Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?

[GeorgFranz]

Hi girls + guys,

a site of us were hit by a google update or a google penalty. We have lost 50% google traffic in one day (25th april, 2012). (Total visitors in average per day: 6k, yesterday: 3k)

It's a german website, so I think google.de (germany) was updated. Our rankings in google.at (austria) are also affected, but it's not that bad as in google.de.

We have not done any specific on page seo activities in the last two months. GWT doesn't have any message for us (no critical errors).

After my first analyse I can say this:

• google has indexed 17k pages (thats fine)
• we are on 1st place with our domain name
• the last three days, the google traffic went up (+20%), but yesterday it was 50% below average (so -70%)
• last week we had a very good day, we had twice the traffic than normal, but this calmed down the following days
• we have lost number no. 1 places at two high traffic keywords. We had these no 1 rankings for years. We have been outranked by two of our competitors, but they have not done any onpage changes.
• We have lost a lot of positions at a lot of keywords. But there are also keywords which moved up.
• We have good content, useres are visiting 5 pages in average.
• No virus, no hacker (no hidden cloaking page)
• it's an old domain (2002)
• Lot of (good) inbound links
• Lot's of likes, g+. Good twitter activty.

So, all in all I think it's more likely a ranking algo change than a penalty (a penalty for what reason?)

My specific question(s): Is there any "check list" which could help me to find out the reason for this mess?

What is the best strategy to regain the positions? New HTML code? New On page seo? (seomoz grades most of our important pages an A)

Any idea would be appreciated!

Best wishes,
Georg.

[csfarnsworth]

dean1986 I totally agree with you.Look at the meta keywords.Are they not part of SEO strategies.Forum posting was used as one of the largest technique of SEO.Than people switch over to blog posting.Than web 2.0 and now guest post/infographics.

Surely the ranking game is not easy by any means and google have to take actions all the time but the day I meet MR MATT always coming up with happy face in videos telling the world EMD is there check out are you down,I shall ask him.MR MATT "why you guys hate spam and index it"?

Who develop natural domain as ranking signal and who said this game is over?

[freestone]

Sorry to hear things are still bad for your site.  We are still suffering reduced traffic and have done a ton of work on backlinks, created a list of very old ugly backlinks and a few new ones that frankly must be negative SEO (yea all you people that want to jump in and say no it is not negative SEO ....that is very rare to non-existent...dont bother....I dont want to hear it....your are wrong...you are as niavie as you are a fool).

We have now sent 1000s of emails and or filled out contact forms for link removals from these sites .....and gues what.....ZERO reponces so we are creating a disavow file and will try and come back here and let you know how it goes.

More on the negative SEO.....we have some recent links (according the MAN himself) that are super suspect.  We did not ask for them and there is really no reason for thse site to link us except competitors trying to pile on the already diminised ranks.  Hey negative SEO guys.....Get a life...

I would love to throttle some penguins.

[GeorgFranz]

Still no progress. So we have decided to rename our main urls and run into the next mess, have a look here: http://www.seo-stories.com/post/31927940673/google-penguin-penalty-duplicate-content-problem

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Andy,

no, thats not the case at my site.

Best wishes,

Georg.

[AndyMacLean]

Do you rely on branded keywords for which you arent the brand owner? Ive seen alot of movement for these kinds of terms recenty.

[GeorgFranz]

Oh, very cool site! Thanks for the info!

[freestone]

Our rankings are still fluctuating wildly.  Up and down 10 to 35 places from Moz campaign crawl to the next crawl.   This has been going on for months.  It makes little sense.  A keyword that is up 10 one crawl might be down 35 the next and the same keyword might then be up 45 in the next crawl.  It is just non sense.

Are others experiencing this crazy swing up and down ?

[Dr-Pete]

Definitely some turbulence at the end of July, and around Panda 3.9. If you haven't seen it, keep an eye on our new project, MozCast:

http://mozcast.com/

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Peter,

were there any major google ranking updates in the last days? (end of july?)

Best wishes,
Georg.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Steven,

in the last days it got even worse (!). We lost the number 1 position of our main keyword. Also keyword combinations. So we have lost again half of our remaining traffic.

I am pretty frustrated, I need some time to analyze this new situation. I will post the new findings here in some days.

Best wishes,

Georg.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Grace,

thanks for your long post and for sharing your experience! Well, I am using a different software / content mangement system, so I am not able to have the same issue as you.

Best wishes,
Georg.

[StevenvanVessum]

Hey Georg,

I was just reading this thread and was wondering if you're back on top again.

