Massive Google Drop on two sites!
-
Hi All,
We have experienced a massive Google drop on Two of our eCommerce websites in the past week.
From Feb - July we were ranked 2 for various key words
In Aug we dropped to 8
In September to 96 if not lower.
We pay for monthly link building and add unique product info each week (but not much new content such as articles or blogs).
My SEO guys has not been that helpful and just sent me a link to the Panda update blog, which doesn't mean a great deal to me.
Obviously this has had a massive effect on business, and ideally i need to diagnose the problem and find a new startegy on moving forward, so most likely looking for a for a new SEO guy/company as well.
I need someone is proactive, communicates well and make constant suggestions about moving forward not just link building.
One thing I would like to add is these two site have a different homepage, category and range structure, but do share some if the 2000 product database.
Can anyone help? Any advice on sorting this would be gratefully appreciated.
Thanks
M
-
I think it's dangerous to speculate that you were hit by EMD without knowing all of the facts. EMD hit Sep 28. There was also a major Panda update Sep 27. But you mentioned that you started dropping in August.
Can you tell the exact date of your drop? If it was Aug 20 there was a Panda update then. You mentioned that your two sites share the same 2000 product database. If they have duplicate pages, or pages with significantly duplicated product descriptions then this is a big flag for Panda.
You mentioned that you pay for linkbuilding. Some linkbuilding has been punished by Penguin. Now, Penguin affected most sites on Apr 24 and many more on May 25. However, there are some people who have documented that a site may be able to be affected by Penguin at any time. (They still believe a refresh is necessary for recovery). So, if your traffic drop happened within a few weeks of a major keyword anchor texted linkbuilding campaign then Penguin is a possibility.
Have you checked your WMT for any warnings of unnatural links? This is a possibility as well.
Plus there are a pile of other factors. Check this list for a bunch of other possibilities for a ranking/traffic drop.
-
I'd say you probably need to look at how you are building links as well as the content on your site to see if it is spammy or not.
I haven't seen the site so it's really hard to tell what has caused the drops but in conclusion;
-
Look at your content, is it spammy, is it stuff users want to read or is it written for search engines?
-
Link Building, what kind of links are being built? are they spammy? (use open site explorer) look at creating a new link building strategy that focuses on quality.
If you want to talk further about it you are welcome to PM me and I can give you site a proper look over and see if I can help you
-
-
This has all been very helpful, thank you. So the questions Im left with are
What do I do next? - I am running SEOMoz crawl/report will go through everything with a fine tooth comb?
Do I need to do more link building and what budget would be good?
Do I need better site content?
Any major flaws?
Why was the main reasons the drop so big?Could anyone help to put a strategy together and take on this work?
-
Thanks guys for all your help, at least I have an idea of how to move forward,. I have PM the URLs over or shall i post them here openly??
-
Like Carlos said most likely the EMD update.
See - http://mozcast.com/metrics and tab 'EMD Influence'.
Regarding your SEO people, you may not have access to your webmaster tools account but you could put your website domain so we could take a quick look.
It wouldn't take very long to tell if your SEO people are doing a good job or not.
Just so you understand a little better, Google puts some weight (From what I have seen, a lot) on a website which has an EMD (exact match domain) and that also targets that term.
I have seen websites rank with an EMD on the first page with little to no link building.
Google has just turned the power on EMD's down. As you can see from my link.
The reason why the guys above are saying your must have a poor link profile is because even when Google turned the power down, the link building you should have should of held you up.
So... EMD turned down, poor link profile (which should have held you up) = drop
Answer - Build your link profile up.
But it maybe something else until we can see your site, for all I know your whole site is duplicate content and you have been penalised.
-
Happy to help. The first thing you need to do is find out if the SEO done to your site could also be the reason why your site dropped. Even with the EMD update, to drop from #8 to #96 there must be something else going on.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is the content on your site over-optimised?
Does your link profile look unnatural (exact keyword anchor text, low quality links, article directories, blog comments, link wheels, etc.) ?
Could you have any on-page issues (duplicate content, over-optimised meta, etc.)?
If you show us your sites we will be able to give you better advice.
-
PS webmaster tools is not showing anything, status is currently
No new messages or recent critical issues.
-
Thanks Carlos, very helpful. I'm thinking about finding some new help, any tips what i should start focusing on first and how long this may take to get back up?
-
Before the recent update from Google having the keywords in the domain helped a lot.
I'm sure that they still help somehow, but to get back to where you were you will need to build up the authority of your site (good links, social signals, quality content, etc - nothing new).
As Simon said, also check your WMT account and see if you have any messages from Google regarding unnatural links.
-
Yes they are out of three words in the domain, two are the search term, for both sites. Is this something you help with?
-
Sounds like your SEO guy doesn't really pay much attention and his attitude towards you coming to him with that query suggests that he might be doing some poor link building which might have got you penalised by Google.
