Puzzling Penalty Question - Need Expert Help

[MRSWebSolutions]

I'm turning to the Moz Community because we're completely stumped. I actually work at a digital agency, our specialism being SEO. We've dealt with Google penalties before and have always found it fairly easy to identify the source the problem when someone comes to us with a sudden keyword/traffic drop.

I'll briefly outline what we've experienced:

We took on a client looking for SEO a few months ago. They had an OK site, with a small but high quality and natural link profile, but very little organic visibility. The client is an IT consultancy based in London, so there's a lot of competition for their keywords. All technical issues on the site were addressed, pages were carefully keyword targeted (obviously not in a spammy way) and on-site content, such as services pages, which were quite thin, were enriched with more user focused content. Interesting, shareable content was starting to be created and some basic outreach work had started.

Things were starting to pick up. The site started showing and growing for some very relevant keywords in Google, a good range and at different levels (mostly sitting around page 3-4) depending on competition. Local keywords, particularly, were doing well, with a good number sitting on page 1-2. The keywords were starting to deliver a gentle stream of relevant traffic and user behaviour on-site looked good.

Then, as of the 28th September 2015, it all went wrong. Our client's site virtually dropped from existence as far as Google was concerned. They literally lost all of their keywords. Our client even dropped hundreds of places for their own brand name. They also lost all rankings for super low competition, non-business terms they were ranking for.

So, there's the problem. The keywords have not shown any sign of recovery at all yet and we're, understandably, panicking. The worst thing is that we can't identify what has caused this catastrophic drop. It looks like a Google penalty, but there's nothing we can find that would cause it. There are no messages or warnings in GWT. The link profile is small but high quality. When we started the content was a bit on the thin side, but this doesn't really look like a Panda penalty, and seems far too severe. The site is technically sound. There is no duplicate content issues or plaigarised content. The site is being indexed fine. Moz gives the site a spam score of 1 (our of 11 (i think that's right)). The site is on an ok server, which hasn't been blacklisted or anything.

We've tried everything we can to identify a problem. And that's where you guys come in. Any ideas? Anyone seen anything similar around the same time? Unfortunately, we can't share our clients' site's name/URL, but feel free to ask any questions you want and we'll do our best to provide info.

[MRSWebSolutions]

Thanks again Marie!

You've been really helpful, and it's much appreciated. Unfortunately, we've still not found anything that could cause the issue. That thread shared was really interesting, but their problems was quite different to ours. They lost traffic immediately after moving their hosting, whereas our client lost traffic 2-3 weeks after moving server. I'm still not ruling out the possibility that this could've been the catalyst that set off the big drop. We're stumped; but still dedicating time into solving this issue.

I'd love to drop the client's URL in here but I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate us sharing it in this way. The only alternative would be to DM it to someone who knew what they were talking about.

[MarieHaynes]

Also...if it helps, I found this thread very interesting when it comes to troubleshooting big drops following a server change:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1091797

[MarieHaynes]

If you've recently moved to a new server, has the page load time been affected much? Do you see anything on a DNS check such as here:

http://dns.squish.net/

I understand the hesitance in adding a clients' url. I would likely only do so with the clients' permission.

One final thought - I had said that there were no major algo shifts that I was aware of on September 28, but then Alan Bleweiss tweeted about a client who saw a big jump up on that day:

https://twitter.com/AlanBleiweiss/status/656201424439746560

He had wondered if it was a Panda related change.

Yesterday I finally saw one of my clients make a big jump up in what appears to be a Panda recovery. We may be moving to the point where we can't pin down Panda hits and recoveries to just one day. I'm not saying it's Panda for sure though. To drop to the degree that you have and not even have the brand ranking at all you'd have to have really really significant Panda issues.

[MRSWebSolutions]

Hi Maria

Thank you very much for the detailed suggestions. The site doesn't use AJAX much/at all, but I'd missed this piece of news, so thank you.

You've kind of echoed our conclusions, but we're still no closer to a solution. The only thing we have done recently is move the client onto a new server. Can you think of any reason that this might have caused our issues? We've checked the server isn't blacklisted or anything obvious like that.

We're a bit reticent to share a clients' URL on here. From your experience, are the community respectful of this information? The last thing we want is our client being cold called after someone has found there URL here!

[MRSWebSolutions]

Hi Andrew

Thanks for the help. Reassuring to hear we're not alone! We'll be sure to check the recommended tool!

[MRSWebSolutions]

Hi Tom

Thank you very much for the advice. We've ruled out points 1) & 3). We've had nothing in GWT. We've used several tools to check our link profile, including Ahrefs, looking in-depth at all aspects of the profile.

We've been pretty darn thorough with our checks, but there remains a small chance the site could've been hacked and we've not yet picked up on this. Malicious digital activity changes all the time, so I suppose this could be a result of something we've not seen before (though it's unlikely). Have you got any tips for identifying such activity (apart from the obvious (eg. inbound/outbound links)?

[MarieHaynes]

What a frustrating situation.

Does the site rely on AJAX much? In late September, early October a lot of sites that relied on AJAX saw their sites drop out of search. It was first noticed with WIX sites, but many other sites had the same issue:

https://www.seroundtable.com/wix-google-deindex-21034.html

There was no major shakeup of Panda/Penguin in late September. It's possible that there were some small Panda ripples but I haven't seen any cases of sites plummeting in search because of Panda recently.

I echo the advice to check for hacked pages.

I'd also have a good look for things like a change in design, url structure, etc. I've seen quite a few sites who somehow accidentally noindexed half their site by backing up legacy code or making a similar error. I'd also re-evaluate your robots.txt page and do some fetch and render as Googlebot on the pages that aren't ranking well to see if you can see obvious issues.

With a big drop like this my money would be on a technical error in the site. It really doesn't sound like a Penguin/Panda problem to me. That said, if none of these tips help, sharing the url in this forum will get you some more specific advice.

[Andrew_Birkitt]

We had a similar thing happen with a client a while ago and it was to do with point 3 as mentioned by Tom, it turned out that the site had been hacked and had some very adverse and unwanted links added to the footer that were invisible to the naked eye or by searching the code.

We were recommended a little plugin for chrome called User Agent Switcher which identified and revealed these hidden links on the site, once they were dealt with the site recovered to where it was previously.

[TomRayner]

Hi Adam

First of all - very sorry to see this.  Hope you can get them back on their feet.

For something so dramatic, for me it's only ever one of three things:

1. A manual penalty (as notified in GWT)

2. Website has been hacked

3. A penguin penalty

I think with points 1 and 2, you might have already ruled this out, but be absolutely sure. Run every check under the sun to see whether the site was compromised, look for odd URLs that have been created, check Joomla/WP updates (and plugin updates to make sure they're not injecting malicious code) - just anything.

So that leaves us with point 3 - and I know you've mentioned you've looked at the backlinks already, and apologies in advance if this advice is like teaching you to suck eggs.  Have you tried every backlink source, not just Moz, but WMT, Majestic and Ahrefs?  Have you used tools like Kerboo and URLProfiler for quick classification of the sites?  Have you checked the anchor text distribution?

The big calling card for me is the brand name drop - and that the majority of the time relates to a link/spam penalty.  If you want, you can PM me the URL and I'll quickly pop it into Majestic and Ahrefs for a bit of further analysis - if anything just for a bit of sense checking.