Is there any change since the end of april?

Bye, Steven

[gracessweetlife]

Hi Georg, let me begin by stating I am new to SEOmoz and quite a newbie when it comes to SEO but I too was hit terribly at the end of April. I'm not sure if my situation could also be the reason for your issues. I thought I would throw it in the mix just in case because through my search for answers I found many others were experiencing the same issues and because of the algorithm changes most were faced with the question "Did I get hit by Google?" My site dropped out of search, pages where I once appeared on the first page were either on page 55 or I couldn't find them or I gave up looking after page 60. I would search for exact post title and either I wouldn't appear or my homepage would appear. I reached out to my web developer and he insisted that it was probably a penalization from Google. I didn't believe it could be true because I never participated in any type of link programs, I didn't know what cloaking meant and I couldn't redirect a url even if I wanted to. Then I received a crawl error for this page /wpp-app.php/service. I reached out to the developer again and he stated that Google should not be crawling that page. I remembered the developer had performed quite a few plugin updates and I think there may have also been a WordPress update around the same time. Through my search I ran across the SEOmoz keyword analysis tool, when I tried to enter one of my keywords it wouldn't return a report. After trying several keyword density tools and not being able to run a report I looked into my page code and I found that my All In One SEO plugin was no longer loading properly and apparently it had a conflict with WP Super Cache. It started to make sense because at one time Google would return my generated meta description whenever I entered a keyword into search now they were generating a snippet. Also none of my SEO titles were displaying. I also found that my sitemap was not updating properly. That's when I ran across this thread - http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/o9VYAneofdM As it turns out there was a problem with the plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) already generating a virtual robots.txt. Also I found with the updates changes had been made to my .htaccess code. In fact, Antonio, the WP htaccess Control plugin developer jumped in to help me (thank God). He changed my robots.txt to add blocking for the /wpp-app.php/service. Within two weeks my pages started to return in search, in fact the other day I started searching for each of my posts and they all seem to have returned to where they once were. I was very concerned because none of my posts published from May 12 on had page rank but Stuart Kerr (a member here) told me that the page rank toolbar tool doesn't update daily but a new update should be coming through soon. I am hoping that each of the new pages will rank once the update is in place. Through all of the researching I decided to reach out to Google to inquire about a manual penalization and thankfully they returned with "no manual site penalization". It's taken from the beginning of May up until just a couple of days ago to get this issue cleared up. I may be totally off base and I apologize if I am but is it possible that you could be experiencing the same? I've read through all the comments above but unfortunately I don't understand most of the discussion but I would feel terrible if I didn't mention my experience just in case it could be the answer to your problem.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Roy,

yep, the turnover also went down. But not 50% but like 35%. We are still working very hard to get the turnaround...

Best wishes,

Georg.

[AgentsofValue]

Hi Georg, That's a huge decline, isn't it? But how about your conversion? If the decline did not cause a big impact to your ROI then I think there is nothing to worry that much. If it did, then there is really something wrong going on.

What I would recommend is that you review you Google Analytics (or any other analytics tool you are using) and determine which particular pages got the biggest declines (you can run the comparison feature of GA - like this month vs. last month) and try to check if these pages are still indexed on Google, try to check also if these pages still rank on your targeted keywords. Then do what is necessary to bounce back.

Regards,

Roy

[freestone]

At the heart of every algo change is revenue not fairness.  To believe otherwise is to be naive.

[luwhosjack]

Hi Matthew, these are good tips but what if you have a news site with a load of different content that has been hit? You can't make sure that words don't come up more than a couple of times in titles or you would end up not writing about things. Any ideas there as we seem to be being hit with the penalty stick also.

We haven't done link building full stop and only have a few hundred links to us that are organic

[luwhosjack]

I agree with your point about the aim of websites. Google penalising low text when a lot of sites are there and enjoyed by people because they are image heavy - they don't want a load of text. Or news sites, they may just want short snappy news in one place they like going to but a lot of small news sites (like my own although we have a lot of comment also) seem to be being hit.

[seo-wanna-bs]

As the drop coincides perfectly with Penguin, then it's definitely a backlink issue.

[seo-wanna-bs]

That's nonsense. Talk to Google about what? The automatic penalty that was applied? That apparently they cannot do anything about.

It's nice that you presume those that have been hit, have done something wrong. It seems common among those who have managed to dodge Panda, to presume they safe and that the rest of the world has done something to deserve their fate.

In my niche, it's image heavy and low on textual content. This is by nature and not due to any wrong doing. My user metrics are amazing and yet my website was hit by Panda recently.

