Puzzling Penalty Question - Need Expert Help
-
I'm turning to the Moz Community because we're completely stumped. I actually work at a digital agency, our specialism being SEO. We've dealt with Google penalties before and have always found it fairly easy to identify the source the problem when someone comes to us with a sudden keyword/traffic drop.
I'll briefly outline what we've experienced:
We took on a client looking for SEO a few months ago. They had an OK site, with a small but high quality and natural link profile, but very little organic visibility. The client is an IT consultancy based in London, so there's a lot of competition for their keywords. All technical issues on the site were addressed, pages were carefully keyword targeted (obviously not in a spammy way) and on-site content, such as services pages, which were quite thin, were enriched with more user focused content. Interesting, shareable content was starting to be created and some basic outreach work had started.
Things were starting to pick up. The site started showing and growing for some very relevant keywords in Google, a good range and at different levels (mostly sitting around page 3-4) depending on competition. Local keywords, particularly, were doing well, with a good number sitting on page 1-2. The keywords were starting to deliver a gentle stream of relevant traffic and user behaviour on-site looked good.
Then, as of the 28th September 2015, it all went wrong. Our client's site virtually dropped from existence as far as Google was concerned. They literally lost all of their keywords. Our client even dropped hundreds of places for their own brand name. They also lost all rankings for super low competition, non-business terms they were ranking for.
So, there's the problem. The keywords have not shown any sign of recovery at all yet and we're, understandably, panicking. The worst thing is that we can't identify what has caused this catastrophic drop. It looks like a Google penalty, but there's nothing we can find that would cause it. There are no messages or warnings in GWT. The link profile is small but high quality. When we started the content was a bit on the thin side, but this doesn't really look like a Panda penalty, and seems far too severe. The site is technically sound. There is no duplicate content issues or plaigarised content. The site is being indexed fine. Moz gives the site a spam score of 1 (our of 11 (i think that's right)). The site is on an ok server, which hasn't been blacklisted or anything.
We've tried everything we can to identify a problem. And that's where you guys come in. Any ideas? Anyone seen anything similar around the same time? Unfortunately, we can't share our clients' site's name/URL, but feel free to ask any questions you want and we'll do our best to provide info.
-
Thanks again Marie!
You've been really helpful, and it's much appreciated. Unfortunately, we've still not found anything that could cause the issue. That thread shared was really interesting, but their problems was quite different to ours. They lost traffic immediately after moving their hosting, whereas our client lost traffic 2-3 weeks after moving server. I'm still not ruling out the possibility that this could've been the catalyst that set off the big drop. We're stumped; but still dedicating time into solving this issue.
I'd love to drop the client's URL in here but I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate us sharing it in this way. The only alternative would be to DM it to someone who knew what they were talking about.
-
Also...if it helps, I found this thread very interesting when it comes to troubleshooting big drops following a server change:
-
If you've recently moved to a new server, has the page load time been affected much? Do you see anything on a DNS check such as here:
I understand the hesitance in adding a clients' url. I would likely only do so with the clients' permission.
One final thought - I had said that there were no major algo shifts that I was aware of on September 28, but then Alan Bleweiss tweeted about a client who saw a big jump up on that day:
https://twitter.com/AlanBleiweiss/status/656201424439746560
He had wondered if it was a Panda related change.
Yesterday I finally saw one of my clients make a big jump up in what appears to be a Panda recovery. We may be moving to the point where we can't pin down Panda hits and recoveries to just one day. I'm not saying it's Panda for sure though. To drop to the degree that you have and not even have the brand ranking at all you'd have to have really really significant Panda issues.
-
Hi Maria
Thank you very much for the detailed suggestions. The site doesn't use AJAX much/at all, but I'd missed this piece of news, so thank you.
You've kind of echoed our conclusions, but we're still no closer to a solution. The only thing we have done recently is move the client onto a new server. Can you think of any reason that this might have caused our issues? We've checked the server isn't blacklisted or anything obvious like that.
We're a bit reticent to share a clients' URL on here. From your experience, are the community respectful of this information? The last thing we want is our client being cold called after someone has found there URL here!
-
Hi Andrew
Thanks for the help. Reassuring to hear we're not alone! We'll be sure to check the recommended tool!
-
Hi Tom
Thank you very much for the advice. We've ruled out points 1) & 3). We've had nothing in GWT. We've used several tools to check our link profile, including Ahrefs, looking in-depth at all aspects of the profile.
We've been pretty darn thorough with our checks, but there remains a small chance the site could've been hacked and we've not yet picked up on this. Malicious digital activity changes all the time, so I suppose this could be a result of something we've not seen before (though it's unlikely). Have you got any tips for identifying such activity (apart from the obvious (eg. inbound/outbound links)?
-
What a frustrating situation.
Does the site rely on AJAX much? In late September, early October a lot of sites that relied on AJAX saw their sites drop out of search. It was first noticed with WIX sites, but many other sites had the same issue:
https://www.seroundtable.com/wix-google-deindex-21034.html
There was no major shakeup of Panda/Penguin in late September. It's possible that there were some small Panda ripples but I haven't seen any cases of sites plummeting in search because of Panda recently.
I echo the advice to check for hacked pages.
