Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?
-
no one has actually said to do anything but wait, I will go against the fold and say strip out all those adsense units down the left and maybe even dump that sharing tool bar at the bottom of the page, you already have a load of social sharing buttons on each page and that bar at the bottom looks like its holding up load times.
Go into webmaster tools and request a crawl.
-
I wouldn't be surprised Alan looking at his website that a lot of links were built naturally by people linking to his site as it looks like a good resource.
I've got a website were I built some links to gain a good position and left it, over a few months that exposure built tons of new links without me knowing from all over the web.
Now if those little sites have been hit, lets say a fair amount had been wiped out then I can see how rankings could be lost.
-
i dont think what you have is wrong at all. nor do i think the google example affects you.
Do not use read more, as you want to pass relevant link text to the page.
I think Bobs advice is need edhere, dont panic.
-
After a very hard night and a lot of thinking, I've an idea.
We are using a lot of "keyword links" on our site.
It's - by the way - http://www.schicksal.com - an astrology site. We have lost 72% visibility - according to figures of sistrix.com.
So, we are doing this:
Zodiacs
Description of Zodiacs
Now a list with zodiacs
Aries (longer, descriptive title
short description of aries
In that case the "aries" keyword in the description is getting the link to the article.
I think, google doesn't like this after pengiun.
So, what is better:
a)
Aries
description
b)
Aries
description ... read more
What do you think?
Best wishes,
Georg.
-
Google provides a form where you can them that your site was hit by error: http://searchengineland.com/penguin-update-peck-your-site-by-mistake-googles-got-a-form-for-that-119698
-
Damn, it's the penguin update...
http://searchengineland.com/the-penguin-update-googles-webspam-algorithm-gets-official-name-119623
-
Dear Dean, i know it mean a lot and its a pain in the A**, i hope my comment didnt offended you.
However , u might want to take advantage of that time to review your linking neighboor , your on-site optimisation and all your website agnosic features.
It happenned to me too , but after some long hours , i was able to get back where i was before the BOOM. Good luck , im sure you can do it too !
A little wink wink that i can give , is that on my side , i moved away from html 4 to html 5 to better segment my website with
<header>,
<footer>,
<hgroup>and so on.
Best regards,
Yan Desjardins
</hgroup>
</footer>
</header>
-
"simply fell down in the SERP"
you say it like it means nothing....
-
Your websiteis not de-indexed from google , it simply fell down in SERP as you still show for your branded keywords..
Did You recieve any sort of notice in Google Webmasters Tools ?
Regards ,
Yan Desjardins
-
Yes just noticed, i thought we were all talking of the last over-op update
-
already mentioned on the post Alan
-
I wonder if anyone noticed this update http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
should be hitting now
-
The so-called "over-optimization" penalty definitely hit hard, sometime between 4/24-4/25. It is possible to see Google make a correction, but it doesn't appear that there were major changes between 4/25-4/26. Of course, this just happened, so we don't have much data.
Given the large scale of the drop and that this is a confirmed algorithm change, I think you have to start there. This is the official post from Google and I see that someone has already linked to Rand's post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
Look specifically at the terms that dropped. Are you aggressively targeting those terms (with keyword stuff, inbound anchor text, etc.)? I think the "Don't Panic" advice has some merit - if you over-optimize to reverse over-optimize, you've just made even more of a mess. I'm not saying to sit on your hands, but dig deep into the analysis and put together a reasonable plan of attack - don't just start changing things at random.
-
Hi,
thanks for all responses so far!
I've looked in our access stats... Today we will have less visitors than yesterday, so the nitemare is still not over...
I don't think it's a good idea to wait some days and do nothing. There must be a reason for this - a penalty or a ranking algo change. And the only way around is to remove the "thing" which caused the mess.
Possibly reasons:
- Over optimized on page (could be) - restructure site and recode html
- Bad links (can't be removed easily) which are punished by google
I can't restructure / recode the site within days but within 1-2 weeks. If we get back the top positions meanwhile, I will also apply the new code to be fit for the future.
Have I overseen a thing?
Best wishes,
Georg.
-
The reason is probably -
Giving someone blanket advice that is only partially helpful is not good...
So he waits a week, and has done no research into what may have caused this, what then? Panic?
I would fully agree that panicing is the wrong idea, but so is sitting around doing nothing, as an agency - it is very easy for a person to say - just wait it out, but as a consumer what does that mean - sit around and do nothing, or proactivlely begin researching the possible causes?
So I would think a more correct answer IMHO to someone who is new to the game, would be...
