Website hit by something, but not sure if penguin or panda?
-
Hi my site was doing ok, last week, humming along and increase in traffic. We felt that all the work removing bad links had worked. then all of a sudden, bang traffic dropped and is still dropping day by day.
The strange thing as well is all the social media, bing and yahoo traffic has also dried up!
Has anyone else had something smiler?
-
What's the exact day of the drop? Normally, I wouldn't really be concerned with a drop in webmaster tool impressions especially after a bump up, but since you mentioned you lost traffic on Bing, yahoo and social, it does raise some flags.
IF that happened around the final 3 days of the month, then you were affected by the update I mentioned which nobody seems to be talking about....
Anyway, did you check crawl errors on GWT? Did you crawl the site separately ? Did you see any problems with the index/noindex/etc?
As for injected codes, the easy way is to load pages (that you lost traffic on) in google. Check the saved cache. If you got some injected codes, they'll show up there.
There's really not much we can do but assume things. I do hope you could find the reason for the problem.
-
Thanks for your reply Chris661 and DennisSeymour. Where to turn that is the question. Its all rather confusing.
-
in webmaster, my impressions went up considerably, then it went down .see pic http://i.imgur.com/NZnK7Vt.png
-
We did not move to https.
-
We did not do anything apart from removing some more links
-
(Maybe check your htaccess/robots/were you hacked? Injected by an invisible code? Check Google cache) What should I look for for a hacked or injected code?
Yes we are using the universal code.
Thanks for your suggestions..
Taiger
-
-
We also saw an increase in traffic and rankings around 10/17 and were feeling pretty cocky. One tracked keyword jumped from 7 to 1 and in the last 3 days has come down to 5. Traffic also reduced and I think it coincides with the 3 day thing Dennis mentioned. I just attributed it to the Penguin update "settling". But now Dennis makes me want to do better on page!
Impressions are up looking prior to 10/17 so I think that is a good thing overall. Have not had any similar drops on social or Yahoo/Bing.
-
There was an update 3 days ago. It's not reported but it looks like a big one. Maybe that's it?
I dont think it was Penguin, as my sites that little links but great onpage SEO and branding got some huge increases.
Im still checking the others to identify the common thing.
In your case, it's sounds weird that you will drop even for bing and yahoo AND social. So that's probably not because of google.
- Check webmaster tools - impressions, how much has changed?
- Crawl your site - check problems
- Did you move to https?
- What else, besides link removal, did you do?
- Maybe check your htaccess/robots/were you hacked? Injected by an invisible code? Check Google cache
- Check analytics code are you using the universal code? Or whatever stat tracker you are using, be sure that it's compatible.
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
-
Can I define that one area of my website is a regualr news (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read?
Hi I have a client that have a news website, he asked me if he can define one area of his website to be a regular news that google can show on google news search results (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
What Google algorithm hit my website? Graph attached.
Please check the below URLs and let me know which algorithm hit my website. I collect the data from 3 different tools. http://i.imgur.com/ImljFmO.png http://i.imgur.com/aWxqOdj.png http://i.imgur.com/PqhhruN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Website Does not index in any page?
I created a website www.astrologersktantrik.com 4 days ago and fetch it with google but still my website does not index on google as the keywords I use is with low competition but still my website does not appear on any keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ramansaab0 -
Following Penguin 2.0 hit in May, my site experienced another big drop on August 13th
Hi everyone, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May. This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame. On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google. At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction. So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner. However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs : Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added. As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!! I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached. In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs. So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business. However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions) My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process. I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design. I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My website is ConcertHotels.com. Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Where to begin (SEO-wise) with my Website?
Hello, We hired a company to design an e-commerce website for us. Along the way they did some initial SEO design, but we are clearly a long way from where we need to be. I'm not a web-designer or a knowledgeable SEO person. I have the website linked to webtools, google analytics and obviously this site as well. I've been toying with the idea of just trying to accomplish some SEO myself, but the more I read about SEO, the more daunting it seems. I'm a full-time military pilot, so this seems like it involves more time than I have to give. Where do I begin? My Website www.phoenixprintingsolutions.com Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JRodBeMe0 -
Purpose of a Blog in a website
How internal blog or external blog is helpful in SEO?why it is good to have a site with blog?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
Website Crawl problems
I have a feeling that Google doesn't crawl my website. E.g. this blogpost - I copy a sentence from it and paste it to Google. The page that shows up in search results is www.silvamethodlife.com/page/9/ - which is just a blog page with all the articles listed, not the link to the article itself! Did anyone ever have this problem? It's definitely some technical issue. Any advice will be deeply appreciated Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexey_mindvalley0 -
Why was I hit by the above the fold algo?
I cannot find any decent information on this update. Everybody appears to reiterate what Matt Cutts posted. I understand what the update was 'supposed' to combat and achieve. I also understand what those abusing ads above the fold, are supposed to do. But I need to know what to do, when you don't have too many ads above the fold. One of my websites was hit. Several professionals have tried to convince me it was Panda, that was released on 18th January. But I am now 99.9% certain it wasn't. I'm in the UK, traffic on the 18th was normal, little better than expected actually. Traffic on the 19th was normal until around 10pm GMT and there as a noticeable dip, compared with previous days and weeks. January 20th continued this decline and at the end of the day, there was a 25% loss. I have 1 Google ad, that is above the fold. Most of the pages have no ads at all. No affiliates or anything else. I have always prided myself in keeping my website clean and ad free. We also have the lowest bounce rates in the niche, by a mile, as far as I can tell, from speaking to other webmasters. I cannot remove this 1 ad, the servers alone, cost a couple of grand. The advertising supports the website. Nothing I can find online, gives me any indicators, as to what might be tripping this filter. But I need to figure it out, as traffic has now reached a 50% loss, which equates to about 15,000 visitors per day. I have tore my pages apart, removed functionality, added functionality and yet traffic has continued to decline. Can anybody shed light on this? I worry that perhaps Google is seeing the images on my website as ads. The images open a bigger preview in lightbox, but with JS turned off, opens a new page, with nothing but the image on it. I am at my wits end. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0