My Search Rankings Are In FreeFall Since Last One Month. Should I Be Worried?

[jagdecat]

My site www.midigital.co until the 10th of December, 2015 was ranking more or less in the top 10 for 92 Keywords most of them 1 word and 2 word, built upon over 10 years of SEO and optimization (all ethical).

Since that time however it's like Google's decided that we didn't belong there and all the rankings are in free fall. The only change was that we updated our Wordpress Version. Nothing else was changed. Links were same as always.

My organic traffic figures have fallen 99%, many KWs have been buried beyond 51+ and because of that client's queries we got have virtually disappeared. PPC helps but it's not Organic.

Should I be Worried or is it just more Google Dance?

[jagdecat]

Thanks Peter. Duplicate content was never an issue before this month. We're really stumped because most of the duplicate content even is years old. The content from last year is all new.

But as you mentioned it could be that Google Finally Woke up. The same content btw was responsible for our 92 very highly trafficked KWs. I'll have our SEO team look at it.

Sigh! hope it's just temporary. Thank you so much for taking time out for me. Really appreciate it.

[jagdecat]

Hi Chris,

Thank you so much for the detailed answer. Our KWs Radiation has been built around Digital Agency and Digital Marketing Services. So all in all KWs like Digital Media, Digital Media Agency, Digital Agency, Digital Agency USA, etc etc have been used as our core KWs, and then building up with KWs for services such as Web Design, Creative, etc. However It's been some time since we visited our Content Strategy, about time we gave the site the value it deserve.

For Thin Content, as mentioned the site is old. In those times, we didn't always have access to long form content and we never really do update the older content. I doubt anyone has value for a mobile article written in 2007 (one of them is) and we don't remove it because it's just part of our growth.

Content Spam: We were hit last year with a Spam Bot - one of those crazy BOTS that hacks websites and then creates massive links to the site. That's where those LV sunglasses variations came in but we since cleaned up the site and most of those link profiles have been disavowed in Webmaster. Unfortunately, we couldn't get rid of the incoming links entirely.

Thanks for your time, btw. Really appreciate it.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Umair,

There are a few changes I'd suggest here if this was one of our clients. There is no real clarity around the most recent Google updates but there has been talk of onsite elements taking more of a focus either now or in the near future.

Either way, here are my suggestions from a quick glance of the site:

Keyword Focus - The page title for the home page is keyword-stuffed but the page itself doesn't seem to have a focus. The other pages lack a focus as well. Through the page titles, headings and content there doesn't appear to be any particular focus term(s)

Thin Content - Most landing pages seem to have ~100 - 400 words. We consistently see the best results from 1500+ words per landing page, though even boosting them to closer to 1000 words should see an improvement. Just make sure the content is legitimately valuable to the user, not just a sales pitch about your company.

**Site Speed **- GTmetrix gives a page speed score of E. Site speed is quite important these days

Excessive URLs - Some of the URLs are quite excessive. This appears to be done to fit keywords in but this can be done in a cleaner, more succinct way. For example, rather than _www.midigital.co/about-mi-digital-agency-marketing-services/, _either about-us or digital-agency would be perfectly acceptable and still on point.

Footer Links - The use of sitewide footer links on a few sites isn't ideal. The worst example having well over 30,000 links from the one domain

Blog or Comment Spam - Most of your anchor text profile is made up of variations of "louis vuitton sunglasses" terms. While I haven't dug down to confirm this, it does at least raise a red flag for me and search engines.

I hope that helps!

[Mobilio]

Yes - you should be worried.

Only known change was RankBrain on 26 Oct 2015:
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

So you must check for Panda (probably). In Moz there are many articles how to escape it.

Now let's see your site structure:
http://www.midigital.co/?s=
http://www.midigital.co/partners-affiliates/?s=
http://www.midigital.co/digital-marketing-and-media-innovations-agency/www.meezanbank.com/ribaseazaadi/?s=
http://www.midigital.co/digital-marketing-and-media-innovations-agency/page/2/?s
http://www.midigital.co/digital-marketing-and-media-innovations-agency/page/3/?s
and this happen 981 times... RU index also search results?

http://www.midigital.co/tag/anderson/
http://www.midigital.co/tag/consulting/
http://www.midigital.co/tag/data/
total - 1402 URLs with tags... RU index also tags?

http://www.midigital.co/mi-digital-thinking-and-ideas-digital-happenings/page/8/
http://www.midigital.co/mi-digital-thinking-and-ideas-digital-happenings/page/7/
http://www.midigital.co/mi-digital-thinking-and-ideas-digital-happenings/page/5/
total - 214 URLs... RU index also pages?

Also your host sabotage you:
http://midigital.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/HIp2-1030x704.jpg
http://www.midigital.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/HIp2-1030x704.jpg
total 346 images sitting on non-www version. But if you access HTML document - 301 redirect to www. RU your 301 redirect works?

You also have 32 404 pages. Few domains that didn't work anymore -> http://www.pascrackit.com/ http://blog.mediastation.co.uk/ but you still keep links to them. Few minor problems -> mailto:mailto:careers@mediaidee.com + http://www.midigital.co/digital-marketing-and-media-innovations-agency/page/15/www.meezanbank.com/ribaseazaadi/ http://www.midigital.co/digital-marketing-and-media-innovations-agency/page/15/www.meezanbank.com/ribaseazaadi/?s=

As you can see you have colossal duplicated content. And you're with huge probability hit by Panda.