Don't panic, but don't be complacent - Begin researching your tactics over the past years, your link profile your on page seo ect.. so in a few weeks IF it does not "Magically" clear itseld you can have a clear actionable plan to begin responding - two weeks of no money coming in could mean death for a business.... So why would you not begin researching while "wating"
I also do not think the "dust" will settle, this is an ongoing battle, and will be for some time to come - so waiting a few weeks on a site that = livelyhood is not a smart decision either
IMHO of course
-
I don't see why this is getting downvoted. Traditionally Google does make corrections after a significant update. The website in question is still receiving traffic and isn't completely out of the index, and could very well see the rankings go back in a week or two.
If you panic and start making site changes immediately, you may not know what the cause of the problem was. If you go and change title tags, remove some spammy looking links, change the anchor text and a handful of other things you would not know which was effective and which wasn't.
It's like pulling your goalie in hockey after going down 2-0 in the first 5 minutes. Let the updates play themselves out for a week or two and go from there.
-
Yes, that's what I would advise.
I think a lot of us have been hit with this. Just try and comply with Google as much as possible, and I think the first port of call is all the on-page SEO.
Matt.
-
The best thing you can do right now is nothing. Sit tight for about a week orso, keep an eye on your traffic and serps.Give Google some time to sort itself out and have a look when the dust settles. Don't go into panic mode and start changing all sorts of things - worst thing you can do right now.
-
No, we have no paid links. We have written several articles which were sent to press agencies over the years. Blogs, newspapers, other sites etc. are linking our content.
-
Hi Matt,
thank you for your advices! I will have a look at Rands whiteboard. So your suggestion is to reformat / restructure the html code to get out of this?
Best wishes,
Georg.
-
we need a new sub forum to deal with all this and have all answers and questions in one place.
Peoples business's are being ruined, we need to all come together in one place and learn from each other to get over this as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Please like this and I will email SEOmoz to see will they do it. Thanks
-
Hi Ivo,
thanks for your fast answer and the link to article! We have not done any article spinning (I didn't know about article spinning till last week...). We have not done any link building for the high traffic keywords, but we have done link building for other keywords (which are not affected).
No, we had no break down a month ago, I've attached our analytics...
So, if it's a penalty - what to do?
Best wishes,
Georg.
-
Hi Georg,
I have had the same problem. It is because of the latest update by Google around 'over-optimisation'.
Don't worry though, all is not lost! There are a few things that you need to change:
-
Make sure that your webpage titles are not over-optimised (i.e. 'Free Shoes, New Shoes, Sports Shoes - Shoe Company'). Make sure that they read properly and don't look spammy. Try not to repeat any of the keywords more than once, if at all.
-
Check that all of the links on the page are not suspicious. For example, having loads of anchor text linking to the same page.
-
See what your keyword density is on your webpage and see if you have maybe be keyword stuffing (Google is being a lot harsher and stricter on this now).
-
Go through your img alt attributes and check they are all relevant and not just blatanet attempts to fit in long-tail keywords.
Once you have done this, resubmit the pages to the Google index and hopefully, after a few weeks, you should start regaining some ground. Unfortunately its a bit of a waiting game now, but make sure you do everything you can to show to Google that you are not over-optimising and you should be OK.
Also, take a look at Rand's recent whiteboard Friday which goes over this.
Good luck!
Matt.
-
-
If you have built backlinks from websites that have been hit by the update then basically those backlinks which are helping you to rank have gone and therefore your rankings drop.
When you say 'lots of (good) inbound links' what we talking about directory submissions, guest posts, paid links?
-
Hi Georg,
Looks like a penalty. We have experienced similar things yesterday on a number of websites which we've been adopting overly-aggressive link building tactics and it is a result of a recent google update:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
It is not a result of your onsite SEO. There might be different reasons for it but I do consider it as a result of article spinning which might have been taking part of your link building activities. Especially if the keywords that you lost rankings for have been targeted by such links - spinned content on private or public blog networks.
Have you had some kind of drop in rankings about a month ago for those particular keywords?
Kind regards,
Ivo
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
-
Same search term shows #1 on Bing but #140 on Google?
Hi, I am using the search term of my website domain i.e. "Series Digital" on both Bing and Google. Bing shows my website as the top most link. But on Google, my website appears on page 14!! Why is this happening when I am using the string within the " "?
Algorithm Updates | | Cloudguru990 -
6 year old Corporate domain lost all rankings on EMD day.
Hello, our company's website goo.gl/7Q56G lost all our rankings after the EMD algo update. Our domain is NOT a EMD. At the same time, I found that we have about 6000 new, extremely low quality spam backlinks with the same anchor text ("loan"). I saw some of those a few weeks ago, but didn't really pay much attention because I didn't believe Google would think we build those. I didn't get any messages on webmaster central. If this occurred with the EMD update, is it because of the low quality backlinks? Most of the real spammers, brokers (we are the actual funding source) are now dominating the top 10 for our main keyword "merchant cash advance". We were in the top 10 for the past 4 years, why would we get hit so hard now? I really appreciate your advice.
