Does this traffic drop look like Penguin to you?
-
Dear Community
In early October, I noticed a sharp drop of the rankings of the main KW of a website I manage: idee-sol.fr. This, of course I immediatelly attributed to penguin 2.1.
While researching on the experience other webmasters have had with this unfortunate situation, I noticed that most of them had very sharp drops of traffic in a relatively small time, e.g.: a drop of 80% in a couple of days. But on idee-sol, the drop looks less steep yet equally worrying. Was the cause of this traffic/ranking drop due to penguin 2.1 exclusively or to penguin + something else (or not penguin at all?)
I'm including an image of the "non paid search" report of analytics.
-
OK, Thanks Lynn
-
HI,
On the face of it this certainly looks like a penguin related drop, the time fame matches even if the drop is less steep than some have seen. It is worth looking at your organic traffic segmented by landing page, maybe your homepage took an immediate hit and some inner pages pages held their rankings a bit longer (or vice versa). If the site is quite new then it is also possible that you are seeing normal variations that often come with new sites (which may explain the slower drop off, the penguin update hit your main keyword(s) and the longer tail stuff slowly declined as google eventually decided where your pages should be placed in the serps). It is of course always worth thinking about if any other changes in the code or content happened at the same time which might have had an effect of rankings.
If you have been building a lot of links through directories and especially if those have been somewhat keyword heavy then a penguin hit seems likely (even though no manual penalty notice). I would hold off on building any more directory links and start looking at evening out your profile with some more natural type links (these will depend a bit on your industry).
-
The directories may be a problem, Penguin doesn't like them. you can always try to disinvow a percentage of them see if you notice any improvement from there. I don't imagine its one thing alone.
-
Hi Chris
Thank you for your answer.
The website is new so I really cannot compare it to last year. According to google trends there is some seasonal variation for the main keywords used on the site, but nothing as brutal as an 80% variation.
The SERPS have gone down considerably, I have been tracking the weekly positions using many sources (including MOZ), they were slowly but surely descending from the 4th to the end of October.
Linkbuilding has been done using high quality, human curated directories. Normally I would not consider them spammy, but you never know. Google had detected about 60 backlinks before the penalty.
I have not received a manual penalty notification from Google
-
Have you compared the traffic to previous years to see if its a seasonal drop off ?
Have you also looked at your SERP position? Penguin would have a drop there more than it would visitors.
Have you done any new link building that may have resulted in a hit by penguin? Its worth looking at your back links to see if they look bad and may be whats doing it too etc.
It's worth looking at multiple metrics before jumping the gun a bit.
I hope some of the above questions may help you narrow it down a bit.
You may find Google trends helpful for looking at data over time if you can't go back so far in your analytics or want a broader bit of research.
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
-
Email traffic tracking in Google Analytics
Hello! I have a question about how to assure email traffic is properly tracked in GA > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. **First, some background... ** Our company (Wisconsin's largest group dental practice) is about to revamp the way we try to re-capture patients who don't have a future appointment set with us. Part of that process will include emails. Those emails will point back to our website to request an appointment. Now to the question... Is there anything special we should do to assure that links coming to the website and the resulting appointment request goal conversions track appropriately and appear under "Email" in the Default Channel Group of Analytics > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels area of GA? For example, should we use Campaign URL Builder to establish UTM links? Thanks in advance for any feedback. Erik
Reporting & Analytics | | SmileMoreSEO0 -
Spam Direct Traffic
Hello, Lately, I have been receiving a big amount of unexpected direct traffic from Boston. After analyzing with Analytivs, this is what I get (please, check attachment). Normally I would be blocking this traffic source straight away from my Google Analytics account, and also blocking this traffic from accesing my servers, but check out the analytic metrics: this traffic represents 12% of my total traffic right now!!! av. session duration is 4:53 !! bounce rate is 72% !!!! pages/session 1.44 !! Service provider is "Microsoft Corporation" who looks like one of the typical spammy service providers. My question is, is this a bot?? what do you think ? Thanks, Luis zUlVHIi
Reporting & Analytics | | Yeeply.com1 -
An overnight substantial drop in visit duration while amount of sessions grew.
Hi, My Ave. session duration has dropped from 2:10 to 0:14 overnight. At the same time, amount of sessions from all channels grew on average of 56%. This increased (and I guess low quality) traffic is coming in from multiple regions, languages, devices and channels. I was not able to pin point it to 1 source, location, landing page etc. See enclosed screen shot. I would appreciate if anyone can shed some light on what's wrong and if there are any SEO implications. Thanks. pxWQX2E.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Amis0 -
Traffic Drop Observations: Google UI, Mobilegeddon
Our traffic has dropped 25% in the last 3 weeks while maintaining our keyword rankings. At first, we thought it was due to the simultaneous change in Google UI where they removed the separators between ads and organic results. However, now, we have also noticed that our user devices have gone from ~ 50% desktop/50% mobile to 20% desktop/80% mobile. Just food for thought ...
Reporting & Analytics | | Humanovation0 -
New e-commerce launched, drop in traffic
One of our clients launched a new e-commerce site and there was a significant (60%) drop in traffic in Google Analytics following the launch. We are about 10 days into the new site, and our suspicion is that the move has caused a decrease in their site authority which has lowered their search position. The old site had the store at sitename.com/store. The new site has a Shopify store at shop.sitename.com. There were very few external followed links to the store pages, so we thought that there would be little effect for overall site traffic by moving the store to a subdomain. Any recommendations for next steps on diagnosing the problem and working towards a solution?
Reporting & Analytics | | DesignHammer0 -
Non ranking keywords driving traffic !?
Moz Analytics and Google analytics is saying some keywords are driving organic search traffic & hence MA suggesting them as keyword opportunities, yet theres no rank for any of them so how can that be so ? cheers dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Moved Up in SERPS & Traffic, Need Help Converting
Hello, After listening to the advice of many of you on this forum, I have managed to move my site up in the SERPS, close enough to where I want/need to be. My traffic has increased heavily, yet I am still not seeing a large increase in orders being placed. I am positive that I have the lowest prices on these items, and the most information available about them, yet I still can't seem to convert a lot of this traffic into sales. Can you guys please take a look at my site and provide some guidance on what I can/should do to help convert these visitors to customers? my site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Prime850 -
Segmenting traffic from referring sites in GA
Most of our traffic is from Referring sites, and in referring sites, job sites are sending most of the traffic. How can we segment traffic from job sites. There are about 40 such sites. We would like to receive a report which shows traffic excluding from these job sites.
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050