Website hit by something, but not sure if penguin or panda?
-
Hi my site was doing ok, last week, humming along and increase in traffic. We felt that all the work removing bad links had worked. then all of a sudden, bang traffic dropped and is still dropping day by day.
The strange thing as well is all the social media, bing and yahoo traffic has also dried up!
Has anyone else had something smiler?
-
What's the exact day of the drop? Normally, I wouldn't really be concerned with a drop in webmaster tool impressions especially after a bump up, but since you mentioned you lost traffic on Bing, yahoo and social, it does raise some flags.
IF that happened around the final 3 days of the month, then you were affected by the update I mentioned which nobody seems to be talking about....
Anyway, did you check crawl errors on GWT? Did you crawl the site separately ? Did you see any problems with the index/noindex/etc?
As for injected codes, the easy way is to load pages (that you lost traffic on) in google. Check the saved cache. If you got some injected codes, they'll show up there.
There's really not much we can do but assume things. I do hope you could find the reason for the problem.
-
Thanks for your reply Chris661 and DennisSeymour. Where to turn that is the question. Its all rather confusing.
-
in webmaster, my impressions went up considerably, then it went down .see pic http://i.imgur.com/NZnK7Vt.png
-
We did not move to https.
-
We did not do anything apart from removing some more links
-
(Maybe check your htaccess/robots/were you hacked? Injected by an invisible code? Check Google cache) What should I look for for a hacked or injected code?
Yes we are using the universal code.
Thanks for your suggestions..
Taiger
-
-
We also saw an increase in traffic and rankings around 10/17 and were feeling pretty cocky. One tracked keyword jumped from 7 to 1 and in the last 3 days has come down to 5. Traffic also reduced and I think it coincides with the 3 day thing Dennis mentioned. I just attributed it to the Penguin update "settling". But now Dennis makes me want to do better on page!
Impressions are up looking prior to 10/17 so I think that is a good thing overall. Have not had any similar drops on social or Yahoo/Bing.
-
There was an update 3 days ago. It's not reported but it looks like a big one. Maybe that's it?
I dont think it was Penguin, as my sites that little links but great onpage SEO and branding got some huge increases.
Im still checking the others to identify the common thing.
In your case, it's sounds weird that you will drop even for bing and yahoo AND social. So that's probably not because of google.
- Check webmaster tools - impressions, how much has changed?
- Crawl your site - check problems
- Did you move to https?
- What else, besides link removal, did you do?
- Maybe check your htaccess/robots/were you hacked? Injected by an invisible code? Check Google cache
- Check analytics code are you using the universal code? Or whatever stat tracker you are using, be sure that it's compatible.
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
-
About DA of the Website
Hi There, I would like to know why one of my website - https://patnalocalguide.com Domain Authority is not improving. It is not going up and down but it is maintaining its score between 10 since last 5 months. Not going above 10 or below. Why is it so? I'm conitnuously working on creating backlinks for the website and the DR score on Ahref improving but the DA is not. What steps to follow to increase DA? How to find out whats going wrong with our present strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozByAnuj0 -
Why is Amazon crawling my website? Is this hurting us?
Hi mozzers, I discovered that Amazon is crawling our site and exploring thousands of profile pages. In a single day it crawled 75k profile pages. Is this related to AWS? Is this something we should worry about or not? If so what could be a solution to counter this? Could this affect our Google Analytics organic traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
Noindexing Thin News Content for Panda
We've been suffering under a Panda penalty since Oct 2014. We've completely revamped the site but with this new "slow roll out" nonsense it's incredibly hard to know at what point you have to accept that you haven't done enough yet. We have thousands of news stories going back to 2001, some of which are probably thin and some of which are probably close to other news stories on the internet being articles based on press releases. I'm considering noindexing everything older than a year just in case, however, that seems a bit of overkill. The question is, if I mine the logfiles and only deindex stuff that Google sends no further traffic to after a year could this be seen as trying to game the algo or similar? Also, if the articles are noindexed but still exist, is that enough to escape a Panda penalty or does the page need to be physically gone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlfredPennyworth0 -
Questions on Google Penguin Clean-up Strategy
Hello Moz Community! I was hit with a REAL bad penalty in May 2013, and the date corresponds to Penguin #4. Never received a manual spam action, but the 50% drop in traffic was very apparent. Since then, I've had a slow reduction in traffic, to where I am today... which is almost baseline. Increases in traffic have not occurred regardless of efforts. In researching a little more, I see that my old SEO companies built my links with exact keyterm matches, many of them repeated over and over, verbatim, on different sites. I've heard two pieces of advice that I don't like 1) scrap the site, or 2) disavow all the links. I would rather see if I can get the webmasters to change the link to something generic, or my brand name, before I do either of these. To scrap my site and start new will be damn near impossible because I'm in an extremely competitive niche, and my site has age (since 2007), so rather work with what I have. A couple of questions, for