Traffic dropped 75% - Panda 2 Penalized?
-
Hello everyone,
My e-commerce website traffic dropped by 75% overnight, on April 12th. The website has been around since 2003 and growing every year. Over the years gained some great placement for some competitive keywords and stayed on page 1 for some time. After the Panda update, some of our major keywords dropped from page 1 to page 10. The first Panda update had a slightly negative effect on us, by bumping up all the brand's websites (brands we carry) placing the brands in the first couple positions (giving them 2-3 first spots) pushing us down. However, the Panda 2 killed us.
I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on my situation.
Did anyone ever have luck or would recommend contacting Google, and asking them for advise or reasons why the site was dropped.
The website in question is www.instyleswimwear.com
Thanks in advance,
Alex -
You're welcome Alex.
Actually my recommendation is to not noindex category or pagination pages. They each need a unique title, meta description & h1 tag, and categories need quality descriptive content on the 1st (default) page in the pagination sequence.
I would not have that content repeat on subsequent pages in category pagination sequence - allowing each of those to stand alone as supporting pages - the unique products on each should be enough to communicate uniqueness of content if you've got thumbnails and captions for each.
I would use noindex/follow on all other filter types though, or block those filters from search bots altogether (it's easier to do noindex/follow).
-
Alan,
Thanks for your help. Recent post by Dr. Pete had some great pointers as well. In reference to the pagination and category pages, do you recommend NOINDEXing them?
-
Alex
content scraping is a challenge, to say the least. going after scrapers is monumental. I bet they scraped by sucking up the feed that bizrate uses. The best defense against such action is to provide a different description to bizrate than that which you use on the site. Yes, it's more work, however it can help a lot.
Whether Google recognizes bizrate for what it is or not, I honestly don't know. I do know that the overriding scrape issue and the potential that bizrate's pages are battling yours dictates the two different description solution.
-
Alan,
Thanks so much for taking the time to check out my site. I didn't think of searching exact match on descriptions. But now that I did, I see the same site (with different domain) scraped my site and using my product descriptions.
hoodieswebsitedesigner.com, <cite>coolauthentichoodies.com, etc.</cite>
In addition, I found another online store that are steeling our descriptions, <cite>summerfashionshop.com</cite>
And finally, as you have pointed out, Bizrate also shows up, however these are our listings on Bizrate.
Having all this data, what can I do about Google seeing my site as the content owner. And also, does Google realize that Bizrate uses our descriptions, since they are linking back to our product pages?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Alex
-
Great Insight Alan. Awesome observation! Ecommerce websites are faced with faceted navigation, duplicate content and canonical URL issues. Thats why ecommerce websites are more prone to relegation on Google updates.
Something has to change drastically on the way ecommerce websites exist. Otherwise, Google may end up delisting or relegating a huge number of such websites.
-
Alex,
I've had the opportunity (misfortune?) to perform audits on a few ecommerce sites that saw a major hit due to Panda. I can tell you that Google set up a mechanism for submitting your site to let them know. You won't however, get individual site reconsideration, you'll simply be giving them an opportunity to include your site in their ongoing evaluation process. And be able to commiserate with others.
Taking a quick look at your site here's a few factors:
**1. Duplicate product descriptions. **
I pulled up a random product on your site and did an exact match search for the first line in the product description. I got your site among some bizrate.com listings, and a couple rogue sites.
Having a truly unique description for every product page is critical. It should be at least a few paragraphs long. Yes, that's a massive time-suck. However it's one of the most significant factors in the long list of factors.
2. Topical Confusion
With so many sorting options included in primary navigation (New Arrivals, full catalog, Sale, Final Sale links up top as well as the entire left sidebar navigation that's site-wide), you're not doing anything to help Google comprehend content relationships that are unique on the site. Many of these pages are purely pagination with no unique content other than product images, a one word product name, and price. There's no way any of that content can stand out as truly strong content pages uniquely identified to a particular set of important phrases.
There's also no navigation breadcrumbs, which would reinforce topical relationship focus and separation.
3. Inbound Link Profile
A quick check in OpenSiteExplorer.org shows the majority of links contain "swimsuit" anchor text. Overall, there are hardly any phrases built around variations such as "bikinis" or "women's bathing suits" or any of countless other variations - without that breadth, your site is too heavy on too few variations.
That's just an overview that should get you going in the right direction, however it's just what stood out in a quick review.
