Puzzling Penalty Question - Need Expert Help
-
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.
-
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.
-
Also...if it helps, I found this thread very interesting when it comes to troubleshooting big drops following a server change:
-
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:
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.
-
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!
-
Hi Andrew
Thanks for the help. Reassuring to hear we're not alone! We'll be sure to check the recommended tool!
-
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)?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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:
-
A manual penalty (as notified in GWT)
-
Website has been hacked
-
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.
-
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
-
Google asking questions in SERPs
I just did s search for Hayley Kiyoko, and Google asked me which song is my favourite from her new album. Is this a new thing? I've never asked Google a question before and had it ask me something back, other than "did you mean... (the correct spelling for what I was looking for)?" u6qYnwq.png
Algorithm Updates | | 4RS_John1 -
When sub domains take away the traffic from search; will this helps or hurts main website rankings?
Hi all, We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ecommerce SEO help
Hi I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products. We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot. I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France. I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands. I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO. I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
A few sitemap questions
1. When I do a sitemap through a generator, it lists some of my URLs twice, with and without the last slash. Ex: <url><loc>http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-hollywood</loc><lastmod>2013-11-25T16:12:50+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.9</priority></url> <url><loc>http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-hollywood/</loc><lastmod>2013-11-25T16:14:27+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.69</priority></url> Should I remove one of these or leave it? 2. What is the importance of lastmod? I've read that if you have a lastmod listed, Google won't recrawl until a new time/date is up? 3. This goes along with lastmod, but is changefreq important? Can it hurt me at all?
Algorithm Updates | | howlusa0 -
Struggling with Google Bot Blocks - Please help!
I own a site called www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au After months and months we still have a serious issue with all pages having blocked URLs according to Google Webmaster Tools. The 404 errors are returning a 200 header code according to the email below. Do you agree that the 404.php code should be changed? Can you do that please ? The current state: Google webmaster tools Index Status shows: 26,000 pages indexed 44,000 pages blocked by robots. In late March, we implemented a change recommended by an SEO expert and he provided a new robots.txt file, advised that we should amend sitemap.xml and other changes. We implemented those changes and then setup a re-index of the site by google. The no of blocked URLs eventually reduced in May and June to 1,000 for a few days – but now the problem has rapidly returned. The no of pages that are displayed in a google search request of www.google.com.au where the query was ‘site:wheretobuybeauty.com.au’ is 37,000: This new site has been re-crawled over last 4 weeks. About the site This is a Linux php site and has the following: 55,000 URLs in sitemap.xml submitted successfully to webmaster tools robots.txt file has been modified several times: Firstly we had none Then we created one but were advised that it needed to have this current content: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/sitemap.xml
Algorithm Updates | | socialgrowth0 -
Lost over 65% of organic visits since Sept - Please help
Hi all, I'm fairly new to SEOmoz, i am here because i dont seem to be getting any actuall help from my SEO company, so am trying to figure this out myself. I have done a quick analysis using google analytics and have gone from 13441 google organic visitors in Sept to 4527 google organic visitors in March. (see attached image GA Sept - March) Visitor numbers seems be to fairly stable in sept, oct, nov, and perhaps a slight decline in Dec, but then on Jan17th seems a big drop, and i have never recovered... (See images GA - Oct, GA - Nov, GA - Dec and GA - Jan ) I am at a bit of a loss, i have heard about google penalties, but there are no warnings in my webmaster tools about this, the only warning i ever got was a message on Dec 24th which read : http://XXX.co.uk/: Big traffic change for top URL Search results clicks for (my site) have decreased significantly. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates. However, if you have recently made significant changes to the content or configuration of your site, this change may be an indication that there are problems. This is not a penalty notice is it? its simply google telling me i have lost a lot of traffic? Strange thing is December's traffic was pretty much fine, so do not understand why i got this message, when the drop in traffic happened a month later. I've been racking my brain for months trying to fix every little possible issue i can find with my site (its not nice, when you do not actually know what google has decided it doesn't like about your site!) but nothing seems to be helping, i've been hiring content writter's as i found loads of websites have copied a lot of content, i also decided maybe the product descriptions are being classed as duplicate so again have got in content writter's to re-write hundreds of product descriptions (all this is costing me an arm and a leg)... Nada! Then today, when doing this google analysis (see image GA Sept - March) i noticed two sites, i have renamed them on the image to: XXX-1.co.uk & XXX-2.ecomm-search.com XXX-1.co.uk was a test server where i could play around with code on my website before i actually implement changes, usually i delete all the files after i use it... but it looks like i forgot to do that.... the site is a complete copy of my website (but obviously a version where you can not actually process an order) but all the pages still have canonical links back to the proper website... Just in case this was causing issues, i have 301 redirected the site back to my main site... Is this wise? or should i just delete the site? XXX-2.ecomm-search.com is a search company i was trialing as i wanted to improve the search functionality on my own site, however the search features are hosted on their site... I was told it has no bearing on SEO as its not indexed... however if google is seeing refferalls coming from that site, which is basically a duplicate of my search pages but with better functionality, could they be considering this a duplicate content issue? If anybody can give me any advice at all about above questions, or in general about what happened on Jan 17th (as i see from web search's many people were affected but i can not seem to find people who actually know what google did) i would be very grateful. Thanks James iNiKRDq jd6FJ3l RzaqTEy 8KCtykz 2m2OGvG
Algorithm Updates | | isntworkdull0 -
Help with local Seo?
Hi, I am really struggling with current predicament i find myself in. I am a small to medium sized business based in Newcastle in the UK and am trying to rank well locally for the keywords that i feel my customers will be searching for locally. I have got to the stage where i am on page 1 of google uk or nearly there but cannot compete against the national companies who have the search terms then just add pages for virtually every city in the country. For example my main product is "Artificial Grass" and my city/town is Newcastle This is where my office is and where my customers are. This is also where my google places page states. Now theres a company that sells Artificial Grass called www.asgoodasgrass.co.uk that are based no where near but use the power of there site to come up in every local search by adding a page "Artificial Grass Newcastle" as well as hundreds of others. They rank 3rd and im 8th. There actual Newcastle page is poor, where as i put everything into my page including pics, video etc. Still no joy. I feel i am always going to rank behind these big boys even though i am the actual local company and have no intention of working others area that are not local to me. By the time i rank behind the above type companies and the likes of yell.com i feel i am never going to be seen and fall back on expensive adwords to help me along. I am a complete newbie at this and would love any help or tips you could give to give me a fighting chance in my area. My site is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk incase you want to look as you will have gathered my other primary product is driveways for which also i feel like i have a million competitors! many many thanks for any responses John
Algorithm Updates | | totaldriveways0 -
Title Tags and Over Optimization Penalty
In the past, it was always a good thing to put your most important keyword or phrase at the beginning of the Title Tag with the company name at the end. Now according to the over optimization penalty in the Whiteboard Friday video, it seems to be better to be more human and put the company name at the beginning with the keyword or phrase following. Am I understanding this correctly?
Algorithm Updates | | hfranz0