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
-
Google contradictory communications about manual action being applied
Hello,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mylittlepwny
we received a manual action (partial match) for pure spam for a site of ours. The date is not sure, because we didn't receive any notification in mail or inside Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, so all we can say for sure is that we noticed that the manual action page wasn't empty anymore in 10/03/2013. Some context: our Google traffic got a big hit on 07/20/2013, losing around 60% out of 250k visits per day. At first we thought it was an algorithmic penalisation related to Panda update. It already happened a few times in the past: losing part of Google traffic and having it back usually a couple of months after, often even better than before. We were really surprised at first to be deemed as pure spam given that the domain is ours since it was created 7 years ago, that we have never employed black hat techniques and that our efforts were always put into building valuable pages for users instead of using spam techniques to deceive them. But after noticing the manual action, we obviously thought that this was the actual reason for our traffic sudden drop. So we tried to figure out from the 4 URLs that Google reported as examples of the pure spam affected pages, what issues on our site could have been misinterpreted for pure spam. We also checked all the webmaster guidelines and fixed the issues we thought we could not be fully compliant with. All this process lasted for 3 months, after which we submitted our reconsideration request on 12/16/2013.
On 01/07/2013 we got the following answer: We've reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that would directly affect your site's ranking in Google's search results. You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking. Google determines the order of search results using a series of computer programs known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking will happen from time to time as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or if it's performing more poorly than it once did, check out our Help Center to identify and fix potential causes of the problem. Now we are really puzzled because Google is saying 2 opposite things: We still have a pure spam manual action, and we don't have a manual action (as per their newest response to our reconsideration request).
We could find online a few cases somehow similar to our own, with Google apparently giving contradictory communications about manual actions, but none of them helped to build a clear explanation. I don't want to enter into the merits of the reasons of the penalisation or whether it was or wasn't deserved, but rather knowing if anyone had the same experience or has any guess on what happened.
What we could think of is some bug or problem related to synching between different pieces of Google but still, after some days, the manual action notice is always there on Google Webmaster Tools and nothing changed in our traffic. We are now thinking about sending a second reconsideration request asking to update our Google Webmaster Tools manual actions page accordingly to our current actual status.
What do you think? thank you very much0 -
Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links
Hi, We are in the process of trying to remove a partial manual penalty for unnatural links. I would like to do a complete link audit of our site, where can I get complete data on sites linking to my website? Webmaster tools only appears to show the top 1000 domains. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Google Manual Penalties:Different Types of Unnatural Link Penalties?
Hello Guys, I have a few questions regarding google manual penalties for unnatural link building. They are "partial site" penalties, not site wide. I have two sites to discuss. 1. this site used black hat tactics and bought 1000's of unnatural backlinks. This site doesn't rank for the main focus keywords and traffic has dropped. 2. this site has the same penalty, but has been all white hat, never bought any links or hired any seo company. It's all organic. This sites organic traffic doesn't seem to have taken any hit or been affected by any google updates. Based on the research we've done, Matt Cutts has stated that sometimes they know the links are organic so they don't penalize a website, but they still show us a penalty in the WMT. "Google doesn't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. However, because we realize that some links may be outside of your control, we are not taking action on your site's overall ranking. Instead, we have applied a targeted action to the unnatural links pointing to your site." "If you don't control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google's perspective, the links already won't count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you're able to get the artificial links removed, submit areconsideration request. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action." Check that info above at this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604772?ctx=MAC Recap: Does anyone have any experience like with site #2? We are worried that this site has this penalty but we don't know if google is stopping us from ranking or not, so we aren't sure what to do here. Since we know 100% the links are organic, do we need to remove them and submit a reconsideration request? Is it possible that this penalty can expire on its own? Are they just telling us we have an issue but not hurting our site b/c they know it's organic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
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 -
Manual reconsideration request not going away.
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am in need of the support from a knowledgeable community, my brain is hurting over this query and is not providing any answers! So I have got my fingers crossed that someone can spot the issue of why a website I am responsible for has been bumped out of the Google search results. In March this website (www.message me for details.com) lost all keyword rankings and also all brand terms. Action was taken to remove unnatural links as you can see from the timeline below these links have been removed. The manual review request has come back from Google and now seems to indicate the reason for the serps removal is due to 'some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines', which makes me think it the website itself as well and links that were causing the issue. So what has happened so far? 9 March - Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to www.message me for details.com 20 May - All 'unnatural' links that could not be removed by contacting website owners were compiled and added to the disavow tool. 29 May - Manual resubmission request submitted. 6 June - The following message received (see end of post): 18 June - updated disavow request submitted - roughly 40-50% links removed. 27 June – Manual review requested. 2 July - The following message received (see end of post): So after reviewing thousands of links and removing any poor-quality links, contacting webmaster and when not ale to remove manually I have added to a disavow list. Although their is a chance I have missed something in the link reviews but I am pretty confident that anything that could be considered spammy as been removed or disavowed. I have also used the tech crawl tool and there are no issues showing up there. I am at a lose as to what is cauing this issue. I need some advice on what steps to take next.. Regards, Colin Google message Dear site owner or webmaster of www.message me for details.com,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TeamSEO
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.havenpower.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.havenpower.com/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visithttps://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.0 -
Rankings and search traffic fell off a cliff
Hi Moz community, One of my clients has a beast of a website built in ASP.NET (which causes me problems cos I don't have much experience in that) It is a job-site that aggregates job opportunities from other job-sites and provides a job matching service by email etc. They used to have great presence on Google naturally for thousands of job searches. Since Penguin and Penguin 2.0 (I think) their traffic has fallen off a cliff. I have been doing some "off-page" experimentation, seeing if we can fix a lot of issues by re-sculpting their backlink profile (seeing as it was after penguin). but what I have found is that some pages respond to this off page work but some just do not at all, despite how we approach it, such as disavowing previous links building fresh new top quality content links with natural anchor text etc.... Which has lead me to the conclusion that the wider issue is on-page and potentially site structure. Unfortunately as it is ASP.NET I am not so comfortable diagnosing the issues. I think also some issues will be related to dupe content etc.... but I would LOVE to get some input from my learned Moz colleagues. The website is http://www.allthetopbananas.com/ - any tips on how to recover from this dramatic loss of traffic would be massively appreciated. Kind regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | websearchseo0 -
Outreach - what to give away in return
We are creating a PDF that is useful for people in our industry. In the email outreach, what should we give in return for these people using or linking to our PDF. Looking for a list of possible ideas.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
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