Why was I hit by the above the fold algo?

[seo-wanna-bs]

I cannot find any decent information on this update. Everybody appears to reiterate what Matt Cutts posted. I understand what the update was 'supposed' to combat and achieve. I also understand what those abusing ads above the fold, are supposed to do. But I need to know what to do, when you don't have too many ads above the fold.

One of my websites was hit. Several professionals have tried to convince me it was Panda, that was released on 18th January. But I am now 99.9% certain it wasn't.

I'm in the UK, traffic on the 18th was normal, little better than expected actually. Traffic on the 19th was normal until around 10pm GMT and there as a noticeable dip, compared with previous days and weeks.

January 20th continued this decline and at the end of the day, there was a 25% loss.

I have 1 Google ad, that is above the fold. Most of the pages have no ads at all. No affiliates or anything else. I have always prided myself in keeping my website clean and ad free.

We also have the lowest bounce rates in the niche, by a mile, as far as I can tell, from speaking to other webmasters.

I cannot remove this 1 ad, the servers alone, cost a couple of grand. The advertising supports the website.

Nothing I can find online, gives me any indicators, as to what might be tripping this filter. But I need to figure it out, as traffic has now reached a 50% loss, which equates to about 15,000 visitors per day.

I have tore my pages apart, removed functionality, added functionality and yet traffic has continued to decline.

Can anybody shed light on this? I worry that perhaps Google is seeing the images on my website as ads. The images open a bigger preview in lightbox, but with JS turned off, opens a new page, with nothing but the image on it.

I am at my wits end. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Paul

[seo-wanna-bs]

That link is really bothering me. I have never personally used that dirty piece of software, and I've contacted the guy who owns the website several times asking him to remove that link.

It appears other links have been built without my knowledge but nothing OTT. So I don't think that's the issue. The drop on Jan 20th is just too much of a coincidence.

I've lost over $20k. Fortunately Adsense ecpm is a lot higher, after decreasing bounce rate etc.

Despite how it may appear, I've actually got quite a lot of experience fixing Google penalties. This is the first time I've ever been stumped and with it being my own site and getting desperate, I've made some choices against my better judgement.

I've also hired a couple of other SEO's, which is actually how I ended up on a wild goose chase, trying to combat Panda, when I was certain it wasn't the issue.

I did submit a reconsideration request and got the automated response that there was no manual penalties. I may take the loss and remove the ads for a week, at the end of the day, I need to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks a lot for all your input Ryan.

[RyanKent]

Paul,

I agree with you that tearing up your site was likely a mistake. I would suggest restoring your page to represent the page both you and your members loved.

It is my opinion we have reached the limit of what can be done in a Q&A. What you have described is an across-the-board drop in rankings on or about Jan 19th. To diagnose and repair the penalty your options are:

• hire a professional SEO consultant

• continue to make guesses and tear up your site

If you were to stay on your current course, I would make the following suggestions:

-submit a Reconsideration Request just to ensure you have not been hit with a manual penalty. If Google responds with the standard message indicating you have not been manually penalized, then take comfort in knowing you are just dealing with the normal algorithm and can focus on it.

• you are clearly familiar with the ATF update (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html). If you are so sure that is the problem, there is a very easy way to test! Remove the ads for a time period and see if your rankings are restored.

• based on the feedback you have already received from other SEOs, you can try improving your content. Do it in such a way that would truly benefit users, not in a manner to appease the search engines

• lastly, have you considered other possibilities? For example, your site may have a link penalty. When I checked OSE your first link shows as: http://dbpmarketing.com/senuke/senuke-x-review/

According to the page:

| Name: | SENuke X |
| Creators: | Joe Russell & Areeb Bajwa |
| Focus: | Automated Link Building |

Your link profile shows clear signs of manipulation and your links did increase at exactly the time you were penalized.

5+ months of lost traffic = how much revenue? Or asked another way, how much revenue do you need to lose before you consider hiring someone with experience resolving Google penalties?

[seo-wanna-bs]

Hi Ryan, the site was hitting 30,000 uniques a day. The pages are very image heavy and also serve tens of thousands of downloads a day. We have 2 quad core servers, with 28GB ram. 1 is a dedicated web server and the other dedicated SQL. We also have a dedicated, but much less powerful backup server and finally 20TB traffic allowance.

The blog page in question, wasn't supposed to target any terms. It was to boost morale while traffic is down. I appreciate I could have still targeted terms but I figured I'd just tone things down a little. Most of the other pages are highly targeted. http://www.tehkseven.net/theme/nokia-c3-themes.html for example, is targeting Nokia C3 Themes.

The download page is currently a complete, utter mess. It was previously very similar to this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rockstar.gta3&feature=top-paid#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDIwNiwiY29tLnJvY2tzdGFyLmd0YTMiXQ..

But after losing so much traffic on January 20th, I've ripped it inside out. I removed the large intro banner that members usually spent hours designing, moved text around the page, moved the ad up, down, left and right. It's rather sad and my members aren't pleased that the pages which display their work, have been destroyed, but they are fortunately supportive and understanding of the situation.

