Is it a Panda/Penguin hit? Or it's just a natural ranking drop?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Clean URL vs. Parameter URL and Using Canonical URL...That's a Mouthfull!
Hi Everyone, I a currently migrating a Magento site over to Shopify Plus and have a question about best practices for using the canonical URL. There is a competitor that I believe is not doing it the correct way, so I want to make sure my way is the better choice. With 'Vendor Pages' in Shopify, they show up looking like: https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/vendors?q=Cellucor. Not as clean. Problem is that Shopify also creates https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/cellucor. Same products, same page, just a different more clean URL. I am seeing both indexed in Google. What I want to do is basically create a canonical URL from the URL with the parameter that points to the clean URL. The two pages are very similar. The only difference is that the clean URL page has some additional content at the top of the page. I would say the two pages are 90% the same. Do you see any issue with that?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Redirect 'keyword-url' to improve ranking?
I was wondering if a good url, with a keyword in it, can help you improve the position of that certain keyword by redirecting that url to your website. To make it clear: We run the website www.terello.nl, and have the possibility to let the url www.iphonereparatie.nl (translation: iphonerepair) redirect to our website. Would this help us to rank for the keyword 'iPhone reparatie'? I hope that I made myself clear this way:) Otherwise i'm more than happy to clearify myself!
Technical SEO | | Jan-Peter0 -
Paypal instead of Merchant's account and will the site still move up?
Hello, Will an Ecommerce site still move up in a niche if it only accepts PayPal and doesn't have a merchant's account on it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
What's the best way to pass link juice to a page on another domain?
I'm working with a non-profit, and their donation form software forces them to host their donation pages on a different domain. I want to attempt to get their donation page to appear in their sitelinks in Google (under the main website's entry), but it seems like the organization's donation forms are at a disadvantage because they're not actually hosted on that site. I know that no matter what I do, there's no way to "force" a sitelink to appear the way I want it, but... I was trying to think if there's a way I can work around this. Do you think 1) creating a url like orgname.org/donate and having that be a 301 redirect to the donation form, and 2) using the /donate redirect all over the site (instead of linking directly to the form) would help? Are there alternatives other folks recommend?
Technical SEO | | clefevre0 -
Sudden 50% drop in SERP rankings
Hi, Our website is well established and has been growing every month until around Jan. 6th 2013. All of sudden our search rankings on Google dropped dramatically (nearly 50%). We getting tens of thousands fewer visitors through search results than normal. At the same time as the drop (almost to the day) we changed our forum software from Vbulletin3 to Vbulletin4. The forums are on a different subdomain, and our forum developer said there is no way the change would affect the main site. Is that true? So far, we have not been able to figure out what caused the sudden change. Maybe a Google update?
Technical SEO | | AVman0 -
Using a Feedburner RSS link in your blog's header tag
It was suggested in Quick Sprout's Advanced SEO guide that it's good form to place your Feedburner RSS link into the header tag of your blog. Anyone know if this needs to be done for every page header of the blog, or just the home/main/index page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Redirect old URL's from referring sites?
Hi I have just came across some URL's from the previous web designer and the site structure has now changed. There are some links on the web however that are still pointing at the old deep weblinks. Without having to contact each site it there a way to automatically sort the links from the old structure www.mydomain.com/show/english/index.aspx to just www.mydomain.com Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Building URL's is there a difference between = and - ?
I have a Product Based Search site where the URL's are built dynamically based on the User input Parameters Currently I use the '=' t o built the URL based on the search parameters for eg: /condition=New/keywords=Ford+Focus/category=Exterior etc Is there any value in using hypen's instead of = ? Could you please help me in any general guidelines to follow
Technical SEO | | Chaits0