Website (.BE) showing up in .NL SERPS

[Jacobe]

Fellow mozzers, we need your help

We have a situation where a customer has two websites for each country:

• flowtracksurf.be → Belgium
• flowtracksurf.nl → Netherlands

They used to have very good keyword rankings in the SERPS in BE & NL.

Flowtracksurf.nl had good rankings in Google.nl and Flowtracksurf.be in Google.be.
Recently there has been a change: Flowtracksurf.nl is not showing up in Google.nl anymore. It also seems that all the rankings from flowtracksurf.nl have been switched to flowtracksurf.be.

.BE is doing very well, .NL is suffering.

Data shows us that .NL :

• In the first two weeks of december 2014, we see a massive drop in traffic (GA)
• In that same week(s) we see a drop in search queries (Webmaster Tools)
• We see the exact opposite in .BE (growing strong in those weeks)
• When we look at the cache of flowtracksurf.nl we see only reference to flowtracksurf.be. Is that a hint of what was going on?
• On the same date that we see a massive drop in traffic on .NL, we see a peak in 'indexation' of .BE
• We see that the MOZ pages crawled dropped in that same week for NL
• We're also seeing that all the traffic from Google.nl is now going to flowtracksurf.be.

Some keywords we were scoring #1-2 for are: surfvakanties, surfvakantie, surfcamp mimizan, surfcamp, frankrijk, surfcamp spanje, surfen frankrijk

We just can't figure out the hard evidence in the data.
Can you help us on that?

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Jacob - Has this issue been resolved? We would love an update, thanks!

Christy

[Keszi]

Hi Jacob,

Just arrived home. So I would disclose why I said a few hours ago, that I was afraid of the December 8th date.

I have seen a huge drop in few of our websites which had quite a spammy backlink profile on that date. We have been cleaning up since then, trying to repair the damage, and results are showing up.

Try to check if your organic traffic has dropped site-wide or just for specific search queries. (in my case specific search queries had less traffic, but some other keyword sets were producing well).

On the 6th-7th there was the "Penguin Double Take" update, which I think has hit your site performance.

I hope this helped.

Gr., Keszi

[Keszi]

Oh, that 8th of December... now that is something I didn't want to see.

We also have seen a drop on this period on both dutch and belgian market.

If you want, I can take a look in the evening, I will PM you.

Gr., Keszi

[Jacobe]

Hi Keszi

Thank you for your reply and insights. Great reference to the article. We'll go in-depth.

However, the changes are so sudden(*1) and big(*2) that we believe it must be something bigger than this.

(*1) the big drop (for NL) happened on 8-21 December.
(*2) we're talking about -95% organic traffic overnight

[Keszi]

Hi Jacob,

As I was reading through your question, the first thing that jumped in: HREFLANG markup.

Then I jumped over your URL and I see the following:

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.flowtracksurf.be" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">nl-be</a>" /> (on Belgium version)

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.flowtracksurf.nl" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">nl-nl</a>" /> (on Netherlands version)

You are not using cross annotation. That might cause an issue for you.

There is a nice article about Hreflang implementations from Dave Sottimano: http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Read it trough, I think with correct implementation of Hreflang, you should be able to resolve this issue.

I hope it was helpful.
Gr., Keszi