I'd also have a good look for things like a change in design, url structure, etc. I've seen quite a few sites who somehow accidentally noindexed half their site by backing up legacy code or making a similar error. I'd also re-evaluate your robots.txt page and do some fetch and render as Googlebot on the pages that aren't ranking well to see if you can see obvious issues.
With a big drop like this my money would be on a technical error in the site. It really doesn't sound like a Penguin/Panda problem to me. That said, if none of these tips help, sharing the url in this forum will get you some more specific advice.
-
We had a similar thing happen with a client a while ago and it was to do with point 3 as mentioned by Tom, it turned out that the site had been hacked and had some very adverse and unwanted links added to the footer that were invisible to the naked eye or by searching the code.
We were recommended a little plugin for chrome called User Agent Switcher which identified and revealed these hidden links on the site, once they were dealt with the site recovered to where it was previously.
-
Hi Adam
First of all - very sorry to see this. Hope you can get them back on their feet.
For something so dramatic, for me it's only ever one of three things:
-
A manual penalty (as notified in GWT)
-
Website has been hacked
-
A penguin penalty
I think with points 1 and 2, you might have already ruled this out, but be absolutely sure. Run every check under the sun to see whether the site was compromised, look for odd URLs that have been created, check Joomla/WP updates (and plugin updates to make sure they're not injecting malicious code) - just anything.
So that leaves us with point 3 - and I know you've mentioned you've looked at the backlinks already, and apologies in advance if this advice is like teaching you to suck eggs. Have you tried every backlink source, not just Moz, but WMT, Majestic and Ahrefs? Have you used tools like Kerboo and URLProfiler for quick classification of the sites? Have you checked the anchor text distribution?
The big calling card for me is the brand name drop - and that the majority of the time relates to a link/spam penalty. If you want, you can PM me the URL and I'll quickly pop it into Majestic and Ahrefs for a bit of further analysis - if anything just for a bit of sense checking.
-
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
-
What is the feeliing of "Here's where our site can help" text links used for conversions?
If you have an ecommerce site that is using editorial content on topics related to the site's business model to build organic traffic and draw visitors who might be interested in using the site's services eventually, what is the SEO (page ranking) impact -- as well as the impact on the visitors' perceptions about the reliability of the information on the site -- of using phrases like "Here is where [our site] can help you." in nearly every article. Note: the "our site" text would be linked in each case as a conversion point to one of the site's services pages to get visitors to move from content pages on a site to the sales pages on the site. Will this have an impact on page rankings? Does it dilute the page's relevance to search engines? Will the content look less authoritative because of the prevalence of these types of links? What about the same conversion links without the "we can help" text - i.e., more natural-sounding links that stem from the flow of the article but can lead interested visitors deeper into the ecommerce section of the site?
Algorithm Updates | | Will-McDermott0 -
To link or redirect? That is the question.
I have a site that I don't really use any longer but still has some okay rankings. I'd like to take advantage of the links point to that site. Is it better to redirect that site to my new one or to just place a link on the homepage pointing to my new site?
Algorithm Updates | | JCurrier0 -
Been Penalized, Starting from Scratch, Need Advice
Good Morning, We've been penalized for unnatural links on the site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e After attempting to contact many of the sites with links pointing at our site, and getting no response, we decided to start from scratch on a new domain : http://goo.gl/XUH3f The first thing I did once the new domain was up was remove all of the unique content (text) from the original site and place it on the new site... I am still having a difficult time getting the new site to rank in the SERPS. Can you guys please provide pointers as to what steps should be taken to get the new domain, http://goo.gl/XUH3f a high ranking in the SERPS? Thanks!!
Algorithm Updates | | Prime850 -
Any health bloggers/writers out there want to help in an experiment?
Hey mozzers, I'm trying a post-penguin experiment with a brand new website. New domain, separate hosting from all my other stuff, all that. It is run on an article script that allows new authors to make articles and post them. It is all health related and there are no other topics. I'm trying to see if a brand new site can get something to rank quickly with no SEO being done. No links of any kind, just social media sharing of articles. Authors can put links in their articles to anywhere they want, so if you want to help your health site out with a link, go for it. I'm looking for any writers who want to join us in this experiment. i figure if we get a lot of content on there, all original, no spun, natural links, we can do well. if so, I'm abandoning all penguin hit domains and starting over. And you all can get some links out of it. I've already got me and my employees, so the more the merrier. Just let me know if interested.
Algorithm Updates | | DanDeceuster2 -
I need help with drastic SERP difference between Bing and Google
One of our sites that has been around for a couple of years has about 60,000 pages showing on google, however, bing only shows 90 pages for the site. This same phenomenon has been happening across the board for our sites. Any ideas to improve our indexing results for bing?
Algorithm Updates | | atuomala0 -
Title Tags and Over Optimization Penalty
In the past, it was always a good thing to put your most important keyword or phrase at the beginning of the Title Tag with the company name at the end. Now according to the over optimization penalty in the Whiteboard Friday video, it seems to be better to be more human and put the company name at the beginning with the keyword or phrase following. Am I understanding this correctly?
Algorithm Updates | | hfranz0 -
Google new update question
I was just reading this, http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/220662 We have our official site, which has 200+ service pages, which we wrote once and we keep doing SEO for them, so they rank high all the time. Now my question is, how does Google handle the site freshness ? Service static pages or if we are adding blog items, then also they consider them as fresh site, right ? So, we dont have to update those service pages, right ?
Algorithm Updates | | qubesys0