I need to start putting it back together and pay extra attention to keeping the ad below the fold, while focusing on my users. As much as I want to fix this issue, destroying my website in the process, isn't what I want to do.

Our bounce rates are 20-30%, which are among the best in the niche, we average 12 page views and 8-9 minutes per visit. Yet none of this seems to matter, all Google cares about is this bloody advert.

I'll checkout the Wikipedia page, thanks.

[RyanKent]

Paul, take a look at this URL for example: http://www.tehkseven.net/blog/1/entry-1164-daily-inspiration-1/

Some positive notes: it appears to be authentic, original content and your community members are responding to it.

Question - what is this page supposed to rank for? Since this page is linked to from an above the fold area of your home page it must be important, right? It does not appear your site is large enough to earn branded searches. For example, SEOmoz "Whiteboard Friday" has been around long enough and attracted enough interest to show signs of a brand. The term earns 1600 Global Monthly Searches.

Try this: look at your various mobile theme pages and ignore the page title. How long does it take to figure out what the page focus is? Ideally the answer should be one second. Instead, the actual focus of the page is often not found in the content, or if it is found it is not in the Description area above the above but rather in the auto-generated text below the large ad.

By the way...opportunity for your site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_theme I would suggest adding HIGH QUALITY, HELPFUL content to the wiki page and providing your site as the source.

On another note...

**the servers alone, cost a couple of grand. **

In re-reading your original Q&A this just hit me. What kind of hosting do you have? The performance of your site is not that of a dedicated server. Based on the performance I would guess you use a VPS but your costs should be under 1k US per year.

[seo-wanna-bs]

Hi Ryan, I must ask what you mean by "unfocused" content. Do you mean unfocused in that the subject matter for a theme is unrelated to the next? Or do you have an issue with the architecture of the website? Cheers

[seo-wanna-bs]

Hi Ryan, I'm not looking for confirmation, I think it's a given, that ATF is the update that hurt us. Sorry for lack of info, finally at a PC now.

I agree regarding the alt text of the attachments. We are using invision power board and on the attachments system they use terrible alt text. It's likely possible to hack though. In this niche, the top sites all lack textual content an I believe Google is smart enough to understand that.

What I was hoping for, is for somebody to be able to look at the page with the ad and say "oh yes, there's your issue, I've seen this before'. Wishful thinking?

The drop in traffic is site wide and the drop in ranking appears to be across the board too. The drops aren't typical of a normal penalty, we've not been knocked back several pages, just all pages dropped several spots, which has had a devastating effect.

It's not any specific content type, or section of the site. The entire site was hit late Jan 19th, GMT, which would be midday US. If there's any information I can provide, that you feel may assist you in offering help, please ask and I'll provide it.

[RyanKent]

Paul, you are not sharing enough info for anyone to be able to assist you.

Take a step back and look at this Q&A. You have shared:

• you are 99% sure you have been hit by the ATF algorithm change

• you are confident you are not affected by Panda

I had to pull even basic info such as the site URL. We have no information about your traffic drop other then the date. What assistance do you desire? Are you really seeking to resolve the root issue? Or do you just want someone to confirm your diagnosis?

Based on what I am seeing, I am highly concerned about your extremely thin and unfocused content. Example page of one of the site's themes: http://www.tehkseven.net/theme/109507/summertime-mobile-theme.html

To make matters worse, the image ALT text is either missing or exceptionally poor. An example of ALT text on the above page "Attached Image: 1.png"

[seo-wanna-bs]

Hi Ryan, thanks for taking the time to look, once again replying via my iPhone. So please excuse lack of formatting. Ad is on the download page, click any item in the gallery. Prior no major changes other than an update in the cms which did introduce a couple of duplicate content issues that were quickly fixed. But since I have noindexed a lot of content and traffic has spiralled. My gut tells me that this ATF update works on a sliding scale, based on the ratio of pages with the offending ads. My noindexing pages without the ad, has increased that ratio.

[RyanKent]

I viewed your site and did not notice the Google ad you mentioned. Has it been disabled?

I noticed some content issues as you mentioned but did not see anything else which immediately stood out. Further analysis of your analytics is necessary. Exactly HOW has your traffic dropped? Did it drop across the board? Or are there some keywords or pages which experienced a drop while others remain unaffected? Did rankings drop?

What changes were made in the 60 days before the drop?

[seo-wanna-bs]

Grr seomoz isn't mobile friendly. It's stripped all the formatting. Sorry for the long sentances.

[seo-wanna-bs]

Hi Ryan, I avoided posting the URL, as over on the Google forums, I found people got caught up in details, such as low text content etc. But I'm hoping we won't do that here. URL: http://goo.gl/UDTIw The low text is a problem for the entire niche and we go way beyond what 99% of our competitors do. I'm 99.9% sure the issue is from the ATF update. Since Jan 20th, I have changed a lot. But as I say, this has to be in some way related to ads.

[CrakJason]

Another obvious question is : did you change anything recently?

[RyanKent]

Without the ability to at least look at your web page, we are truly flying blind. I cannot see how any helpful advice can be offered without, at a minimum, examining your site.