Hummingbird - Client took hit. Anyone else?
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I recently landed a client about 2 months ago. About 1 month ago organic started to go down. I'm not 100% sure it's Google hummingbird. Has anyone else looked at their GA or GWT and seen a decline?
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I have experienced a few huge ranking drops (eg 28 positions in one week) in the last month. I was wondering if it was to do with hummingbird?
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Look at the keywords in Analytics and see if there has been a shift/drop in actual generic organic to branded organic.
If you use MOZ can see how the rankings have dropped? - if not then find a popular organic keyword that worked previously and search for it in a incognito chrome window (to rule out personalisation) and see if its showing on Google.
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According to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable http://www.seroundtable.com/google-hummingbird-17442.html, there was a Hummingbird update on August 24, 2013. On that exact day my client's visits started dropping. I looked at organic visits for sources Google, Bing, & Yahoo separately and only Google organic dropped.
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this.
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I don't think we are seeing a drop in traffic in September, more likely the opposite.
In late September we had an alert in GWMT by Google of a spike in soft 404's maybe others have experienced this. We had never seen it before, it was always a stable factor in our reports and only started around the beginning of September. We have rectified this by explicitly telling Google what pages are 404 which after after doing made even more positive changes to our SERPs. As I understand it Google does not like soft 404's and deems them detrimental to search quality. We feel that Hummingbird may have had a hand in is since it occurred around the same time that Hummingbird was rolled out.
Might be worth looking at this in GWMT for similar reports for your client.
David
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How much did your client's site go down? It could be just from natural fluctuations or SEO work from competitors.
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