Algorithm Updates | | DaveMri1 -
Proper Way To Submit A Reconsideration Request To Google
Hello, In previous posts, I was speaking about how we were penalized by Google for unnatural links. Basically 50,000 our of our 58,000 links were coming from 4-5 sites with the same exact anchor text and img alt tags. This obviously was causing our issues. Needless to say, I wen through the complete link profile to determine that all of the links besides this were of natrural origins. My question here is what is the accepted protocol of submitting a reinclusion request; For example, how long should it be? Should I disclose that I was in fact using paid links, and now that I removed (or at least nofollowed) them? I want to make sure that the request as good as it should so I can get our rankings up in a timely manner. Also, how long until the request is typically aknowledged? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BestOdds0 -
Has Google problems in indexing pages that use <base href=""> the last days?
Since a couple of days I have the problem, that Google Webmaster tools are showing a lot more 404 Errors than normal. If I go thru the list I find very strange URLs that look like two paths put together. For example: http://www.domain.de/languages/languageschools/havanna/languages/languageschools/london/london.htm If I check on which page Google found that path it is showing me the following URL: http://www.domain.de/languages/languageschools/havanna/spanishcourse.htm If I check the source code of the Page for the Link leading to the London Page it looks like the following: [...](languages/languageschools/london/london.htm) So to me it looks like Google is ignoring the <base href="..."> and putting the path together as following: Part 1) http://www.domain.de/laguages/languageschools/havanna/ instead of base href Part 2) languages/languageschools/london/london.htm Result is the wrong path! http://www.domain.de/languages/languageschools/havanna/languages/languageschools/london/london.htm I know finding a solution is not difficult, I can use absolute paths instead of relative ones. But: - Does anyone make the same experience? - Do you know other reasons which could cause such a problem? P.s.: I am quite sure that the CMS (Typo3) is not generating these paths randomly. I would like to be sure before we change the CMS's Settings to absolute paths!
Algorithm Updates | | SimCaffe0 -
Google spitting out old data as new alerts
Am I just unlucky or are others seeing this too? I have several google alerts. For the past 6 months, google keeps sending crap along with good stuff. its a bit like their search results. There are three types of Alerts they send that I'm not impressed with. 1. Alerts that are from unintelligible splogs that take real news stories and rewrite them with unintelligible garbage that makes no sense at all. Sometimes, they serve up new alerts from the same splogs I saw several months ago, that I felt sure they would have zapped by now. 2. Old stories, that have been around for months. I just received one that was from January, from TechDirt, a big site that must get a huge amount of attention from google. 3. Irrelevant stories because they love to show how smart they are by splitting my alert keyword text into multiple words, but it gives useless results. This is the kind of stuff that crappy search engines like AltaVista used to do. Is google reverting to the childhood of search with all these changes?
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Domain Name search in google not appearing
My hcg domain doesn't show up in google search. Shows up in new sand image search. If I wrap the domain name in quotes it shows up
Algorithm Updates | | noork0 -
Problems with Google results
Hi Everybody, I ve been dealing with this issue for a while now. i have a multilingual website: www.vallnord.com When a search for Vallnord in Google it always shows the result in Catalan, but it does not show what I specified in the meta description, it displays what it crawls from the home page. I have 2 problems here: It is not showing my meta description. What can I do? It is not showing the language from which the search was made. Example: if you search from Google.com and your default language is english it should been displayed the result from the english HTML. www.vallnord.com/en but it is not like this. It is always the catalan (default language of the site) the one that is displayed. I have tried several things already: Inserting the Hreflang function Changing the descriptions Resubmitting the sitemap via Google Webmaster I can not figure out what is going on because if you search: "Vallnord Castellano" it will display the spanish URL but still not the proper description. Moreover if you search: "www.vallnord.com/es" on google , it will display the proper URL and description. FYI, I am using 301 redirects for the languages: es.vallnord.com it is the sames as www.vallnord.com/es In addition to this, If using Yahoo search engine there is no problem. it will show the proper language. from yahoo.com the first result is in english and from yahoo.es the first result Spanish. So any idea what would be the problem?And furthermore, any Idea which would be the solution? Thanks in advance, Guido.
Algorithm Updates | | SilbertAd0 -
The related: query for one of my urls makes no sense
I'm trying to compete regarding keyword X. Currently, I'm on first page, 7-8th position. If, for each one of the urls listed in first page for such keyword, I search for related:[url], I get similar results for all of them, but mine. Mine shows inconsistent results, none of which related to the same topic as the other 9 in the top 10. Looking at them, the only hypothesis I am able to formulate is that, somehow, google is linking the url to its paid banners in big media. However, such banners go through an adserver and/or are declared as nofollow. Is there any obvious reason that could be causing this? I wonder if we are on page 1 even though we're considered pretty-much 'off-topic' regarding the keyword.
Algorithm Updates | | jleanv240