Impressions Fell off a Cliff, No Manual Action, What Gives?

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Hi Moz crew,

We've got a bit of a riddle on our hands here at Flightpath. You see, we're an agency that specializes in digital services like web design, social media and SEO. Unfortunately, we seem to have been hit by an a algorithmic penalty on February 28th, 2014. This is a first for us - we've never had to deal with a penalty (manual or algorithmic) for our site or any of our client sites.

Here's the situation:

• We were averaging around 1,500 impressions per day before the drop. Since 2/28, we see closer to 250 impressions per day.
• No manual action notice in WMT
• Branded keywords did not lose rank. It was primarily our the service-oriented keywords that we lost rank on (ex: "digital agency", "digital agency nyc", "social media agency nyc", "web agency new york" - we were page 1 for all of these, though "digital agency" wasn't as secure as the others).
• Backlink profile looks ok. We did a clean-up (disavowed a few hundred domains) as soon as we noticed the drop, but there wasn't anything in there egregiously offensive. There definitely wasn't anything NEW that was problematic. Not a lot of non-branded anchor text at all.
• No major changes to the site in 2014

Any ideas? The site is http://www.flightpath.com

And here's a horrifying WMT screen grab: i.imgur.com/EY4OBG1.jpg

UPDATE: We recovered nearly all of our missing rank/traffic/impressions for a 3-day period between 4/15 and 4/17.

WMT Screenshot: http://imgur.com/V1fI1MQ

During our brief recovery, we did lose a small amount of rank (just a few positions, only for a handful of keywords) compared to where we were pre-crisis. That makes sense though, we were pretty ruthless in disavowing domains and almost surely caught a few "positive" links along with the bad ones. Aside from that, it appeared to be a full recovery - every single one of our generic keywords was back for just over 48 hours.

Any ideas? Was Google rolling out a new algorithm tweak, only to pull it back due to bugs? Or was it the opposite: Google rolling back the update that hurt our site to fix a few bugs before pushing it live again?

[f1_path]

HI Dan - thanks for looking into this.

Our traffic from organic search has indeed dropped (Google only, rankings and traffic from Bing/Yahoo have remained stable).

Hopefully we've taken care of all the shady back links via disavow. Like you said, however, it could be awhile before we know if this has had any effect. Most of the links you referenced, and most of the ones that needed to be eliminated, came from websites linking to content that existed on our domain prior to the agency purchasing it almost 10 years ago.

You're right about the unusually high amount of indexed pages. The inflation is from our blog "tag" pages. We've put a dofollow/noindex on all of these pages. They're pretty deep on the site though, I expect it will take awhile for them to be crawled again for de-indexing.

We actually had a 2-day recovery just over a week ago. Then, as quickly and inexplicably as the recovery came, we again lost rank on our generic terms. I'm going to add some of this info to the main post now. It certainly is bizarre, so I'm hoping someone might be able to identify what might have caused the site to recover and then drop again over the course of 48 hours.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi John

First thing - have any other metrics changed? Traffic via Google search? Rankings (do you track these independently of WMT)?

Do know that the disavow can take 6+ months to fully process and have an effect back in the SERPs. I do see some suspect links. With Google being so aggressive lately, I could see only a few bad links hurting the site;

• http://wiis.tu-graz.ac.at/people/tom.html "jazz online server"
• http://enn2.com/nitelife.htm "internet cafe index"
• http://public.homeagain.com/faq.html "found pets"

The more I look in OSE there's definitely a lot of link issues. I know they may be old, but it's possible some could have come back to haunt the site.

I would be extra certain you've disavowed all the bad links. Greenlane SEO has two great posts on the process they use;

• www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/01/step-by-step-disavow-process/
• http://www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/04/how-to-uncover-those-harder-to-find-links/

The site design LOOKS great - terrific actually. So it's almost easy to assume everything is technically OK on-site, yet there are definitely some issues there.

For example there are almost 800 pages indexed - which seems like a lot for this site (I could be wrong). There are lost of really long titles and descriptions etc. So as Andy suggests, I'd take a good look at cleaning up anything on-site as well. It may not have caused a penalty, but anything to help Google re-processes the site will help

[Andy.Drinkwater]

"If only we knew when the next refresh was going to be."

Maybe you found it!

It could also be another algorithm update that has tipped you over the edge. You might have been borderline for something for some time, then an update comes along and pushes you over the edge.

Do a site crawl with Screaming Frog as well, to see if anything glaringly obvious jumps out at you.

-Andy

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Hi Andy,

Thanks for the feedback. Only updates would be blog posts (original content, no guest posts or anything).

And yeah, our current thinking is that this is probably Penguin rather than Panda related. If only we knew when the next refresh was going to be.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi John,

That is a big drop off!

The first question really, is if there have been any changes to the site recently? Any development, new pages, SEO work, content, link building, etc.?

Edit-- Sorry, just seen that you said no major changes to the site - but does this mean that there have been changes?

You mentioned that you have disavowed some links - if this was Penguin related, it could take a little while before you see any changes.

-Andy