Suspended YouTube account causing havoc in ranking and traffic
-
Hi SEOmoz community
This is my first question in the forum and I'd prefer it was more on the constructive side rather than introducing an issue on my website. I hope someone can still shed a light on the issue.
Just over a week ago, YouTube has suspended my account for what I would call dubious reasons. Suspending my account meant lots of dead videos on my site and potentially other people's sites, who embedded my videos. I have only recently managed to take down all references to my blocked YouTube account (off my site).
Now here it comes, literally since that week my traffic numbers have dropped below half of what it used to be and less. I hardly have any more organic search entries and my keywords have plummeted (in some cases 20 - 30 positions). Keywords, that ranked well are currently not searched via my site at all. I am not 100% what is going on and doing my reading on the side, but I am starting to get a little paranoid over a potential Google penalty that may have been issued to my site.
Maybe someone has experienced similar issues or simply knows the answer. Someone suggested that due to the 'Trust' that YouTube has passed on to my site is now gone, it caused this massive drop. However, it still makes me think, is an element such as various YouTube videos on your site such a big thing that makes and breaks a site??
I appreciate your input on the issue. Many thanks everybody!!
-
Thanks for your answer Ryan
I understand the point you're making about the duplicate anchor text back links and will look into this. It's still ironic that the problems surfaced once the issue with the YouTube account set in. I'll see how to turn the rudder.
Thanks again
-
One of the first things I notice is the site's backlink profile is incredibly spammy. Google has issued many manual penalties for sites with similar backlink profiles. About 40% of your links show "Online Casino" as the anchor text.
Penguin is an algorithm update designed to target spammy profiles such as yours. It seems highly likely your rankings are being suppressed either manually or algorithmically due to manipulative links. Those links are a clear, black hat tactic.
-
"If Google took action against your YouTube account, they may have taken action against your website for the same reason."
My thoughts exactly. Someone may have reported or Google may have discovered something on the site, and the YouTube account may have just been a tentacle. As Ryan suggestions, can you provide more information?
Best,
Christopher -
Hello Hermski,
First let me share I have never had a YouTube account suspended nor worked with a client in that situation. Accordingly, my advice is more generic in nature.
Why exactly was your YouTube account suspended? I share your concern that your site may have been penalized. If Google took action against your YouTube account, they may have taken action against your website for the same reason.
I do not believe in the "trust" logic you suggested being shared from YouTube. According to your inquiry, your site suffered a "massive drop" in traffic. Assuming you did not make a change on your site such as blocking the site with the robots.txt file, the logical conclusion is your rankings are being suppressed by Google.
Without your site's address or any other information, we can only take wild guesses as to the cause. We require more information to be helpful.
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
-
Unexpected Rank Down After Page Update
Hello Team, I have a post on my blog which was ranking on #1 in SERP. I always tried to update it with new content.On 31-Mar-2017, I made a big update in it. Like, it was a list of 20 tips and I made it to 50+. I thought it will help me to increase it's CTR. And, I changed its URL and redirect old one to new one.But when I checked today, it was totally disappeared from SERP 😞 it's nowhere. But it is indexed I have checked but not ranking now. I did this thing (Content Upgrade) before and it always gave good results but I don't know what happened now.Any suggestions or help?Old URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2015/12/21-useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/New URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2017/03/useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/-With love and respect,Puneet Gogia
Technical SEO | | ManAPR0 -
Organic Traffic Down March-April 2016
Hello MOZ Community! I have been scouring the web to try and assess what may be responsible for our sites traffic decline which fell off quite suddenly between March and April of this year. While I have heard of two specific things that may have impacted us: The Mobile-Friendly update (April 2016) Phantom Update (May 2016) I would like to share what we have tried to uncover ourselves, and would welcome your thoughts/feedback on what may have happened, thoughts on repairing the rank damage, and in general. In May we noticed a large cooling off of our organic searches from Google, the largest a >30% occured in June, but on average we're seeing a trend of 23% less visitors from organic search than only months prior. Paired with this was a decrease in overall visibility, like a number of pages were struck from indexing. The number of URLs ranked in the Top 100 listings dropped by ~ 32% at the beginning of April We review our visibility with SISTRIX's Visibility Index tool, which showed a visibility plummet of almost 50% between mid-March and mid-April Traffic, until towards the end of July, early August has remained low and now only really returning to normal levels in the past few days. All that said, we're puzzled by what would cause such a sharp decline in visibility > organic search. Regarding the known/unknown Google Updates, while our primary site is responsive, we do have a number of old help/support pages that are not responsive – So that is one theory, but I'd appreciate any thoughts or insights you have, or to know if anyone else experienced a drop within the same timeframe.
