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
-
Two high ranking pages instantly dropped from index - no manual penalty notification
We are facing an issue where two of our major rankings pages have just completely disappeared from search results. This has happened in the last 24 - 48 hours and there has been no changes made to the site. From what we can tell, it's only impacted two pages (but two very important category pages). I have double and triple checked all standard indexing protocols - Search Console URL inspection says the pages are fine to crawl and index. URLs have been requested to re-index but nothing has worked. This would have me to believe it could be a manual action yet there are no notifications in Search Console and we are listed as 'No issues detected' in all versions of our web property. Can anyone else think what could be the reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vuly0 -
Are ALL CAPS construed as spamming if they are used in a meta description tag call to action?
I know this seems like an old school question. As a long time SEO I would never use ALL CAPS in a title tag (unless a brand name is capitalized). However I recently came across a Moz video about creating better calls to action in the meta description tags. Some of the examples had CTAs that were using all caps (i.e. CALL NOW! or LOWEST QUOTES!) I realize there is a debate about the user experience implications. However I'm more concerned about search engines penalizing websites that are using ALL CAPS CTAs in their meta description tags. Any feedback/advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Pure Manual Spam v/s New website
My website nowwhatstudio.com hit by google pure spam and google applied manual spam action to the website. Why google applied manual spam action to my website? How Can I recover my website. I create new website (nowwhatmoments.com) with the same content from the old spam action website (nowwhatstudio.com). As google removed my old website content from search indexed. Can I use the same content for a new website? I already spend allot of money on content. If I delete my old website from the server, after that Can I use the old website content for a new website? Or Can make edits the old website content and make it 80% original for a new website? I can use my old website (nowwhatstudio) email id and social accounts for a new website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Question about New Client with Manual Actions / Partial Matches in GWT
We just signed on a new client and are gaining access to their Analytics, GWT, etc... In GWT, we quickly went to "Manual Actions" as the client stated they've been slipping in rankings the past couple months from 1 to 4 to 8 and have been staying at around 7/8 for 15 of their main keywords. Without getting into the specifics of their keyword rankings, I'm curious to know when they may have received the Partial Matches Manual Action from Google. I checked Messages and saw nothing about the Manual Actions update. Can anyone lend some advice as we are most likely going to have to put together a Disavow text file and begin sending requests to take down links. Thank you in advance. Hope this was clear enough, but let me know if you need more info. Patrick uOGsyKh.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Huge Google Dance For Some Rankings. What Gives?
I've got a relatively new website (launched at the beginning of June 2013). For some keywords I'm targeting, it first ranked around page 15. It made huge jumps to finally rank on page 2 or 3. Since then, it goes back to page 15 and then back to page 3. It does this every now and then. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Would this drop indicate a manual penalty?
Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces) A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since. Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season. Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability. I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog. I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT. Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword. The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users. So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty? Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scott.lucas1 -
How to Improve or Recover Google Image Search Performance (Queries, Impressions, Clicks)?
I want to improve or recover Google image search performance for my eCommerce website. My website was working well in Google image search but, I found negative performance since implementation of CDN for all images. Before CDN my image path was as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/265x/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/1/0/10133_1.jpg After CDN my image path is as follow. http://lghttp.11720.nexcesscdn.net/805298/images/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/900x800/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/1/0/10133_1.jpg I can see that, Google image search performance is going down after set up CDN on my website. Because, all images are available on external server. So, How to recover Google image search performance after CDN or any idea to improve performance? 6871173584_a85e22ce1c_b.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770