8th October - anything drastic happen?
-
Hi all,
So, I have done nothing SEO heavy on my site for a couple of months, I deleted a page and moved the content to the homepage, but thats about it.
Anyway, for our main keyword we have dropped from a pretty regular 20-30th position we have enjoyed for the past 4-5 months right down to 95th. Other keywords have also dropped by a few pages but not as drastic.
I got hit by some spammy 'forex' links on the UK Business Forums clones appearing (as per my other post), but they started AFTER the 8th October.
Something happened on that day which very rapidly ruined my rankings. Has anyone else seen this happen? Or could it be Penguin 4 checked out my site on that date? I have not dropped at all for my Brand Name or other keywords, it seems to be the higher searched keywords I have taken a plummet on.
Thanks,
-
phero, once you disavow a domain or a URL, all it takes is for Google to crawl it. Once they crawl the page, they will see that it's been disavowed and recognize it.
-
Thanks, I've tried to keep them clean, but guess I need to be more thorough. How long does disavowing usually get considered - I submitted a load 3 days ago but we dropped even more since then.
Thanks,
-
phero, according to the Moz Algo Change history, Penguin real-time did roll out a few weeks prior to October 8th. But, as we have heard time and time again form various sources, even Google, that it has continued to roll out. So, I wouldn't be surprised if you were actually hit by a Penguin-related update.
What I would do is take a look again at the site's links to see if there are any links that you need to disavow or get rid of completely. Keep in mind that Penguin isn't just about links, there are other issues that can affect your site's rankings, as well.
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
-
We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skjorte19740 -
What is Happening to Me?!
Okay so this morning I logged into webmaster tools and saw this notice of manual penalty for "unnatural links" affecting "some incoming links." (see attached photo) This is a different notification than I've seen before. Keep in mind this website had been building unnatural links up until I took over in December of 2012. I have since cleaned up a TON of them and thought I was making progress... Until this morning that is. So the next thing I did was head over to the incoming links in GWT. What I saw here shocked me. Whereas the last time I checked (maybe 2 days ago) we had approx 6,000 links we now had 195,565 !!! WTF?!?! Okay so somebody is screwing with us, right? But here's the real confusion: I can't find any of these links anywhere else other than GWT. As you can see on the other attachment I have included, Google is reporting some 39,000 links from a domain called "itbriefing.net" however when I search this domain I find absolutely zero of these links. There are a few mentions of our brand but not one single link. Also, looking through ahrefs.com and OSE I don't see any of the data that GWT is reporting here; everything looks normal to me. Now isn't GWT the last to report all of these changes? What could possibly be happening here? Am I losing my mind? We are still being indexed although I've been frustrated trying to get one of our main keywords to re-rank. This was one that had the most poison links built over the years so recently I gave up and changed the URL of the page completely sans redirect. This worked, and GWT reported a ton of lost links (99% of which were poison and the other 1% of which I regained with the new URL). But now this. Is this a GWT fluke? Am I under attack? What is going on.. Please weigh in on this one as I'm baffled. a78a6fe2fc774f9dfddf0f70b7f1e363.png 7279c71f2ed90d8134c6f4cac199d884.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jesse-landry2 -
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?? If yes then how ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Should I report this to Google and will anything happen ?
Hi, I am working with a client and have discovered that a direct competitor has hidden the clients business name in meta information and also hidden the name on the page but off to the side. My intention is to ask the company to remove the content, but the client would like me to report it to Google. Is this a waste of time and what request in webmaster tools should I use. The name is not a trademark but the business name is not generic and it is an obvious attempt to target my clients business. Any help would be appreciated, Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mozzi0 -
What happens when content on your website (and blog) is an exact match to multiple sites?
In general, I understand that having duplicate content on your website is a bad thing. But I see a lot of small businesses (specifically dentists in this example) who hire the same company to provide content to their site. They end up with the EXACT same content as other dentists. Here is a good example: http://www.hodnettortho.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/ http://www.braces2000.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/ http://www.gentledentalak.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth/ If you google the title of that blog article you find tons of the same article all over the place. So, overall, doesn't this make the content on these blogs irrelevant? Does this hurt the SEO on these sites at all? What is the value of having completely unique content on your site/blog vs having duplicate content like this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MorganPorter0 -
Whatever Happened to Text Link Ads?
I've searched the web for any objective articles, good or bad, written about Text Link Ads or Text Link Brokers written in the past two years. Other than the occasional discussion board question, SEOs are silent about these services. I know back in 2006, Rand looked upon them almost favorably. But what has happened since then? Is there any legitimate use for these services anymore (as a link builder)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 1000Bulbs0 -
If I were to change the geographic keyword such as "foreclosures in Dallas" on 20 related blogs to "foreclosures in Los Angeles" what would happen?
In other words I'm wondering if someone built up an internet presence for their company through multiple websites over the years and then decided to move to another part of the united states, would it work to change all the keywords to the new location? Would that work toward getting them ranked in the new area or would you have to create entirely new websites? Thanks guys.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whorneff3100 -
What happened with Hayneedle's rankings?
Hayneedle is an e-commerce company that operates 200 niche sites selling indoor and outdoor home products. They were ranking at the top of the first page for most terms related to their sites (fire pits, fountains, benches, etc.), but all of a sudden at the end of April they lost their rankings, getting dropped to page 4 or lower for tons of their sites (barstools.com, patiofurnitureusa.com, adirondackchairs.com, benches.com, etc.). Does anybody know what caused this? Other than one thread on an SEO forum, we haven't been able to find any discussion about it online. It seems like cross-linking between the sites could have been a problem here, but we'd love to hear thoughts from the experts here on this. Our company is using the same business model of one brand with niche sites and we want to avoid anything like this happening to us.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | outdoorliving0