Does this traffic drop look like Penguin to you?

[Masoko-T]

Dear Community

In early October, I noticed a sharp drop of the rankings of the main KW of a website I manage: idee-sol.fr. This, of course I immediatelly attributed to penguin 2.1.

While researching on the experience other webmasters have had with this unfortunate situation, I noticed that most of them had very sharp drops of traffic in a relatively small time, e.g.: a drop of 80% in a couple of days. But on idee-sol, the drop looks less steep yet equally worrying. Was the cause of this traffic/ranking drop due to penguin 2.1 exclusively or to penguin + something else (or not penguin at all?)

I'm including an image of the "non paid search" report of analytics.

dPnphnr

[Masoko-T]

OK, Thanks Lynn

[LynnPatchett]

HI,

On the face of it this certainly looks like a penguin related drop, the time fame matches even if the drop is less steep than some have seen. It is worth looking at your organic traffic segmented by landing page, maybe your homepage took an immediate hit and some inner pages pages held their rankings a bit longer (or vice versa). If the site is quite new then it is also possible that you are seeing normal variations that often come with new sites (which may explain the slower drop off, the penguin update hit your main keyword(s) and the longer tail stuff slowly declined as google eventually decided where your pages should be placed in the serps). It is of course always worth thinking about if any other changes in the code or content happened at the same time which might have had an effect of rankings.

If you have been building a lot of links through directories and especially if those have been somewhat keyword heavy then a penguin hit seems likely (even though no manual penalty notice). I would hold off on building any more directory links and start looking at evening out your profile with some more natural type links (these will depend a bit on your industry).

[GPainter]

The directories may be a problem, Penguin doesn't like them. you can always try to disinvow a percentage of them see if you notice any improvement from there.  I don't imagine its one thing alone.

[Masoko-T]

Hi Chris

Thank you for your answer.

The website is new so I really cannot compare it to last year. According to google trends there is some seasonal variation for the main keywords used on the site, but nothing as brutal as an 80% variation.

The SERPS have gone down considerably, I have been tracking the weekly positions using many sources (including MOZ), they were slowly but surely descending from the 4th to the end of October.

Linkbuilding has been done using high quality, human curated directories. Normally I would not consider them spammy, but you never know. Google had detected about 60 backlinks before the penalty.

I have not received a manual penalty notification from Google

[GPainter]

Have you compared the traffic to previous years to see if its a seasonal drop off ?

Have you also looked at your SERP position? Penguin would have a drop there more than it would visitors.

Have you done any new link building that may have resulted in a hit by penguin? Its worth looking at your back links to see if they look bad and may be whats doing it too etc.

It's worth looking at multiple metrics before jumping the gun a bit.

I hope some of the above questions may help you narrow it down a bit.

You may find Google trends helpful for looking at data over time if you can't go back so far in your analytics or want a broader bit of research.