folks who are in the know about this penalty, if I may: This penguin update, #4, on May 22nd, was it ONLY because of the link text? Or was it also because of the link quality? None of the updates before it harmed me, and I believe those were because of the quality? Could it be for links linking from my blog to my site? My blog (ex. www.mysite.com/blog), has close to 1,000 blog posts, and back in the days I would write these really long, keyword stuffed links leading to www.mysite.com. I've been in the process of cleaning these up, and shortening them, and changing them to more generic (click here's), but it is a LONG and painstaking process. If I get webmasters to change text to just the url or brand name, that's better than disavowing, correct? As long the linking site has a decent spam score and PA/DA on OSE? Is having SOME exact anchor text okay on these links? Is it just the abuse that's the problem? If so, how many should I leave? (like 5 max per keyword?) Or should I just change to the url, or disavow altogether, any and all links that have exact keyword matches? I've downloaded my link profile from OSE and Majestic, and will do so from Ahrefs (I believe it is)? Does Webmaster Tools have any section that can help give me insights into the issue? If so, can you point me in the right direction? Can I get partial credit, for some work done? For instance, say a major update, or crawl, happens, and I've only fixed/disavowed 25% percent of the links by then, is there a possibility that I get a small boost in traffic? Or am I in the doghouse till they are all fixed? Say I clean/disavow everything up, will my improvement be seen in the next crawl? Or the next Penguin update? As there may be a substantial difference in time there. 😎 I see AHREFS, has some information on anchor text... any rules of thumb as to percentages of use of a certain anchor text, to see if I'm abusing or not, before I start undertaking all of this? Thanks! Could the penalty have "passed" altogether, and this is just where I rank? Thanks guys, but the last thing I want to do is ditch my site... I will work hard on this, but need some guidance. Much appreciated! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidC.0 -
Website Isn't Ranking & I'm Not Sure Why Based On The Data
Hi Moz Community,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ErrickG
I am having an issue that has been killing me for some time and I could really use another opinion. One of my client’s websites hasn't been ranking for some time and I can't put my finger on it. There are no issues showing up in the webmaster tools. If you compare the site with the tops ranking sites for the websites number one keyword, the website is just as good as everyone else. My clients website is the first one on the left in the attachment. We have better quality content but instead of showing up on page 1,2,3 the site is on page 21. I am just at a lost. Anyone have any thoughts outside looking in. Thanks,
Errick rrLJZ2G0 -
60 countries, 1 website. How to develop this?
I've been asked to rank the website of an international association under the same keywords but in multiple languages (they rank very highly for English speaking countries), however they only have the one website with 1 .com domain. Question: Is the better approach to translate the site in multiple languages and then allow people to select the language they desire? OR Buy ccTLD and run the site multiple times in different languages as separate entities?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MassivePrime0 -
Merging two websites to one...
Hi all. Could do with a second opinion on this please... At present a client of ours owns two shops (both doing the same but in towns about 20 miles apart - they sell flooring, but using different names) and has a website for each. The plan is to rebrand both of these stores the same and merge both websites into one. The problem comes that both of the individual websites rank very well in their respective Google Local search results and I fear that killing one of the sites will mean that one store will vanish from the local listings. One domain is a DA 45 and the other a DA 11 so the plan is to use the stronger of the two domains. The question I would like to ponder with people wiser than myself is how can we ensure that the new single domain ranks for both locations in the local? Would the easiest solution be to have pages such as domain.com/store1 and domain.com/store2 with full listings for that store inc name, address, phone number, customer reviews etc? At present the DA 45 domain ranks very well in it's Google local so we need to find a way to change the homepage of that to have both the stores phone numbers but without affecting the local listing. I was considering adding the second phone number as a text based image so that it's visible for people but not for bots Finally, would 301 redirecting the now unused store to domain.com/store2 help with ensuring that we do not lose any local listing for that keyword? If not, are there any suggestions people could offer up Many thanks for any help and sorry for the very long question Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Website is not getting indexed in Google! Not sure why?
I just came up with my new blog, its not live yet but the 1<sup>st</sup> landing page is ready, up and running… all is fine but here is the only problem is its not getting indexed in Google and I am not really sure why? .xml sitemap is there Google webmaster and analytics are there Website contain at least that much real social shares that it should get indexed in Google Few Links may be coming from Famous Bloggers and SEOmoz (both sites are very authentic in their respective domains) It’s the 4 day the website is up I don’t think website is not getting indexed in Google just because it contains 1 landing page and a thank you page! Any clue or help will be appreciated. www.setalks.com is the domain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MoosaHemani0