I have a very strange feeling that someone bad is trying to hurt our company, but maybe I am wrong. Let me explain.
In the last two month, we have seen a very significant drop in sales on our website, but we couldn't figure out why. We have looked at different metrics (Google Search Console, Moz, Google Analytics), but everything looked alright. We had 10% loss in traffic, but we didnt believe at the time that it could be the main issue.
Just yesterday we've discovered the following (please see attached screenshot
- On August 18, 2018 Google launched Search Update
- On the same date, we had a jump in Organic Search Impressions for one particular keyword, which we never tracked before: "free facebook login".
- Majority of all impressions (233,000 out of 258,000) were from Philippines.
- Very low total number of clicks (50 clicks) led to 0% Average CTR for this keyword. Which in return, also lowered our global CTR by 1%.
- One month later we had 1000's of spam emails sent to our Helpdesk from two IP addresses, also from Philippines. We blocked them of course.
It could be all coincidence. I dont know. But do you think that someone can use this fraudulent tactic to lower our CTR and drop our ranking and traffic? Can this influence our SEO in any way?
It's also possible that someone is attacking Facebook and we just happen to be there, on the first page, for the same keyword. Should we try to eliminate our page for this keyword and see what happens?
I've checked this article from Rand Fishkin - https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday and it seems that CTR is an important factor. However the article is from 2015 and maybe it's no longer relevant.
What should we do? Thanks!
