80-90% drop in visits after Panda/EMD update - now what?
-
Hi everyone,
Had my first wonderful experience with an algorithm update. Business was doing great - about 90-100 visitors a day down to about 12-15 from Sept 29th to current.
Our domain is www.hamiltonscarservice.com which I don't think exactly qualifies for an exact match but may be close enough (car service is one of our keywords).
I am more likely to think its related to the Panda 20 update. I haven't changed the site at all lately so I was wondering what tips you guys may have going forward.
The site isn't perfectly optimized (which is where you guys come in) but when I first set it up it worked great so I mainly focused on backlinks from that point on. Now evidently this has caught up with me.
Any suggestions are appreciated - thanks!
-
You can actually leave the links in the footer since it's a good way to distribute your page juice, I would recommend just including the location though, you're creating a very high keyword density by repeating "car service" and "nj" so many times on the page. Chatham, Clark, Cranford, etc. No keyword repetition when you do it that way.
I would rewrite the duplicate content on your pages and try to make it a little bit longer.
You've got zipcodes, map, links to close towns, not too bad man. The duplicate content needs to be handled though.
-
So you recommended I remove all footer links to the landing pages.
What about the links to each of the landing pages from the areas served page (http://www.hamiltonscarservice.com/areas-served/index.html)? Should I just link them as a town and leave out the redundant car service portion?
I thought having the urls in this format (matching targeted keywords/content) was suggested as an on-page recommendation?
-
The EMD update should not have effected you. An EMD would be something like www.carservicemanhattan.com. You have a partial-match domain, and since it doesn't sound spammy or point to a spammy page, you aren't what Google has been targeting.
Your problem is duplicate content. You have dozens of pages with the exact same text on them, except for a find-and-replaced city name. That makes Google think your website isn't offering valuable content. Every page on your website should have unique content.
-
Nowadays you can't just spam the URLs and anchor texts with "car service" + location and create tons of pages with identical flimsy content with the exception of swapping you the location name.
Footer links are too spammy too.
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
-
How to analyze a drop in featured snippets?
Our company site is, in general, performing great in organic search, but we've lost about 10 featured snippets throughout the last 5-6 months, and I'd like to know how to best approach analyzing this.
Algorithm Updates | | vibelingo0 -
Search traffic plummeting after HTTPS fumble - what to do now?
Hi all, Our website typically gets about 80% of our traffic from organic Google search over thousands of keywords (i.e., no single keyword (or group of) drives a large portion of our traffic). It's a nine year old website, and we have been growing steadily -- including about 30-40% year-over-year growth for the past 9-months. That is, up until Feb 2nd. On February 2nd, we switched to HTTPS. Everything was done per Google's recommendations: pages individually 301'd to HTTPS pages, no security warnings, added the new site in Webmaster Tools, etc. Google started to pick up our new site -- albeit 3 weeks into the transition, traffic was still significantly down. However, the big problem that we discovered was our ad revenues were getting destroyed. We're an ad based business and our CPMs were tanking, some of our ad partners were having problems serving ads, etc. We were losing a lot of money. So, we made the decision to reverse the HTTPS change and go back to HTTP. That was on Feb 22nd. Our traffic started to recover, and our ad rates did recover. However, 2-weeks after switching back -- March 8 -- our traffic started to fall and has continued to do so. Our traffic is now half of what it was a year ago, and only 1/3 of what it was before we made any changes. I am totally at a loss for what to do. I have spent endless hours digging through Webmaster Tools with no real insights. Here's the most I've been able to glean: Google picked up the new HTTPS site a lot faster than it has reverted back to the HTTP. Particularly for AMP pages. We had about 2,000 indexed AMP pages, which were quickly picked up when we switched to HTTPS, but since changing back to HTTP Google has been slow to re-index the HTTP. Only 935 AMP indexed pages now. According to Webmaster Tools, our overall ranking position has not been affected (the overall average). However, in a sampling of keywords I notice that a number of keywords seem to have been dropped completely from ranking, while others show the same rank position but Google seems to only be showing us in the results intermittently -- e.g., rank is unchanged, but impressions and clicks are much lower. I do not know what to do at this point, and sadly, I'm starting to get desperate for some help. I feel like all the hard work of almost a decade is slipping away and I have no idea how to change course. I've done absolutely everything I can think of from a technical standpoint. Am I being penalized for abandoning the switch to HTTPS? Should I now try and reverse course again, and switch BACK to HTTPS? Is this a temporary bobble that Google's algo will 'forget'? It's a super high quality website with long, unique, detailed articles. Not spammy and we have never had a manual action against us. I don't know what to do. Please help! Here's a link to the website. Thank you in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | tustind0 -
The Google Algo update that happened 1-8 is KILLING my rankings
Does anyone know what happened?? I have a great website, we ranked very highly for a slew of industry keywords, #1 in most of our top-money kws....and our keywords have been in freefall since the update. Help?!
Algorithm Updates | | Sean_Gutermuth0 -
Yandex Algorithim Update?
I have 2 RU websites. One is my main site www.xxx.com saw big increases in rankings + visits last week. My geo-specific subsite, www.xxx.ru generally ranks better but did not change last week. Any insights about why this occurred?
Algorithm Updates | | theLotter0 -
Organic Traffic dropped 50%. Anyone want to have a stab at why? (URL listed)
Just curious what the pro's on here think is the reason why our site got hammered recently. The URL is www.jobshadow.com. We've got gobs of quality content that had been ranking for quite a few keywords. Even one from Rand himself http://www.jobshadow.com/interview-with-seo-and-seomoz-founder-rand-fishkin/ Rankings for even the exact match domain keyword 'Job Shadow' have been pummeled. Anyway, we've got a pretty solid link profile I would think. We also have a very high user time on the site, thus suggesting the organic traffic was engaged when Google ranked us for those keywords. We have lots of unsolicited inbound links and even recent ones from PBS. I'm not really sure what it takes to please the "machine" at this point. Curious as to what everyone here thinks.
Algorithm Updates | | arkana0 -
With MATT telling PR gone which factor tells now site is good
MATT CUTTS in his like second last video told the world.Guys turn off PR in your Browser.If PR is no longer have value than what an SEO professional needs to know is the site good or bad. 1.Domain authority. 2.alexa 3.SEMRUSH rank 4.compete. So guys need your advice about it.
Algorithm Updates | | csfarnsworth0 -
Google Places/Points of Interest Rankings?
Does anyone have an idea on how Google ranks or determines the 'Points of Interests' that come up when searching about places/cities?
Algorithm Updates | | CarlLarson0 -
Our Developer Site randomly drops 10+ places in Google searches for our Company Name. Why?
Hey everyone, At Betable, we have a player-facing site and a developer-facing site. We also have a developer-facing blog. We have this issue where our developer-facing site will randomly drop 10+ places in Google's Search results for the keyword "betable". This problem can be reproduced by others and in incognito mode, so it's not just one person's results. Furthermore, the developer-facing blog and our social media accounts all suddenly rank higher than the developer site. Even stranger, this problem randomly fixes itself after a few days. This has happened twice so far, and on each occasion there were no changes to the website that would have prompted a drop in rank. After the first drop, we did our best to neutralize any SEOMoz "red alerts" but to no avail, the drop happened again last week. Can someone help us understand what's going on? Are there ways to avoid this? Thanks, Tyler
Algorithm Updates | | Betable0