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
-
Spam Direct Traffic
Hello, Lately, I have been receiving a big amount of unexpected direct traffic from Boston. After analyzing with Analytivs, this is what I get (please, check attachment). Normally I would be blocking this traffic source straight away from my Google Analytics account, and also blocking this traffic from accesing my servers, but check out the analytic metrics: this traffic represents 12% of my total traffic right now!!! av. session duration is 4:53 !! bounce rate is 72% !!!! pages/session 1.44 !! Service provider is "Microsoft Corporation" who looks like one of the typical spammy service providers. My question is, is this a bot?? what do you think ? Thanks, Luis zUlVHIi
Reporting & Analytics | | Yeeply.com1 -
Help! Need to Get Traffic Back Up in Saturated Market
I was looking in one of my client's Google Analytics profiles, and noticed that they had two major drops in traffic before we started working with them—and they've never really recovered. The first, and most significant drop was around January 2015. And then the again, but not as drastic of a drop, was around September 2015. They are a heating and cooling company, but they are located out west so this shouldn't be a seasonality thing. Here is a link to what the BIG drop is traffic looks like in January 2015: http://imgur.com/a/Y1s8U To get a clearer picture, here are the numbers for the overall website traffic:
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueCorona
September 1, 2015 - September 30, 2015: 30,923 sessions
September 1, 2015 - September 30, 2016: 13,768 sessions Year over year traffic to the website dropped by 55%. Here is a link to what year over year looks like in Google Analytics: http://imgur.com/a/TPdJQ Like I said, we weren't working with them at the time so I don't know specifics about what might have caused this, but their numbers have never even come close to reaching what they used to be prior to the noticeable drop after September 2015. Does anyone have any insights into why this might be? Was there an algorithm change back then that could still be impacting them? Any ideas how to get them back to where they once were? Any input is greatly appreciated! Thanks.1 -
Bot Traffic Higher Than Unfiltered?
We filtered bot traffic from one of our Google Analytics accounts and traffic is higher than with the unfiltered view. Does anyone have an idea what might be causing this?
Reporting & Analytics | | Leithmarketing0 -
Filter the Spam traffic
Hello everyone, We have to filter traffic from spam website like webcrawler.com semalt.com social-button.com etc. So we created custom filter with Filter field: referral Filter Pattern: Webcrawler.com|semalt.com|in-g61.mail.yahoo.com|d47c5f40.linkbucks.com|buttons-for-website.com|semalt.semalt.com|forum.topic34157145.darodar.com|social-buttons.com While verification of filter there is error displaying i.e. This filter would not have changed your data. Either the filter configuration is incorrect, or the set of sampled data is too small. Please help in resolving issue..
Reporting & Analytics | | Obbserv0 -
Google Shopping tracking as organic traffic - help!
Hey guys, I have an eCommerce client who sometimes runs Google PLA and Google Shopping campaigns. However, we don't run his AdWords for him, just do his SEO. At the moment, the Shopping campaigns track as organic traffic within Analytics. And I can't see any way to change this! It's so infuriating. How do I change this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | jasarrow0 -
Why do I have a lot of direct traffic from MSN and Yahoo with 100% bounce rate?
For MSN I have about 8000 hits of one page and a 100% bounce rate. In the last month I have about 400 hits from Yahoo with a 100% bounce rate. Msn is all different pages, while Yahoo is all the home page. What would cause this?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
Hi, I'm unsure if I've been hit by penguin/panda. I've attached screenshots below. The first one is April 1st to today. The second is all of April and the 3rd is 1st June to today. The site was offline at the beginning of July which explains no traffic. My traffic took a dip though on April 6th which as I understand it wasn't a panda/penguin roll out? I then got hardly any traffic for May to mid June. Then the site was offline due to a server problem but when it came back on traffic was the highest it has ever been. Today however I am getting zero search engine traffic? I can't figure out what's going on. Can anyone shed any light on the issue? DTJXE DTJXE Dpj21 qHTpj
Reporting & Analytics | | SamCUK0 -
How Can I Record .zip Traffic in Google Analytics
The company I am with shows traffic coming in to .zip files in Google Analytics. The traffic being recorded stopped a while back, but I know people are still downloading/visiting these .zip ULRs. I'm not sure how they were recording/tracking the .zip URLs (in Analytics) before, but I'd like to track them once again. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | poolguy0