80-90% drop in visits after Panda/EMD update - now what?
-
Hi everyone,
Had my first wonderful experience with an algorithm update. Business was doing great - about 90-100 visitors a day down to about 12-15 from Sept 29th to current.
Our domain is www.hamiltonscarservice.com which I don't think exactly qualifies for an exact match but may be close enough (car service is one of our keywords).
I am more likely to think its related to the Panda 20 update. I haven't changed the site at all lately so I was wondering what tips you guys may have going forward.
The site isn't perfectly optimized (which is where you guys come in) but when I first set it up it worked great so I mainly focused on backlinks from that point on. Now evidently this has caught up with me.
Any suggestions are appreciated - thanks!
-
You can actually leave the links in the footer since it's a good way to distribute your page juice, I would recommend just including the location though, you're creating a very high keyword density by repeating "car service" and "nj" so many times on the page. Chatham, Clark, Cranford, etc. No keyword repetition when you do it that way.
I would rewrite the duplicate content on your pages and try to make it a little bit longer.
You've got zipcodes, map, links to close towns, not too bad man. The duplicate content needs to be handled though.
-
So you recommended I remove all footer links to the landing pages.
What about the links to each of the landing pages from the areas served page (http://www.hamiltonscarservice.com/areas-served/index.html)? Should I just link them as a town and leave out the redundant car service portion?
I thought having the urls in this format (matching targeted keywords/content) was suggested as an on-page recommendation?
-
The EMD update should not have effected you. An EMD would be something like www.carservicemanhattan.com. You have a partial-match domain, and since it doesn't sound spammy or point to a spammy page, you aren't what Google has been targeting.
Your problem is duplicate content. You have dozens of pages with the exact same text on them, except for a find-and-replaced city name. That makes Google think your website isn't offering valuable content. Every page on your website should have unique content.
-
Nowadays you can't just spam the URLs and anchor texts with "car service" + location and create tons of pages with identical flimsy content with the exception of swapping you the location name.
Footer links are too spammy too.
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
-
Sizable decrease in amount of pages indexed, however no drop in clicks, impressions, or ranking.
Hi everyone, I've run into a worrying phenomenon in GSC and im wondering if anyone has come across something similar. Since August, I have seen a steady decline in the number of pages that are indexed from my site, from 1.3 million down to about 800,000 in two months. Interestingly, my clicks/impressions continue to increase gradually (on the same pace they have been for months) and I see no other negative side affects resulting from this drop in coverage. In total I have 1.2 million urls that fall into one of three categories, "Crawled - currently not indexed", "Crawl anomaly", and "Discovered - currently not indexed" Some other notes - all of my valid, error, and excluded pages are https://www. , so I don't believe there is an issue with different versions of the same site being submitted. Also, my rankings have not changed so I tentatively believe that this is unrelated to the Medic Update. If anyone else has experienced this or has any insight to the problem I would love to know. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Jason-Reid0 -
How much do branded search organic traffic & direct traffic impact the ranking for their non-branded topic/keyword?
Hi Moz community, We can see many websites with a reputation will have more number of visitors landing with these two types of traffic mostly (>90%): organic traffic of brand queries and direct traffic. Will these visits help and impact the ranking of these websites for the keywords/topics they been employing? Ex: Moz will have many such visitors. Will this really impact the ranking of Moz for non-brand queries they try to rank for, like "SEO Software". If so, will this have a huge impact or it's just a minor ranking factor. Because we have this with our website and we don't see such boost in rankings compared to our competitors with less direct traffic; where as I been looking at some SEO articles that direct traffic is one of the most important ranking factors. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Search traffic plummeting after HTTPS fumble - what to do now?
