Impressions Fell off a Cliff, No Manual Action, What Gives?
-
Hi Moz crew,
We've got a bit of a riddle on our hands here at Flightpath. You see, we're an agency that specializes in digital services like web design, social media and SEO. Unfortunately, we seem to have been hit by an a algorithmic penalty on February 28th, 2014. This is a first for us - we've never had to deal with a penalty (manual or algorithmic) for our site or any of our client sites.
Here's the situation:
- We were averaging around 1,500 impressions per day before the drop. Since 2/28, we see closer to 250 impressions per day.
- No manual action notice in WMT
- Branded keywords did not lose rank. It was primarily our the service-oriented keywords that we lost rank on (ex: "digital agency", "digital agency nyc", "social media agency nyc", "web agency new york" - we were page 1 for all of these, though "digital agency" wasn't as secure as the others).
- Backlink profile looks ok. We did a clean-up (disavowed a few hundred domains) as soon as we noticed the drop, but there wasn't anything in there egregiously offensive. There definitely wasn't anything NEW that was problematic. Not a lot of non-branded anchor text at all.
- No major changes to the site in 2014
Any ideas? The site is http://www.flightpath.com
And here's a horrifying WMT screen grab: i.imgur.com/EY4OBG1.jpg
UPDATE: We recovered nearly all of our missing rank/traffic/impressions for a 3-day period between 4/15 and 4/17.
WMT Screenshot: http://imgur.com/V1fI1MQ
During our brief recovery, we did lose a small amount of rank (just a few positions, only for a handful of keywords) compared to where we were pre-crisis. That makes sense though, we were pretty ruthless in disavowing domains and almost surely caught a few "positive" links along with the bad ones. Aside from that, it appeared to be a full recovery - every single one of our generic keywords was back for just over 48 hours.
Any ideas? Was Google rolling out a new algorithm tweak, only to pull it back due to bugs? Or was it the opposite: Google rolling back the update that hurt our site to fix a few bugs before pushing it live again?
-
HI Dan - thanks for looking into this.
Our traffic from organic search has indeed dropped (Google only, rankings and traffic from Bing/Yahoo have remained stable).
Hopefully we've taken care of all the shady back links via disavow. Like you said, however, it could be awhile before we know if this has had any effect. Most of the links you referenced, and most of the ones that needed to be eliminated, came from websites linking to content that existed on our domain prior to the agency purchasing it almost 10 years ago.
You're right about the unusually high amount of indexed pages. The inflation is from our blog "tag" pages. We've put a dofollow/noindex on all of these pages. They're pretty deep on the site though, I expect it will take awhile for them to be crawled again for de-indexing.
We actually had a 2-day recovery just over a week ago. Then, as quickly and inexplicably as the recovery came, we again lost rank on our generic terms. I'm going to add some of this info to the main post now. It certainly is bizarre, so I'm hoping someone might be able to identify what might have caused the site to recover and then drop again over the course of 48 hours.
-
Hi John
First thing - have any other metrics changed? Traffic via Google search? Rankings (do you track these independently of WMT)?
Do know that the disavow can take 6+ months to fully process and have an effect back in the SERPs. I do see some suspect links. With Google being so aggressive lately, I could see only a few bad links hurting the site;
- http://wiis.tu-graz.ac.at/people/tom.html "jazz online server"
- http://enn2.com/nitelife.htm "internet cafe index"
- http://public.homeagain.com/faq.html "found pets"
The more I look in OSE there's definitely a lot of link issues. I know they may be old, but it's possible some could have come back to haunt the site.
I would be extra certain you've disavowed all the bad links. Greenlane SEO has two great posts on the process they use;
- www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/01/step-by-step-disavow-process/
- http://www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/04/how-to-uncover-those-harder-to-find-links/
The site design LOOKS great - terrific actually. So it's almost easy to assume everything is technically OK on-site, yet there are definitely some issues there.
For example there are almost 800 pages indexed - which seems like a lot for this site (I could be wrong). There are lost of really long titles and descriptions etc. So as Andy suggests, I'd take a good look at cleaning up anything on-site as well. It may not have caused a penalty, but anything to help Google re-processes the site will help
-
"If only we knew when the next refresh was going to be."
Maybe you found it!
It could also be another algorithm update that has tipped you over the edge. You might have been borderline for something for some time, then an update comes along and pushes you over the edge.
Do a site crawl with Screaming Frog as well, to see if anything glaringly obvious jumps out at you.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the feedback. Only updates would be blog posts (original content, no guest posts or anything).