Technical SEO | | kernewein0 -
Domain not ranking in Google
https://www.buitenspeelgoed.nl/ is a domain acquired by our client. Previously this website was on http://www.buitenspeelgoed-keupink.nl. With the old domain they were ranking top 30 on 'buitenspeelgoed' in google.nl. Now with the new exact match domain they aren't ranking any more (for months). However, the website is indexed, as you can see on http://1l1.be/nz I don't know what to do anymore. Need some advise. What we allready have done the last months: made adjustments to the 301-redirects (this was originaly setup wrong by the webdesigner (de) optimized the homepage on 'buitenspeelgoed' (strange is the fact that the Moz robot can't access the site). Checked the robots.txt to see if the website was blocked for Google Checked the meta robots to see if the website was blocked for Google Disavowed some spammy (old) links which linked to the old domain Checked Search console > Fetch as Google if there isn't any Malware of some kind (and to see if Google can access the site) Checked Search consol to see if there manual spam actions (isn't the case) Checked for duplicate content by copy/paste some texts in Google and see if any other results are showing up (isn't the case for most of the texts) Please let me know what we can do.
Technical SEO | | InventusOnline0 -
SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites
Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits). What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?
Technical SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Why is our login page ranked higher than our homepage?
Hello everyone, When you search "ProtonMail", our Login page always ranks #1 while our homepage ranks #2. We're unsure why this is happening. The PA for our homepage is higher than the login page, and the login page itself basically has zero content except for a login form. We don't want to put the login page on robots.txt, we want to do our best to preserve it so that people can login. However it still does not make sense to us how the login page ranks higher, even though it has a lesser PA. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | kevinzh0 -
Home Page Not Ranking... Need an EXPERT
Hi, for about a year now, our home page seems to have been "removed" from Google (except for our branded keywords). The home page is clearly indexed, but none of the keywords for the home page rank in the top 500 (again, except for our brand, trophycentral). Other pages in the site are fine and we rank in the top 10 positions for hundreds of keywords. We are also okay on Yahoo and Bing. So the issue is the home page from non-branded words. There have been no manual penalties, but since the words, such as trophies and trophies and awards are all but gone, something is going on. It has been almost exactly a year now and I have tried everything from removing backlinks (although I still can't tell which are "bad links", to changing titles, to improving speed and structure. I have had quite a few really nice people try to help, but their suggestions don't seem to work or are too vague. I really need an expert as the impact to the business of not having a home page performing is very damaging. Thank you!!!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Database Crash affecting our rankings
Here is one for you. We had a database crash, and was down for an hour and 15 minutes, on Dec 18th. During this time our system automatically sent out a 301 redirect to our product home page. (iboats.com/boat-parts-accessories/dm/) On Dec 24th I noticed a huge ranking drop on a lot of our keywords, and some keywords that were serving up the redirect page from our database crash, in place of its normally ranked page. So my assumption is that Google was crawling our site during the database crash and caching the redirect pages in place of our regularly ranked pages. So when a search query is made that would normally display our ranked page, it is now displaying the redirect page from the crawled cache. And on other keywords where we normally would rank for, Google no longer has that page cached, so it drops it from ranking. My question: Does this assumption sound accurate? If so, I'm assuming over time that our past ranked pages will show up once again after Google recrawls those pages and saves them in their cache. I have several sites that were affected with this: boatcovers.iboats.com boatpropellers.iboats.com iboats.com Thanks in advance for your input
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Large Drop in Brand-name Traffic
Hey folks, I recently noticed a very large drop in brand-name traffic (in the realm of 50%) which coincided with some SEO changes to target non-brand-name searches. Thing is, the site is still ranking #1 for all the brand-name searches that the traffic drop happened in. (checked terms via SEOmoz toolbar, and also proxy with Bruce Clay's toolbar). Any thoughts on where to start lookingfor the problem or what might have caused it? If this hadn't happened at the same time as other changes, I'd put this down to non-SEO problems.
Technical SEO | | BedeFahey0