Was there a recent secret Panda update? Help.
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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.
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Thanks Marie, we'll get on that. Appreciate you (and everyone else) taking the time to help.
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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".
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Thanks Aaron, would be interested in hearing more when you find the reason!
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We had an interesting situation here at the office where a client had a legitimate page on the site mysteriously vanish. Still investigating.
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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!
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See thread here... The Easter Bunny Took My Traffic
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