I don't want to come across as being harsh, but I do feel your response was a little presumptuous and insensitive.

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Agreed.  Except I refuse to spend more on Google PPC - I went the other way and reduced spend.  If they penalize us for no reason the last thing I want to do is give them money!  I could understand if we intentionally did something wrong, but that fact that a dozen top webmasters have all given different advice and can't point to anything concreate leads me to believe that everyone is to some extent guessing (even though some thoughts were excellent and everyone was well intentioned).

[freestone]

+1 on the same thing happened to a few sites we work on.  We have now made all the changes we can to on-page and technical and will let that stew for a few weeks before we consider anything else.  Some traffic has returned but there is a long way to go.

In the mean time spending non-ROI money on PPC.  Ugh

Would sure be nice if the webmaster tool recommendations would keep sync with Algorithmic changes so you could properly react to all the silly black and white creatures.

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Hi Georg, I read through these posts and felt as though our issues are almost identical.  I got hit a month or two ago and wasn't sure why.  We have been in business for years and never had an issue (of course our rankings have moved up and down over the years). We lost (like no where to be found) at least two huge keywords on our home page and about 25% of our overall business.  I have 5 people and already had to lay off one. The scary part is we have no idea why.  While I am sure we are doing some things wrong, we don't know what.  I have had a bunch of great suggestions and have been addressing them (but everyone has a different thought as to what is causing it).  Still no luck with getting the keywords back. I have reduced keywords, reduce crawl errors, changed content, etc, etc.

I will keep watching this thread in the hope that I learn something as panic is an understatement at this point!

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Peter,

thanks for the link!

Well, that are really bad news

Quote:

• Wait for news of a future Penguin Update and see if you recover after it happens
• If it doesn’t, try further cleaning or consider starting over with a fresh site

We can't change the domain - that is our brand...

Do you know the cycle of the panda updates? What do you think, when will be the next penguin update?

The good news this week: Some of our rankings are coming back slowly.

Best wishes,

Georg.

[Dr-Pete]

Good additional info on Penguin from Danny Sullivan today:

http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463

Looks like it is on an "offline" data update, like Panda. So, recovery could be delayed in many cases.

[Dr-Pete]

For everyone's privacy/security, we'd prefer you not share emails and account info via Public Q&A. Please use the private messaging system. Thanks.

[ypl]

Hi Josh,

Our site was also hit.  Will you take a look at our site: www. butterflycraze.com

[BrianCC]

"...Internal anchor text (linking within your site) is rarely penalized."

I agree that it's rarely penalized, but based on some things I'm seeing, I think a site with exceptionally high percentages of exact match internal anchor text links to category pages can (perhaps unintentionally) be caught in the Penguin net. Not conclusive just yet, but it really looks like this is the case with a site I'm working on.

The term "collateral damage" comes to mind.

[GeorgFranz]

Here is the complete analysis why we have lost our rankings: http://www.seo-stories.com/post/22524770229/how-to-get-back-the-rankings-after-the-penguin-update

Furthermore I've described all our actions so far to regain our rankings after the penguin ate the half of our fish.

[diywm]

I took  "simply falling down in the SERPs" to mean that it's preferable to an actual penalty. We are all rising or falling in the SERPs for every keyword every day according to what changes happen in and around our sites and in and around other people's sites.

Google is trying to use a bunch of signals to imply authority and quality and along the way they are bound to judge some well intentioned sites wrongly.   Someone I know has a site full of original and useful content. But he also has a whole bunch of duplicate content pages lying around which he forgot about from months ago, and a long list of duplicated archive pages due to poor use of tags in WordPress.  He's placed a large ad above the fold on every page and has a high code to content ratio on the page. He has poor but not non-existent social interaction on his site and his site as a home-made feel to it - it also looks dis-organised - which I tend to think prevents people from ever engaging with his stuff as they can't see the article for all the surrounding clutter.  He uses GA so G knows about his bounce rate too.   You can't fault him on his content, but in the past when he didn't know better he did some fake link building but he doesn't do it any more.

He lost 75% of his traffic on 24th April.   At least if this a result of  "simply falling down in the SERPs", he can simply climb back up with a  few changes. Except for the bad links.

I'm not sure what anyone can do about those, but then I am (reliably) told Penguin had nothing to do with inbound links.

Liz

[gXe]

I'm an SEO and during our monthly reporting it became very clear that we were effected by Penguin. I did a search on two of our larger clients for 4/23 through 4/27 and it was like a spiral into h@#$&. We don't believe it was from on-page SEO and we are HUGE white hat proponents, but it would appear that our meta tags may be the culprit.

