Can Very High Impressions and 0% Organic CTR Impact our SEO Rankings?

[plumrocket1]

I have a very strange feeling that someone bad is trying to hurt our company, but maybe I am wrong. Let me explain.

In the last two month, we have seen a very significant drop in sales on our website, but we couldn't figure out why. We have looked at different metrics (Google Search Console, Moz, Google Analytics), but everything looked alright. We had 10% loss in traffic, but we didnt believe at the time that it could be the main issue.

Just yesterday we've discovered the following (please see attached screenshot

1. On August 18, 2018 Google launched Search Update
2. On the same date, we had a jump in Organic Search Impressions for one particular keyword, which we never tracked before: "free facebook login".
3. Majority of all impressions (233,000 out of 258,000) were from Philippines.
4. Very low total number of clicks (50 clicks) led to 0% Average CTR for this keyword. Which in return, also lowered our global CTR by 1%.
5. One month later we had 1000's of spam emails sent to our Helpdesk from two IP addresses, also from Philippines. We blocked them of course.

It could be all coincidence. I dont know. But do you think that someone can use this fraudulent tactic to lower our CTR and drop our ranking and traffic? Can this influence our SEO in any way?

It's also possible that someone is attacking Facebook and we just happen to be there, on the first page, for the same keyword. Should we try to eliminate our page for this keyword and see what happens?

I've checked this article from Rand Fishkin - https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday and it seems that CTR is an important factor. However the article is from 2015 and maybe it's no longer relevant.

What should we do? Thanks!

G86Nge4

[Everett]

Oleh, I think it would be safe for you to try to eliminate ranking for that keyword. With that low CTR, If you don't do it then Google will do it for you, which would be worse.

It is my understanding that CTR is a signal, but that if someone is manipulating it they would have to keep doing it for the long run in order for it to stay effective. It wouldn't be a permanent thing, as you would slowly rise up again when the attack stopped.

You wouldn't be the first or the last to block all traffic from the Philippines. I'd start there.

That said, I have no idea what the title and description are in the SERPs, or what the landing page is, or if the content is relevant to that query. All of these things matter.

Also, I have doubts that CTR for a single page or query by itself would cause a 10% drop in traffic across the site, even if the global CTR did lower because of it. As Roman suggested, have a very close look at your link profile using a tool like Link Detox or Moz Link Explorer, just in case they are hitting you there as well.

[Everett]

Hello Oleh,

It could be that you just started ranking for that term in that country (for any number of reasons), and therefore the spammers took notice and started emailing you. It really is hard to say without knowing the page, but Roman has some good advice. I'm not entirely sold on Disavow files, but you should definitely look to see if you have new links from domains in the Philippines.

You can also block traffic from that country if you don't think you'll ever get any customers from there.

[Roman-Delcarmen]

First of all these the checkpoints that you need track

• You need to carefully check all your link-profile looking for spam links pointing to your site
• Disavow all those links with a high toxic score/spam score. Disavow Tool
• Check all the anchor text and queries on your Search Console, GA, Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush or any other tool.
• Also, start to think of creating some geo-IP segmentation on your server
• Try to find a pattern on the IP address of your visitor and block all the suspicious IP or even regions

Hope this info helps you to answer to your question

Regards and Good Luck