Was there a recent secret Panda update? Help.
-
Our site http://www.entrepreneurhandbook.co.uk has had a fairly significant drop in organic traffic this past week. Going from 3.8k to 3.k
Can't see any reported updates on the major SEO websites, we'd had steady growth all year then appear to have back-peddled.
One post in particular, our UK venture capital list was page1 for a number of VC related keywords such including 'venture capital' (google.co.uk) but it's completely dropped out of the index for that one and others.
Does anybody have any ideas? We haven't done any link building at all, we've focussed entirely on on-site SEO and high quality in depth articles/posts/lists and historically we've always seen small increases at every algo update.
-
Thanks Marie, we'll get on that. Appreciate you (and everyone else) taking the time to help.
-
Hi,
I haven't heard any rumblings about Panda at all. If you've got pages disappearing from the index, this is not likely to be an algorithmic issue like Panda or Penguin as those algorithms won't remove a page from the index.
To see if you've been manually penalized, check Webmaster Tools --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions.
It's probably also a good idea to use the fetch and render tool in Webmaster Tools on these pages. I see that you've got your wp-includes folder blocked. This means you are probably blocking Google from seeing your javascript. If they can't render your pages properly then this can definitely cause problems. Here's more info from Google in which they say, "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings".
-
Thanks Aaron, would be interested in hearing more when you find the reason!
-
We had an interesting situation here at the office where a client had a legitimate page on the site mysteriously vanish. Still investigating.
-
Thanks EGOL but it's not (just) seasonality, that was my first thought.
The actual ranking positions have been lost, some being taken completely out of the index!
-
See thread here... The Easter Bunny Took My Traffic
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
-
Our Sites Organic Traffic Went Down Significantly After The June Core Algorithm Update, What Can I Do?
After the June Core Algorithim Update, the site suffered a loss of about 30-35% of traffic. My suggestions to try to get traffic back up have been to add metadata (since the majority of our content is lacking it), as well ask linking if possible, adding keywords to alt images, expanding and adding content as it's thin content wise. I know that from a technical standpoint there are a lot of fixes we can implement, but I do not want to suggest anything as we are onboarding an SEO agency soon. Last week, I saw that traffic for the site went back to "normal" for one day and then saw a dip of 30% the next day. Despite my efforts, traffic has been up and down, but the majority of organic traffic has dipped overall this month. I have been told by my company that I am not doing a good job of getting numbers back up, and have been given a warning stating that I need to increase traffic by 25% by the end of the month and keep it steady, or else. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it realistic and/or possible to reach that goal?
Algorithm Updates | | NBJ_SM2 -
Help guide pages from subdirectory must be opened in a new tab?
Hi, We have help guide pages for every feature we provide. They been hosted on different sub directory and we linked them from our website pages. Do we need to make these sub directory pages to open in a new tab when clicked from our website pages? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Any Google Panda/Penguin, etc updates late October 2012?
Not sure why my website traffic is dropping down late Oct 12. It showed a boost with the last Panda update in early Oct. Anyone know of a current update?
Algorithm Updates | | ChrisTS0 -
80-90% drop in visits after Panda/EMD update - now what?
Hi everyone, Had my first wonderful experience with an algorithm update. Business was doing great - about 90-100 visitors a day down to about 12-15 from Sept 29th to current. Our domain is www.hamiltonscarservice.com which I don't think exactly qualifies for an exact match but may be close enough (car service is one of our keywords). I am more likely to think its related to the Panda 20 update. I haven't changed the site at all lately so I was wondering what tips you guys may have going forward. The site isn't perfectly optimized (which is where you guys come in) but when I first set it up it worked great so I mainly focused on backlinks from that point on. Now evidently this has caught up with me. Any suggestions are appreciated - thanks! 09cSe.png
Algorithm Updates | | kabledesigns0 -
Need help with some duplicate content.
I have some duplicate content issues on my blog I'm trying to fix. I've read lots of different opinions online about the best way to correct it, but they all contradict each other. I was hoping I could ask this community and see what the consensus was. It looks like my category and page numbers are showing duplicate content. For instance when I run the report I see things like this: http://noahsdad.com/resources/ http://noahsdad.com/resources/page/2/ http://noahsdad.com/therapy/page/2/ I'm assuming that is just the categories that are being duplicated, since the page numbers only show on the report at the end of a category. What is the best way to correct this? I don't use tags at all on my blog, using categories instead. I also use the Yoast SEO plug in. I have a check mark in the box that disables tags. However it says, "If you're using categories as your only way of structure on your site, you would probably be better off when you prevent your tags from being indexed." There is a box that allows you to disable categories also, but the description above makes it seem like I don't want to block both tags and categories. Any ideas what I should do? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad0 -
Bounce rate help?
I'm trying to get to the bottom of the bounce rates of a few of the keyword results on my site. I think I'm getting traffic to an informative page and visitors are reading it then hopping back to Google to search for the terms I've just given them and I'm getting high bounce rates for this. I'll use an example to make it clear. A Google search for "hp 3050 ink" gets my HP 3050 printer page (A page that lists all the cartridges that will work in a HP 3050 printer) as a pretty good result. So far so good, right? My problem comes when I look in analytics and see that this page has a massive 80% bounce rate. The only reason I can think of is that people are using my site to find out what cartridge a printer will take and then using that information to refine their search. Am I over looking something? Is there anything I can do? Does it even matter? If it does is it really fair that my site is being punished for being a useful resource? Thanks in advance
Algorithm Updates | | Stinkyink0 -
Index Page lost rankings? Please Help!
This morning I ranked highly (Page 1 UK Google) for over 50 keyword search terms for my website http://www.careworx.co.uk This afternoon my rankings have bottomed out and dropped pages? I have not been de-indexed it appears and many of my sub-pages are still highly ranked. Would anybody know what has happened? I know of Google Panda but I would've seen results drop before now so I'm very concerned. Don't seem to have lost any links etc and am careful to balance SEO with a mix of techniques to keep Google happy and again, have not been de-indexed. Can anybody offer advice please, or let me know how I can rectify this.
Algorithm Updates | | andystep0 -
How did NexTag.com Survive the Algorithm Update?
After going through numerous post-algo update articles I find one price comparison site to have gone though unscratched - NexTag.com Question: What contributed to their success? Was it sheer domain authority, content quality, unique toolset... or something else?
Algorithm Updates | | Dan-Petrovic0