Do you have access to webmaster tools? if so you may have a message about unnatural links.
Whats the website and maybe I can have a better look for you.
-
are the domains "exact match domains"?
if so, you may want to have a look at this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data
If it is a Panda or Penguin penalty you will have to conduct a link review and remove links to your site that could be triggered the penalty. More on how to do that here: http://www.branded3.com/b3labs/cleaning-your-links-a-step-by-step-guide/
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
-
Google search operator "site:" show different result.
Search operator "site:" show incomplete information. When I search with just domain name it show only 3 link that got crawl in past week, this is the link https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=mLr3VfrhN4_BuATQuYugBg&gws_rd=cr&fg=1#q=site:sierralivingconcepts.com&safe=off&tbs=qdr: but when i look a specific link it show them in any time (search tools), https://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://www.sierralivingconcepts.com/p-6300-white-silver-regence-louis-xiv-mango-wood-ornate-hall-console-table.aspx&safe=off&biw=1600&bih=775&noj=1&tbas=0&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0CBUQpwVqFQoTCJ-4iOLK-McCFQFwjgod43gI9A But when i look in cached page it says "appeared on 11 Sep 2015" I am total confused why google not showing all the new link that it crawl from my site.
Search Behavior | | Sierra-Living-Concepts0 -
Are there better & inexpensive third party website analytics software over Google Analytics?
I've heard there are some third-party software that provide greater depth of information than Google Analytics, such as mouse tracking, heat mapping, video snapshots ect. Can anyone recommend a good program to use? I've tried a basic web-search but there seems to be a great variety of different ones.
Search Behavior | | Justin_hannan270 -
Is putting/removing Adsense ads on the site affects crawling for seo?
Because I noticed when we totally remove Adsense ads on our site, the pages crawled per day on the google webmastertools suddenly dropped into noticable amount and we tested again to turn it on for a singe day, it jumped up again. So if Adsense affects crawling then, if we have adsense ad on all pages of the site the more chances it gets crawled by the bot? WS76R8w
Search Behavior | | CruiseControl0 -
Google indexing PDF's
Hello, We work heavily on E-commerce SEO and recently Google has started to index PDF pages (Datasheets) added to the product pages instead of the actual product pages. Has anyone else noticed this at all? Seems to have got worse over the last month or so. Thanks
Search Behavior | | voipme0 -
Safari Has Top Browser in Google Analytics?
I find this hard to believe but it looks to me as though Safari has jumped ahead as our top browser in the month of January. At first glance I would think it was combining mobile safari with desktop safari numbers but then on the 5th spot I see Safari(in-app) which after looking into could be multiple things from safari mobile, bookmarked pages, or Chrome for ios. Just looking for thoughts on this, are others seeing a large uptick in Safari traffic for desktops?
Search Behavior | | sknott0 -
Why would my Bounce Rate drop from 40% to 2% over 3 days without making any major changes to my site www.hiltonhead.com?
Our Wordpress site has had an historical bounce rate of 40% for the last 3 years but last Thursday it dropped to 17%, Friday to 7% and now is running at 2%. The pageviews per visit have also increased from 3 to almost 6. Thanks
Search Behavior | | CorkyGifford0 -
Google Places, NAP, multiple address with one phone number
How sensitive do you think the Google Places NAP algorithm is? If I have different Google Places pages for one client with multiple locations, but the same phone number for all locations with different addresses, will this hurt my Google Places ranking or organic webpage result?
Search Behavior | | Mike-i0 -
Drastic Fluctuation in Site Rankings
All, Hope you are having a good day! Recently I had a strange issue with one of my site and I am not sure what might have caused it. I am sure this would be a good place to discuss about it and get some feedback from the elite people in the industry. Here is the problem. Last weekend (On sunday noon) my site which was ranking on Page 1 suddenly dropped its ranking for its main keywords to nowhere, I was panicked to see what was happening and by the end of the day it was slowly coming back and by next morning everything was back. Again on Wednesday noon, the same thing happened. However, this time it din't come up by the next morning. Making it worse, all of my keyword rankings went down from good spots to no where and there was a point when I could no longer see my site. I was worried something might have happened this time and was not sure what could the reason be. On Friday afternoon all the ranking came up better than the previous (which is a very good news for me). At the moment, my site is doing very well and I am really happy about it. I did realize that Google was updating their Algorithm, but this behavior is the strangest I have seen over years. Can someone enlighten me on this peculiar behavior. Is there something wrong with my site or is it a common thing that I have never noticed? I have never done anything blackhat for the site. To be honest, all I have done is some low level link building on the site and the site had some advantage of a re-direct from one my previous site which was doing very well in search engines (I changed it to take advantage of the new domain I had). Your opinions/suggestions are a appreciated.
Search Behavior | | frostmill0