Recent Rank drop after Penguin 2.1?
-
Recently, a lot of pages from our website have moved from page one or ranking number one, to page ten or something.
We got a manual penalty message from Google Team, we removed a lot of unnatural links pointing to our pages and disavowed the rest. This got the penalty removed and we got a message from Google confirming the same. Before the manual penalty we were getting about 140,000 visits per day, after the penalty about 80,000.
However, after Hummingbird or Penguin 2.1 all our ranks have vanished. We are nowhere in Google for our primary keywords and we getting like 40,000 visits per day. Most are direct or from sources other than Google.
We had another look at the links we disavowed, a list of about 11000 domains, we found about 3000 domains to be good. We fixed the disavow file about one week back, but no changes in traffic since. We checking the domains again to see if we have missed more good domains in there; yes, we have. There are still a very few good domains in there. But we are not touching the disavow list; waiting to see the change for the last submitted.
We have a dedicated user base, good liking on Facebook, all the stats in Analytics speak good, about 40% repeat visits about 30% direct. About 3000 people search for the site using our brand name as reported in Analytics.
I doubt the on-page optimization, the pages could be over-optimized. But the on-page factors for other pages ranking for the keywords are similar. The keyword density is similar, so are the usage of headings and stuff. We have not made any recent changes to these on-page patterns.
Our team is not able to figure out what could have gone wrong.
-
The "good" links we disavowed earlier are ranking well on Google. Most are from high quality sites related to the same niche.
The issue was, the reconsideration request got rejected the twice. The example links mentioned in the response were all created by our site visitors. We were in now way responsible for the links placed on those pages. The pages were from BlogSpot, Wordpress and some really popular forums with content created by the users.
But we had to disavow those as well and similar pages to get the penalty revoked. We never checked the page quality and authority that time. We checked later when the traffic dropped and found a lot of pages to be good.
-
Yes, we are working on pages with low average time and improving the content. But the pages removed from top 10 have always been performing well and still are with direct or brand keyword visits.
-
good answer. Remember that it will take google some time to go back and index those links. A good trick is to use some indexing tools on the old links that were removed.
If you have a LinkAssistant you could put all those links in there and see when the last time they were indexed - this could speed things up.
-
I agree with Joseph on his points he has raised as well.
Peter
-
Hi, I think the likelihood is your site is still suffering a kick back from Google. Whilst they have removed the penalty that doesn't mean to say, your status will be automatically restored and unfortunately, to some extent or another, Google will still treat your site cautiously from a ranking perspective.
Also, with the links you have disavowed that has still left a lot of domains from the numbers you have given for which links are still active. They may be good links, but with your site having so many it is possible that Google are still checking the large number remaining.
Restoration will take time I think and yes, the recent Hummingbird update may have impacted your site as well. The on-page optimisation looks OK but as a directory site with little "answering questions" type Hummingbird content, perhaps you need to establish conversations with potential customers using an on-site blog and through social media.
I hope that helps,
Peter
-
Have you looked for panda triggers? The pages with the highest exit stats AND lowest average time on page mean low user satisfaction and is a panda trigger. You want to make sure that the landing pages with the highest exit rate AND lowest time on page are best serving the "query intent" of whatever query the person made to get there.
Also I feel like you have too many ads above the fold.
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
-
Do header tags impact the rankings much?
Hi all, I have gone through some posts and comments where it's been mentioned that header tags will be considered as any other content on page. Is that really true? Writing up more relevant header tags as per the page topics doesn't have any impact? I would like to know the updated importance of header tags in today's SEO. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Website dropping from Page 1 pos 5 to no ranking and then back again?
Hi all, We have a very odd occurrence with a client of ours. It should be noted that they had a penalty recently removed about 2 months ago after much work from our company. Recently they started appearing back on Page 1 Google for a semi competitive keyword term. We were very happy with this and so was the client. The the ranking improved with our work to position 5, which was excellent. Unfortunately what has been happening is they have been dropping out of the rankings completely for this semi competitive keyword for a few days and then reappearing in the same position. The client is checking daily and has noticed. I thought this is just a 'hangover' from the Google penalty and perhaps a one off occurrence, but it has happened about 3 or 4 times now and seems to be happening every couple of weeks. Can anyone shed some light on this behavior? I have checked Webmasters Tools and everything is fine. Thanks Jon
Algorithm Updates | | Jon_bangonline0 -
A Serious drop in Pages crawled per day
On 21st April ,I spotted a sudden decrease in pages crawled per day.Previously it was about 5,000 bust after the drop it reached to 225.From the crawl rate never spiked. Here is my website url - http://www.wpstuffs.com/ 8fQHW2G.png
Algorithm Updates | | vividvilla0 -
Ranking factors
I found this page: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors Is there any new page with more up to date data ? Thank you i.
Algorithm Updates | | iivgi0 -
Can a google data refresh knock your pages out of the rankings?
I see that around mid November 2013 a handful of my sites pages dropped off of Google completely. It was around the data refreshes in November, and while everyone says it doesn't effect that much I was wondering if anyone knew if it could knock some of my pages out of the rankings for a specific keyword. Note - we had previously held muliple listings for different pages on our site for this particular keyword. Google kept the highest ranking and knocked the lower ones off. See attached image of our keyword ranking history to see what I mean. DcJJM0M
Algorithm Updates | | franchisesolutions0 -
Page rank of 2 with zero SEO and a 2 month old domain?
Hello, I helped work on a website for a friend. We used wordpress, a theme from elegant themes and wrote the content over 4 days. Zero back links, no seo, etc. Well, a little on page optimization and that's about it. Oh, we did ONE back link from a review site. The domain was brand new; never registered before. About a week after it started getting indexed, it jump from no page rank to a page rank of 1. About a week later, it jumped to a page rank of 2. Again, zero seo (aside from above stated). The site is: trade lines review dot com A page rank of 2 is nothing to write home about, but given the circumstances, how is this even possible? Thanks you!
Algorithm Updates | | Friedman0 -
Recovered from penguin/panda but which one?
So the good news is that for the first time since April 24th, one of our websites is back in the search results as of around December 12 but I am still unsure as whether it was panda or penguin (or both) that was impacting the site?? Note this was not a manual penalty. I diagnosed it as a penguin issue (drop on April 24th, aggressive on-page optimisation, around 10% of links from spammy directories like addyourfreelinks.com with anchor text built by a questionable agency), but on further advice it was thought that panda was also an issue because it is a hotel microsite so there was duplication with our own brand site and across third party travel sites and there were a number of pages with bare content. I figured it was a good time to clean everything up to address both. Here is a summary of actions taken: submitted disavow file on October 24th with all questionable links including actions taken and comments. Since then I have cleaned up some content so it is less aggressively targeting certain keywords. Amended several third party listings with duplicate content No follow,indexed pages that were directly duplicated with our brand site and over the last month have built a few good quality links. Cleaned up 404's in webmaster tools over the last week I have searched to see if there were any algorithm updates around December 12 but cannot find any mentions. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | jay.raman0 -
What determines rankings in a site: search?
When I perform a "site:" search on my domains (without specifying a keyword) the top ranked results seem to be a mixture of sensible top-level index pages plus some very random articles. Is there any significance to what Google ranks highly in a site: search? There is some really unrepresentative content returned on page 1, including articles that get virtually no traffic. Is this seriously what Google considers our best or most typical content?
Algorithm Updates | | Dennis-529610