And yeah, our current thinking is that this is probably Penguin rather than Panda related. If only we knew when the next refresh was going to be.
-
Hi John,
That is a big drop off!
The first question really, is if there have been any changes to the site recently? Any development, new pages, SEO work, content, link building, etc.?
Edit-- Sorry, just seen that you said no major changes to the site - but does this mean that there have been changes?
You mentioned that you have disavowed some links - if this was Penguin related, it could take a little while before you see any changes.
-Andy
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
-
Pure spam Manual Action by Google
Hello Everyone, We have a website http://www.webstarttoday.com. Recently, we have received manual action from Google says "Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines." . Google has given an example http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com/. The nature of the business of http://www.webstarttoday.com is to creating sub-domains (website builder). Anyone can register and create sub-domains. My questions are: What are the best practices in case if someone is creating sub-domain for webstarttoday.com? How can I revoke my website from this penalty? What should i do with other hundreds of sub-domains those are already created by third party like http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com? . Why these type of issues don't come with WordPress or weebly. ? Regards, Ruchi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Very Slow Recovery after Manual Penalty Removed - Are we missing something?
Our site was handed a manual penalty in November 2013 where exact match anchor text and low quality directory submissions seemed to be the problem. We began the process of link removal, reconfiguration and disavowing. We had already planned to change our domain in early 2014 to coincide with our SSL certificate renewal and although we were hesitant to do this with the manual penalty still there we proceeded and 301'd most of the site but left the pages that were the landing page for most of the exact match links as 302 to the new domain. We continued to work on removing the manual penalty for the old domain as we didn't want it to pass over to the new one and eventually this was removed n March 2014 Now the penalty is gone are we safe to change those 302 redirects to 301 so everything redirects. The problem we have is that six months on, a lot of the pages for the old domain are still indexed and even though we are indexed for the new domains are rankings haven't recovered. Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty or we missing something else
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Manual action penalty revoked, rankings still low, if we create a new site can we use the old content?
Scenario:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar. Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website? We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?0 -
Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
A friend was hit with a manual penalty for unnatural links-impacts links. (see attached) I'm thinking it may be because they copied their entire wordpress.com site over to site.org/blog. (without redirecting it, so they have duplicate content as well) Out of 76+k links, nearly 11,000 are from their wordpress.com blog. If that's the case is the problem solved by upgrading within wordpress.com to redirect to site.org/blog? (then making a reconsideration request?) Or do I risk negatively affecting their site somehow? They saw a significant increase in traffic when they moved the content over but I'm thinking that was more a matter of increasing content on their site than increasing backlinks. The .org site ranks relatively well, whereas the wordpress.com blog doesn't really rank at all.Worth noting: it's a partial match, not a sitewide match. Does that negate my theory about the wordpress.com blog being the cause in any way? Since many of the links from it are sitewide? The wordpress.com blog has a header link to the .org homepage, plus individual links to it in posts. There are also three links in the header to pages on their .com website which redirects to three corresponding pages on the main .org site (the whole .com redirects). There are 23 footer links from the blog to the targeted .org pages as well. In the attached screenshot of who links most from Google Webmaster Tools, note that martindale.com links most, but it's a lawyer's site so they naturally have referring content there. Could that be a problem?Thanks everyone! 🙂M8JVEI6.jpg?1 M6gYE90.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Can anyone explain sudden drop in impressions. Webmaster tools screenshot attached.
I posted here recently concerned about a drop in rankings. I'm yet to figure out what happened and thought I'd post a screenshot of the loss of impressions to see if anyone can help? jeZO1r1.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Our keyword rank fell drastically since our last moz crawl. What gives?
Our site was just crawled last night an we had a number of keywords fall 25% or so, from say # 30 to 38. What would cause such a drastic fall? We haven't taken down pages or changed changed page titles, url or content. One thing we are having trouble with is our meta description and meta keywords for each page. Drupal 7 seems to be giving us trouble and the meta information isn't showing up anymore. Would that cause the fall? Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drudalton1 -
Top 3 actions I should immediately take.... ?
Site: bussongs.com I have a fairly successful (400k visits/month, 1.2m PV/month) site which features a directory of kids songs. kididdles.com is my archnemesis. Slight edge in PVs with better ranking on many long-tail KWs (song names mainly). What are the top 3 things I should do to knock out my competitor? I feel I've nailed the on-page stuff - I have checked all the major items and produced superior content. The big thing that shouts out to me is that my competitor just has many more backlinks, especially from unique domains and that's lifting up everything. Thoughts? Can't wait to hear your ideas!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kmander0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0