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.
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
-
Spammy page with canonical reference to my website
A potentially spammy website http://www.rofof.com/ has included a rel canonical tag pointing to my website. They've included the tag on thousands of pages on their website. Furthermore http://www.rofof.com/ appears to have backlinks from thousands of other low-value domains For example www.kazamiza.com/vb/kazamiza242122/, along with thousands of other pages on thousands of other domains all link to pages on rofof.com, and the pages they link to on rofof.com are all canonicalized to a page on my site. If Google does respect the canonical tag on rofof.com and treats it as part of my website then the thousands of spammy links that point to rofof.com could be considered as pointing to my website. I'm trying to contact the owner of www.rofof.com hoping to have the canonical tag removed from their website. In the meantime, I've disavowed the www.rofof.com, the site that has canonical tag. Will that have any effect though? Will disavow eliminate the effect of a rel canonical tag on the disavowed domain or does it only affect links on the disavowed website? If it only affects links then should I attempt to disavow all the pages that link to rofof.com? Thanks for reading. I really appreciate any insight you folks can offer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brucepomeroy1 -
Website not being indexed after relocation
I have a scenario where a 'draft' website was built using Google Sites, and published using a Google Sites sub domain. Consequently, the 'same' website was rebuilt and published on its own domain. So effectively there were two sites, both more or less identical, with identical content. The first website was thoroughly indexed by Google. The second website has not been indexed at all - I am assuming for the obvious reasons ie. that Google is viewing it as an obvious rip-off of the first site / duplicate content etc. I was reluctant to take down the first website until I had found an effective way to resolve this issue long-term => ensuring that in future Google would index the second 'proper' site. A permanent 301 redirect was put forward as a solution - however, believe it or not, the Google Sites platform has no facility for implementing this. For lack of an alternative solution I have gone ahead and taken down the first site. I understand that this may take some time to drop out of Google's index, however, and I am merely hoping that eventually the second site will be picked up in the index. I would sincerely appreciate an advice or recommendations on the best course of action - if any! - I can take from here. Many thanks! Matt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | collectedrunning0 -
Am I missing an issue on my website?
Are there any glaring issues that I am missing with my site? I am building links, and growing the profile but had seen a drop in rankings a couple of months ago. Is this do to a site issue or am I just missing something? www.wallybuysell.com Any help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CKerr0 -
Archiving a festival website - subdomain or directory?
Hi guys I look after a festival website whose program changes year in and year out. There are a handful of mainstay events in the festival which remain each year, but there are a bunch of other events which change each year around the mainstay programming.This often results in us redoing the website each year (a frustrating experience indeed!) We don't archive our past festivals online, but I'd like to start doing so for a number of reasons 1. These past festivals have historical value - they happened, and they contribute to telling the story of the festival over the years. They can also be used as useful windows into the upcoming festival. 2. The old events (while no longer running) often get many social shares, high quality links and in some instances still drive traffic. We try out best to 301 redirect these high value pages to the new festival website, but it's not always possible to find a similar alternative (so these redirects often go to the homepage) Anyway, I've noticed some festivals archive their content into a subdirectory - i.e. www.event.com/2012 However, I'm thinking it would actually be easier for my team to archive via a subdomain like 2012.event.com - and always use the www.event.com URL for the current year's event. I'm thinking universally redirecting the content would be easier, as would cloning the site / database etc. My question is - is one approach (i.e. directory vs. subdomain) better than the other? Do I need to be mindful of using a subdomain for archival purposes? Hope this all makes sense. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cos20300 -
How about a discussion on Penguin 2.0?
Penguin 2.0 was officially released today. I'm sure we've all seen Matt's video. http://searchengineland.com/penguin-4-with-penguin-2-0-generation-spam-fighting-is-now-live-160544 Ideas for building sharable, linkable content? New strategies? What to avoid, what not to do, etc? Let's get a discussion going!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
Scarce niche websites for link building
Hello! A small company from Mexico that offers cleaning services for home & businesses wants to rank on the first page of Google. The Good: Every month they give away stuff (discounts and/or a free service) and they also participate in campaigns that support non-profitable organizations & charity. So there is plenty of material for me to build some backlinks and to create some interesting content. Their competitors have 0 SEO. I have been doing my homework and none of their competitors websites that are ranking on the top 5 are doing any kind of SEO. But they have had their website for a long time and they probably have a decent amount of traffic per day. Open Site Explorer shows minimal to no websites pointing to them. Google Adwords has increased their sales. They are using virtually nothing as budget and it is helping, but they want organic SEO. The Bad: Blogs seem to be dead in Mexico. And that is one of my strongest ways to create backlinks. I usually get a blogger to write about the company I'm working for to create backlinks and works like a charm in countries were SEO is prehistoric. Usually it takes me very little effort to accomplish a website to rank very well in this kind of scenario, but I'm having trouble this time. The Something: I have been able to boost their rankings with basic SEO in a month but I'm stuck in page #2-5 on their most important keywords. The Ugly: I'm out of ideas. And their budget isn't good enough to apply paid strategies. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan0 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
How to find pages hardest hit
I have been hearing that panda can penalize a website for low quality pages. I have run duplicate content check and done my best to go through the whole website. I hear many people talking about deleting hardest hit pages, or fixing hardest hit pages. My question is how can I find which pages on our website are hardest hit? Is there anyway to check a website for pages that might score low. We do have a ecom section to the website which I am concerned might be considered low quality for each product page. Any advice would be a great help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0