We are being proactive with our clients and telling them about the update and that they are going to notice alot of downward rankings. In the meantime, a lot of sleepless nights rewriting code and content. Ahh, the joy of being an SEO.

Does anyone know if we need to be proactive in resubmitting the sites in Webmaster Tools, or on a waiting game to see if the changes have been picked up in a positive way?

[sunny.popali]

Good start at SEO Stories, good place for many affected sites... We have seen all drops everywhere... any front runners ?

[dean1986]

good observation. let us know how you get on. Thanks

[GeorgFranz]

Hi girls & boys,

today, I've made some on page analysis. I've found out that Google is delivering the "wrong" page from our site at several keywords.

I think this is a very strong signal that onpage optimization is penalized in some way.

But have a look at my new blog post:

Penguin ranking analysis - downgraded due to on page over optimization

Best wishes,
Georg.

[dean1986]

HI Rand, I understand where you are coming from as SEOmoz is a white hat community. However, when I started my business and did not know anything about SEO, I used these spam techniques for the simple reason I didnt know any better and thought that was SEO. Does this make me bad? I dont think it does. Since then, 5 years ago I have come a long way in SEO and consider myself a white hat marketer.

I wouldn't want to put my business at risk with dodgy SEO techniques. However, I did when I was clueless. Now I want to fix it. I'm sure many webmasters on this forum are on the same boat as me.

[AlanMosley]

I believe you are right, i think i have a site that is been hit, yet I cant see what couild be wrong.

Maybe i spoke too soon

[GeorgFranz]

Hi girls and guys,

nothing has been changed so far. But I've written a new blog post:

After the penguin update disaster: Confessions of a bad seo guy: http://www.seo-stories.com/post/22062656569/after-the-penguin-update-disaster-confessions-of-a-bad

@ Alan: In this post I've described the reasons of our activities.

Best wishes,
Georg.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Alan,

if it would be that easy...

I will write a blog post about all our seo activities in the past years and the reason why we did this. I would ask you again after you know all details...

@ Rand: Thanks! Well, it took 3h to have a domain, a website and got alltogether into the google index... I wrote a separate blog post about that

Best wishes,

Georg.

[AlanMosley]

You must remember, that those that have been penalized, have been taking ranking from those that have been doing the right thing, If you rankings came from spam tacktics, you may not have deserved the #1 rankings you had.

If you had come to this forum over the last few years and taken the advice given, you may not have been penalized.

If you really believe that you have done nothing wrong, then you need to talk to google.

[randfish]

Hi Dean - not sure we could (or would want to) segment Q+A or the blog/YOUmoz to create a sub-section specifically about sites being penalized by Google spam updates. However, it sounds like some folks in this thread, like Georg below, may take this upon themselves (which is awesome).

Little known story - SEOmoz's more prominent focus on community began in earnest after a large exodus of members from another forum way back in 2004.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi girls + boys,

after being so frustraded about this penguin update, I've started a blog today: The SEO Stories (@SEOStories)

I will there report my activities to bring my site back to the top rankings. I would be glad about some support...

I hope, you will like my kind of humour...

http://www.seo-stories.com/post/21985421183/google-called-the-25th-april-2012-ranking-update

Best wishes,
Georg.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Josh,

thank you very much for your analysis!!!

How do you find out if a page / domain is "spam flagged"? Do they harm our site?

Best wishes,

Georg.

[Dr-Pete]

It's hard to tell without seeing your copy, but it sounds like you're talking about internal links within your own site. Google is talking about outbound links. Internal anchor text (linking within your site) is rarely penalized.

[Dr-Pete]

Just want to let people know that I believe this is just an overall quality control form. It's worth a try, but I don't expect they'll take action on individual sites (I could be wrong, but don't get your hopes up, in other words).

[GeorgFranz]

Hi,

now I've removed a lot of seo onpage tweaks. We will see if this would help something. I will write a detailled report later on.

Best wishes,
Georg.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Josh,

have a look here:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/schicksal.com

Best wishes,

Georg.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Josh,

it's www.schicksal.com

I've altered the source code meanwhile, I've removed some keyword links. I will report this later on.

Best wishes,

Georg.

[AlanMosley]

The update he is refereing to is for un-natural text, keyword stuffing, i dont think he has anything to worry about there, un-natural in-links is another story

[GeorgFranz]

More info about penguin at search engine land - Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice