Substantial drop in organic traffic and keyword rankings
-
My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information.
-
My pleasure.
-
Thanks for all of your help Dave!
-
I'm always hesitant to switch domains and you do have some good links in there that would be a shame to lose. If you have a manual penalty (which i assume you don't) then it might be something to consider (though still not my favorite path) but with just an algorithmic kick in the butt I'd audit the links, disavow the low quality ones and build up from there.
As a warning I'm sure you're aware of, when you disavow the bad links you'll likely be disavowing links that are actually passing weight currently. The site might see a small drop in rankings after but that's better than a massive drop with the next Penguin update.
-
It was around that time. I'm thinking a new domain might help them start off on the right track?
-
Ah, I thought it might relate to links. Did your client let them go in the spring of 2014?
-
So I found out from the client that they were working with an SEO company that was practicing black hat techniques. In 2013, this company was creating articles and web pages on many low quality domains and pointing links to the client's site. Could this company pulled all of these links when they stopped working with them? Is that even possible?
-
As Josh will find out, it'll be hard to post a public response as it would likely require revealing more than I'd feel comfortable doing but interested to know if Josh and I ended up with the same general take on the potential cause.
-
Hey Karl, Dave here.
As I'm sure you can imagine, it's pretty tough to get a feel for the issue without more info. If you'd like to PM me the URL I'm happy to take a quick look. I may respond back here to help others but I won't list off any details that could be considered proprietary or confidential.
Cheers !
Dave
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
-
Is there proof that disavowing backlinks in GSC help to boost rankings in Google?
Hi Guys Let's say you have a website and you got some questionable back links or lower quality ones. Does anyone have proof that after disavowing back links helped in the rankings or had some positive effects? I am concerned that Google will place our website on their radar and instead possibly demote it or smth. Lastly, if disavowing is the way to go what criteria do you use to disavow backlinks? So if you get questionable back links over time, should you disavow ongoing as well? If so how often? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz0 -
Click Through's for ranking
Back in April of 2014, Rand performed an experiment to determine if Google clicks-throughs made a difference on rankings. He Tweeted and asked people to search on a specific term, and then click on a specific listing, to determine if the immediate clicks made a difference. Within 2.5 hours, his search listing went from #10 position to #1 position. My question is this: If this experiment still works today, could you right click, copy link address of the SERP listing from Google's page and put it in a Facebook or Twitter post, and receive the same results? Or would this be gaming the system? Here is an example of the link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiaqZD9-cXLAhUKyWMKHfFID70QFghYMAk&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbuzzy4shots.com%2Ffocus-pain-relief%2F&usg=AFQjCNElHaso_vXP4rWQdsaX1JdP8IItMQ&sig2=Sg9r6zSbW0pZQtb4ZbzJqg&bvm=bv.117218890,d.cGc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tdawson090 -
Keywords Ranking Fluctuate
Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a client’s website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda/ Penguin update because of some spammy links. We have analysed and disavow sapmmy links edit anchor tag and landing pages. We've made a decent climb back while working on it keywords ranking was improved some of them are from out of 500 to top 30, but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into. 1. Ranking for keywords are again dropping and traffic is gone: I notice keyword ranking is dropping and some of the keywords which are on 2 and 3 page, now on 9<sup>th</sup> page. And also traffic is down. Any help would be appreciated! Regards, S
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShaunPhilips0 -
Why a drop in certain keyword but not others?
Hi. I am looking into a potential clients SEO issues and reasons why their rankings for specific keywords that they ranked for have dropped but others stayed the same or sometimes have improved. They received a manual spam action that was revoked after some disavow and so on. In May of this year they noticed a huge drop in more generic terms. The main keyword that was ranked 6th, dropped to 35th yet other keywords rose slightly. I have noticed this issue for another potential client as well. They ranked 1st for their brand name, then received a spam action that was revoked. Now they do not rank for their brand name but do for other long tail keywords? Any ideas the best way to investigate this or root out the issue and build to improve rank for more generic keywords? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YNWA0 -
Duplicate keywords in URL?
Is there such a thing as keyword stuffing URLs? Such as a domain name of turtlesforsale.com having a directory called turtles-for-sale that houses all the pages on the site. Every page would start out with turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/. Good or bad idea? The owner is hoping to capitalize on the keywords of turtles for sale being in the URL twice and ranking better for that reason.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why?
Hi, We have had a Google action against us for over a year. After many "SEO Company's" we found someone who help us remove (December 2013) the action. Which was due to our bad back link profile. We have 100% improved our content for our website, as Google has requested. We are active within social media, we add relevant content to our blog and we clean up our desk after we finish work 🙂 After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic, if anything its decreasing. Is anyone else in the same position? or has anyone recovered from a similar situation? Josh
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JoshuaKersh0 -
Keyword Phrase vs. separate keywords - Title Tag best practices
Hello, What is your opinion about when to use a keyword phrase vs. 2 keywords, separated by a comma, in the title tag? For example, on this page, the title could be either: NLP Hypnosis, Language Patterns | Nlpca.com or NLP and Hypnosis Including Language Patterns | Nlpca.com Which do you guys think is best with respect to rankings, updates, and future updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Ranking factors: What am I missing here?
I'm trying to understand what techniques might have been used to help the site malime.com.au rank for the term 'boys tops' on Google (AU). It appears to be a new domain, there are hardly any backlinks and basically no social mentions. Internally, the site uses the term 'boys tops' to link to the same page that Google chooses also—so that much makes sense—but other than that (and some weird keyword-stuffed page titles and meta tags) I cannot find much reason for this site to rank as well as it is. Have I missed something? Or is it just a low-enough competition phrase that it can do this with basically internal linking? Any ideas? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathanV19770
