What penalty might have hit here (screenshot attached)

[SamCUK]

I've had a spiky organic traffic profile for some time and wondered if anyone could suggest what penalty might have hit me. Something did in July but then when it recovered (not sure how) I ended up with double the traffic. Then it dipped, recovered a but and has slowly declined since. I've had no manual penalties so it must be algorithmic which means I can fix it. The problem is I don't know what the issues is!

Any help appreciated!

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[Jellyfish-Agency]

Should all be working now. Thanks

[CommT]

Sorry for the late reply - the two urls I lok after are https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk, and https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk

Thanks!

[Jellyfish-Agency]

Moz Community,

Thanks for the feedback. This was a genuine response to the question 'What penalty might have hit here?'. Just thought it may have given some added insights. Don't even want to get into the workings of the tool as you have pointed out, this is not the right place to do so.

Thank you for understanding!

[RobertFisher]

LMAO

[HashtagHustler]

"Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that, Google Analytics in hand, we have warped out minds in such an obsession for destructive thinking that only an act of KeriMorgret & RobertFisher can remove it from us." Step 1 - Mozzers Anonymous

[SamCUK]

Yes rankings have dropped. I had around 10 competitive keywords on the first two pages some time ago and now only about 3 remain. The rest are not in the top 50 which leads me to believe its something algorithmic. So far I have:

1. Removed 'local' pages that had thin content

2. Removed a directory on my site that had pages from other directories in it by accident causing possible duplicate content.

3. Identified sites that had more than 3 or 4 links pointing towards my site and got any links over that number removed.

4. Disavowed some links that could be considered low quality.

Like I said I hoping when a panda/penguin refresh comes along it fixes the problem. I'm just guessing though as to what the problem is as crossing my fingers!

[RobertFisher]

I remember a question re the local you had. So, you took them down recently and they are not the reason for the traffic decline.

I am guessing you have done this, but have you looked at your rankings for the pages and has there been a concomitant drop in rankings? If rankings are dropping and that is causing the traffic drop, it is likely that something algorithmic is effecting you. If it is on multiple pages, to me that also says it is algorithmic as we all tend to "style" our pages the same, same SEO, etc.

Have you changed any structured markup? Added or subtracted it? 
Obviously, you have to look at everything and that is what can be so frustrating. If you do not want to put anything about the site up and want to pm me, I will be happy to take a quick look for you. If I can see something I will point it out as I know you are already fairly well along in learning SEO and can take care of it yourself.

Best,

[RobertFisher]

I never thought about the Admin suppression. That is a cool point.

[KeriMorgret]

Howdy Jellyfish! Thanks for recently becoming active in the Moz Q&A forums. This is a place to help other users, and not a place for lead generation. In addition, all links here are nofollowed.

We ask that you share information here, and not use this for advertising your services.

Thank you for understanding!

[RobertFisher]

This Is Totally funny. Here is what jellyfish sends back to someone who owns an agency:

Thank you for your interest in the Jellyfish SEO Tools. Unfortunately due to a high volume of demand, we are not able to offer you a beta account at this time.

Yet you just posted your penalty checker two hours ago and this question has had 47 total views so maybe 30 people. That blew out your beta. LMAO.

Well, I flagged you and you need to cease and desist.

[RobertFisher]

Jellyfish,

Kudo's on having a product. Not sure I would hawk it this way as it appears you are trying to use this forum to capture people with websites for your agency. You have a profile that is barely filled out and you have been on Moz since June 16th.

I just "signed up" and after giving email, etc. am told you will get back to me. Yep, even the email says that. I really do not think you should do this in this forum.

Best

[Jellyfish-Agency]

What is your URL we will check it out?

[CommT]

Hi SEO Jellyfish - I tried to check my site using your tool and however I typed my URL it always created an error. My URL has an SSL certificate so is https, but even when I took the s off (which would redirect to the hittps version) it didn't like it.

[Jellyfish-Agency]

Jellyfish have a free Google penalty checker http://www.jellyfish.net/seo-tools/google-penalty-checker it does a quick search engine penalty check and lets you know whether or not the site has been penalized by any of the Google algorithm updates from Panda or Penguin.

[SamCUK]

About a year ago I added a lot of 'local' pages trying to attract long tail queries but removed them recently as they weren't bringing in traffic and added little value. I removed them in case they were seen as 'doorway pages'. My site has just gone from several hundred pages to 50 odd. I've got lots of 404's but I'm hoping if its a penalty it'll pick up in the next panda/penguin refresh.

It was my main landing pages (for competitive keywords) that suffered so I'm hoping they'll bounce back. If it's not that I don't know what it is!

[RobertFisher]

Have you looked at:

• Which pages have lost the traffic
• Referrers who may have lost all or significant traffic (I know you said organic, just checking to be sure)

With your use of the word spiky and penalty they are somewhat incongruent. If I am looking at an algorithmic change I would not think spiky first off. But, the decline over time is problematic IMO. Any changes to the site, pages, etc.?

[SamCUK]

Weekly attached.

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[SamCUK]

August to September 2013 were about 350 visit per day average. September and October it dipped to around 100 - 150 visits per day. Then levelled out at around 200 per day until April this year when its dropped and dropped to now 75 - 100 visits a day.

[SamCUK]

My bounce rate between 13th August 2013 and September 17th 2013 was 93.16%. Aver all time is 89.12% so it's always been high. I'm led to believe though that this is because users bounce to a subdomain where they sign up. Could that be the case? I use a CNAME record to do this. I'm not an SEO expert so trying to figure out what's going on here.

[KeriMorgret]

In this case, it's the voice of experience. If you go back a year or two in Q&A, you'll see that I asked the question about my bounce rate and had someone else point it out to me. I was on wordpress, and viewing my code and only saw one GA instance, but it was because I was logged in as admin and one of the instances was being suppressed so that admin visits didn't go into GA.

[RobertFisher]

Sam,

I saw Keri's response and said, damn she is smart. (I once patted myself on the back until I bruised because I had taken a client's site from a bounce rate of about 40% to 1 to 2% on a site we developed for them. Someone on Moz then kindly pointed out that I had the GA code in header and footer, negating my bounce rate. I had to go to client and say... sorry.

Can you assist by giving me an idea on the numbers? It is obviously more than 5 visits a day, but can you put into context a bit? In Oct. 2013 you are looking at Penguin's murderous update and you went up before and then down but right back up to a mid level. When I see a spike like late Aug to mid Oct. (about 6 weeks it appears) I generally ask was there other marketing or did marketing change in any way? 
I suggest doing this with settings on weekly instead of daily to provide a bit easier view for analysis.

With the numbers to the site, it appears that since January you have lost about 33% of your traffic; is that correct?

Thanks

[KeriMorgret]

First question: could it be that a dev hit your site and first removed tracking codes, and then put two tracking codes on at once, doubling page views? Take a look at your bounce rate and see if it went to just a couple of percent during this time too.