Hi all, Our website typically gets about 80% of our traffic from organic Google search over thousands of keywords (i.e., no single keyword (or group of) drives a large portion of our traffic). It's a nine year old website, and we have been growing steadily -- including about 30-40% year-over-year growth for the past 9-months. That is, up until Feb 2nd. On February 2nd, we switched to HTTPS. Everything was done per Google's recommendations: pages individually 301'd to HTTPS pages, no security warnings, added the new site in Webmaster Tools, etc. Google started to pick up our new site -- albeit 3 weeks into the transition, traffic was still significantly down. However, the big problem that we discovered was our ad revenues were getting destroyed. We're an ad based business and our CPMs were tanking, some of our ad partners were having problems serving ads, etc. We were losing a lot of money. So, we made the decision to reverse the HTTPS change and go back to HTTP. That was on Feb 22nd. Our traffic started to recover, and our ad rates did recover. However, 2-weeks after switching back -- March 8 -- our traffic started to fall and has continued to do so. Our traffic is now half of what it was a year ago, and only 1/3 of what it was before we made any changes. I am totally at a loss for what to do. I have spent endless hours digging through Webmaster Tools with no real insights. Here's the most I've been able to glean: Google picked up the new HTTPS site a lot faster than it has reverted back to the HTTP. Particularly for AMP pages. We had about 2,000 indexed AMP pages, which were quickly picked up when we switched to HTTPS, but since changing back to HTTP Google has been slow to re-index the HTTP. Only 935 AMP indexed pages now. According to Webmaster Tools, our overall ranking position has not been affected (the overall average). However, in a sampling of keywords I notice that a number of keywords seem to have been dropped completely from ranking, while others show the same rank position but Google seems to only be showing us in the results intermittently -- e.g., rank is unchanged, but impressions and clicks are much lower. I do not know what to do at this point, and sadly, I'm starting to get desperate for some help. I feel like all the hard work of almost a decade is slipping away and I have no idea how to change course. I've done absolutely everything I can think of from a technical standpoint. Am I being penalized for abandoning the switch to HTTPS? Should I now try and reverse course again, and switch BACK to HTTPS? Is this a temporary bobble that Google's algo will 'forget'? It's a super high quality website with long, unique, detailed articles. Not spammy and we have never had a manual action against us. I don't know what to do. Please help! Here's a link to the website. Thank you in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | tustind0 -
Google traffic drops (October 24th 2014) - Penguin 3.0?
Hi All My client's site http://www.carismaautodesign.com took a bit of a knock around 24th October 2014. Google organic traffic down by ~32%. I am trying to understand if site has been hit by a Penguin refresh (3.0) - and if so why?
Algorithm Updates | | seowoody
If it was, it would appear to be a false negative as the site and backlink profile is clean. The content is perhaps the only area in question... as it's more of a brochure site, therefore content is relatively thin and promotional rather than in-depth/editorial. For example, the gallery pages are very similar in structure, with the images and specification text being the only variation, click on any of the vehicle interiors to see what I mean - http://www.carismaautodesign.com/gallery/mercedes/viano/ You will see the specification text is unique per vehicle interior, but not hugely; Then how could it be? The interiors all contain the same elements just a variation in seating, leather colour, stiching, wood finish etc. Question: Do you think... a.) This IS NOT a Penguin issue but something else (please ellaborate)
b.) This IS a Penguin issue but a false-negative, so do nothing, this will bounce back with next Penguin refresh
c.) This IS a Penguin issue related to content. Merge all gallery pages into one page per vehicle (i.e. one Mercedes Viano Interior page, with all 19 interior galleries as part of the page - thus building one stronger page with more intro text and simple bulleted specification per gallery)
d.) This IS a Penguin issue related to something else (please ellaborate) Thanks,0 -
Penguin 3.0 Site Dropped after Update
Hi We was hit by the Penguin update a long time ago and we lost a lot of traffic/positions because of this. For a long time we worked really hard to identify all off our links that may have caused us to recieve this penalty. After Months of work we submitted the disavow file and reconsideration request and in June 2014 we recieved confirmation from google in webmaster tools that the manual spam action had been revoked. over time we then started to recieve more traffic and better positions in the serps, however since penguin 3.0 we have dropped again for a range of keywords. many going from page 1 to 2 or page 2 to 3/4 Any ideas what we should do here , any help will be really appriciated as I'm totally confused We havent done any link building at all since the penalty / recovery
Algorithm Updates | | AMG1000 -
Rankings Gone? Have I been effected by the Panda/Penguin Update(s)?
Our site www.alphameasure.com has been online since 2005 and currently has a page rank of 4. The site has always ranked on page one or two of Google for our primary keywords (Employee Satisfaction Survey, Employee Engagement Survey, Employee Surveys). I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but now our site is nowhere to be found. I'm thinking our ranking dropped somewhere in mid to late January? We did use an SEO company in the spring of 2012 that went on a link building campaign for us. They added about 450 inbound links over a three month period. Other than that - nothing has really change on the site. We're getting ready to release a new version of our software that was being re-written during all of 2012, so the timing of losing our rankings is just awful. Any help or ideas is greatly appreciated? Thanks in advance,
Algorithm Updates | | EngagedMetrics
Josh0 -
Geographical location influencing Auto Complete / Search Suggest
I was reading this q and a and found some video that Rand had made about this and how using influence to change the auto completes in Google. Is there any chance Google is also dividing the lists from a Geographical location. So users on the East Coast might see something different than the West Coast. I also wonder if Google takes local search over regional. That could also make the auto completes different based on location. Just curious...
Algorithm Updates | | cbielich0 -
Ranking well for main key terms but site traffic has dropped sharply?
Hello All, Just a quick question. Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings. The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change) I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories. Put in place before I started here 🐵 Any help truly appreciated. Regards Tim
Algorithm Updates | | TimHolmes0