Early Feb Update?

[costume]

After the Google "Mystery Update" in early Feb (Algoroo marks the flux as Feb 5th) one of my B2C e-commerce sites has gotten absolutely hammered.  We had some trouble last May but cleaned a whole host of on-site/site quality issues over the summer and as of early Sept we began to regain rankings/traffic quite nicely...until Feb when we've almost given it all back.

I was doing a little hunting around on SearchMetrics.com and saw lots of big ecommerce sites took a hit as well (eBay, Kohls, Target, etc…).  I had read someplace (I think it was the SearchMetrics blog) that the Feb 5^th update had to do with sites ranking due to misspellings.  We do have several domains variations of company name redirecting to our site, I was wondering if that could have hurt.  I dropped the redirects as a test since they do not drive traffic.

I was wondering if anyone else has seen similar issues and/or could shed some light on the situation.  It is very disheartening to see all that hard work simply "go away" so quickly.

[MattAntonino]

Hi, sorry I don't seem to have this email. Can you either PM me here at Moz or send to matt@payonperformance.com.au?

Thanks!

[costume]

Yeah, the update did seem "Panda-like" but I've been such a "content-nut" here lately I can't believe I missed something so big as to crush us like it has.  Obviously I must have missed something.  I appreciate the offer, I sent you a quick email with my URL.  Any insight you can give would be greatly appreciated.

[MattAntonino]

The biggest changes we saw for the Feb 5 update was to ecomm sites with duplicate content across their own site (parameter issues) and other sites (dupe content.)  It "felt" like a Panda+Ecomm update from the data we saw and the experiences for our own clients.

We didn't dig too deeply as many clients were not affected but if you'd like us to take a look post up a domain (or PM it) and we'll be happy to see if it fits our patterns.

[RyanPurkey]

I don't think the typo redirects are an issue. Even Google uses those: http://gooogle.com. What percentage of your visits is referrer traffic or direct?  If you're at 90% from search any of these swings are going to hurt a lot more. Getting higher rates of referrer and direct would help buffer search, and they also indicate a much higher likelihood of not dropping from search due to brand strength.  I work with some more niche ecommerce sites that saw no adverse effects, but also have balanced brand strengths so wherever possible work on strengthening those as well.