Is it a Panda/Penguin hit? Or it's just a natural ranking drop?
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My traffic comes from google. This is the traffic profile. Does it look like a Panda or Penguin hit? I have a hard time determining it myself. Thanks.
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I'd also check your queries in Google Webmaster tools. You can drill down on them to see impressions by day. If you see that your impressions go to zero for a particular Keyword or keyword stem, it's a sign that you might have gotten a penalty of some kind.
Penguin tends to attack pages. If you see a particular page or pages had significant falloff, it's a bad sign.
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The idea is not to get confused and dive a little deeper in to your analytic data.
Get in to day by day traffic and see where do you see the big falls in traffic and compare those days with the dates on which Google updates in penguin and panda algo (you can find this on moz.com)
If it matches the dates as given in the Google algo update chart then you are defiantly hit by a penguin or panda update and you should check WMT for the confirmation.
Sometimes you don’t receive the email but if the dates match you should plan your backup.
Hope this helps!
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Looks to me that some mighty tinkering has been going on, on a regular basis to get these ups and downs and vast swings.
If you can refer back your change logs to see where what and when has reflected in the traffic flow.
Also look at your Adwords account too. When a key word that drives traffic but no sales is eventually culled this can be the result. Low traffic, but very good quality traffic remains
Please let us know more info,
Bruce
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It looks like somewhere around September or October 2012 something happened. There were both Panda and Penguin updates around that time. You may want to try an overlay tool such as Panguin http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/ to see when the dips happened. You should also see if you have old ranking data for that time period or at least compare top pages to see where the traffic was lost exactly. I'm also pretty sure you're looking at total website traffic, and not just organic traffic. This could be something as simple as you stopped running a PPC campaign at that time and what you see now is the traffic without paid advertising. Also see if anything happened with the site around that time like a redesign or a change to the url structure.
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