my main issue is what to do with fresh content on category pages.. I've toyed with the idea of having the landing page content re written every now and then. We used to use a blog parser to bring snippits of comments from the blog into landing pages but I believe that to be a problem with duplicate content. News snippits from other sites don't seem beneficial either. Anyone have any other ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Google Places in the UK, No Postcard
I've been trying to register a business on Google Places now for a few months. As part of the verification process, Google send a postcard to your business address so that you can enter the pin online and verify your address. They also say that it takes up to 3 weeks, however this is now the 3rd time I've requested a pin and none have turned up so far. The latest one was requested well over 3 weeks ago. Has anyone else had problems getting a local results postcard? It's driving me nuts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0