April Google Update?

[Elchanan]

Since April 16 (when Jews ate Matzah) Google hurt one of our clients badly. They are well-known and beloved brand with hundreds of employees and locations across USA.
I can’t see any signal of organic update, or penalty (neither Google Places).

• No message on GWT
• Nothing has been changed on and off site.
• All keywords' ranking are looking like this
• All tools showing good analysis: MOZ, Barracuda, MajesticSeo
• Content is good and not duplicated,
• etc.

Do one of you is aware of significant Google update?
What do you think/suggest?

[rishil]

So here is your issue

run a review, start removing and disavowing all the bad links. A lot of penalties went out in April, e which is why Mozcast was so volatike, there wasn't a major update IMHO.

[Elchanan]

Good point!

I didn't think to check "manual actions" on GWT (because no warning found on message center). This is what I see there:

Manual Actions
Site-wide matches None

Partial matches

Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links

Reason

Affects

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.

Some incoming links
Request a review

[rishil]

Have you checked the penalty check tool in webmaster tools?

[Elchanan]

Hello MOZ Rogers – Tuk – Tuk. What about http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change ?

[Elchanan]

and

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-brewing-18447.html

[EGOL]

Barry Schwartz said there looked to be a Panda update starting to roll out about the 14th.  These can take a few days to roll out.  Lots of comments in the thread from webmasters complaining.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-soft-update-18408.html

[Elchanan]

The subject brand is nothing to do with music. It is moving/storage company.

[DarinPirkey]

This graph looks awfully similar to yours.

http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/april-2014-google-algorithm-updates-song-lyrics/

[Elchanan]

All of the keywords but brand.

Just-Discovered Links looks good - I have checked them all.

Going thru you "how to diagnose" list:

Something wrong with your analytics program - Nope.

Something to do with Google Algorithm or Webspam Team:

• Manual penalty - How can I know? No email has been received
• Algorithm update - The only thing we found is MP3 / Lyric update
• Normal Google fluctuations - Not seems like

Something to do with Webmaster Tools - Nope.

• There is (and always was) excessive link (on every page) from brother companies/websites. This is normal behaviour of brands.
• Zero warnings on GWT dashboard.

Something wrong with your website - nothing changed recently but I have checked it again. All good.

• In the recent days we found FOUR old "access denied" errors and we fixed them. Can't believe it is that.

[DarinPirkey]

Mozcast (http://mozcast.com/) shows that the 17th and 18th were pretty chaotic in the SERPs.  Take a look at the metrics page on there too.  I noticed a few drops on some of my client's profiles but not as significant.

Was this drop for all of your keywords or just one or a few???

Here is an article on how to diagnose a drop in rankings from the team over at ignite.  http://ignitevisibility.com/diagnose-drop-in-seo-traffic/

If you haven't done so already.  I would look into Google WMT and check out "recently discovered links" just to make sure none of them are harming you in any way.