Impressions Fell off a Cliff, No Manual Action, What Gives?
-
Hi Moz crew,
We've got a bit of a riddle on our hands here at Flightpath. You see, we're an agency that specializes in digital services like web design, social media and SEO. Unfortunately, we seem to have been hit by an a algorithmic penalty on February 28th, 2014. This is a first for us - we've never had to deal with a penalty (manual or algorithmic) for our site or any of our client sites.
Here's the situation:
- We were averaging around 1,500 impressions per day before the drop. Since 2/28, we see closer to 250 impressions per day.
- No manual action notice in WMT
- Branded keywords did not lose rank. It was primarily our the service-oriented keywords that we lost rank on (ex: "digital agency", "digital agency nyc", "social media agency nyc", "web agency new york" - we were page 1 for all of these, though "digital agency" wasn't as secure as the others).
- Backlink profile looks ok. We did a clean-up (disavowed a few hundred domains) as soon as we noticed the drop, but there wasn't anything in there egregiously offensive. There definitely wasn't anything NEW that was problematic. Not a lot of non-branded anchor text at all.
- No major changes to the site in 2014
Any ideas? The site is http://www.flightpath.com
And here's a horrifying WMT screen grab: i.imgur.com/EY4OBG1.jpg
UPDATE: We recovered nearly all of our missing rank/traffic/impressions for a 3-day period between 4/15 and 4/17.
WMT Screenshot: http://imgur.com/V1fI1MQ
During our brief recovery, we did lose a small amount of rank (just a few positions, only for a handful of keywords) compared to where we were pre-crisis. That makes sense though, we were pretty ruthless in disavowing domains and almost surely caught a few "positive" links along with the bad ones. Aside from that, it appeared to be a full recovery - every single one of our generic keywords was back for just over 48 hours.
Any ideas? Was Google rolling out a new algorithm tweak, only to pull it back due to bugs? Or was it the opposite: Google rolling back the update that hurt our site to fix a few bugs before pushing it live again?
-
HI Dan - thanks for looking into this.
Our traffic from organic search has indeed dropped (Google only, rankings and traffic from Bing/Yahoo have remained stable).
Hopefully we've taken care of all the shady back links via disavow. Like you said, however, it could be awhile before we know if this has had any effect. Most of the links you referenced, and most of the ones that needed to be eliminated, came from websites linking to content that existed on our domain prior to the agency purchasing it almost 10 years ago.
You're right about the unusually high amount of indexed pages. The inflation is from our blog "tag" pages. We've put a dofollow/noindex on all of these pages. They're pretty deep on the site though, I expect it will take awhile for them to be crawled again for de-indexing.
We actually had a 2-day recovery just over a week ago. Then, as quickly and inexplicably as the recovery came, we again lost rank on our generic terms. I'm going to add some of this info to the main post now. It certainly is bizarre, so I'm hoping someone might be able to identify what might have caused the site to recover and then drop again over the course of 48 hours.
-
Hi John
First thing - have any other metrics changed? Traffic via Google search? Rankings (do you track these independently of WMT)?
Do know that the disavow can take 6+ months to fully process and have an effect back in the SERPs. I do see some suspect links. With Google being so aggressive lately, I could see only a few bad links hurting the site;
- http://wiis.tu-graz.ac.at/people/tom.html "jazz online server"
- http://enn2.com/nitelife.htm "internet cafe index"
- http://public.homeagain.com/faq.html "found pets"
The more I look in OSE there's definitely a lot of link issues. I know they may be old, but it's possible some could have come back to haunt the site.
I would be extra certain you've disavowed all the bad links. Greenlane SEO has two great posts on the process they use;
- www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/01/step-by-step-disavow-process/
- http://www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/04/how-to-uncover-those-harder-to-find-links/
The site design LOOKS great - terrific actually. So it's almost easy to assume everything is technically OK on-site, yet there are definitely some issues there.
For example there are almost 800 pages indexed - which seems like a lot for this site (I could be wrong). There are lost of really long titles and descriptions etc. So as Andy suggests, I'd take a good look at cleaning up anything on-site as well. It may not have caused a penalty, but anything to help Google re-processes the site will help
-
"If only we knew when the next refresh was going to be."
Maybe you found it!
It could also be another algorithm update that has tipped you over the edge. You might have been borderline for something for some time, then an update comes along and pushes you over the edge.
Do a site crawl with Screaming Frog as well, to see if anything glaringly obvious jumps out at you.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the feedback. Only updates would be blog posts (original content, no guest posts or anything).
And yeah, our current thinking is that this is probably Penguin rather than Panda related. If only we knew when the next refresh was going to be.
-
Hi John,
That is a big drop off!
The first question really, is if there have been any changes to the site recently? Any development, new pages, SEO work, content, link building, etc.?
Edit-- Sorry, just seen that you said no major changes to the site - but does this mean that there have been changes?
You mentioned that you have disavowed some links - if this was Penguin related, it could take a little while before you see any changes.
-Andy
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
-
Does Google give weight to the default measurement units (metric / imperial) on pages?
Hi, We run a series of weather websites that cater for the units (feet, metres, Celsius, Fahrenheight etc.) for the users by means of detecting their geo-location. So users in the US see the site in feet, Fahrenheight and pretty much the rest of the world gets metric units. My concern is that if we view the cached version of our pages as seen by the Googlebot out of Mountain View, California, it shows that our geoIP switch to imperial units has been activated for every location in the World. The question is, does the fact that we appear to cater for countries who use metric units by showing (in Google's eyes) Imperial units by default count against us from an SEO point of view? Thanks in advance for any comments, Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nickruss0 -
Very Slow Recovery after Manual Penalty Removed - Are we missing something?
Our site was handed a manual penalty in November 2013 where exact match anchor text and low quality directory submissions seemed to be the problem. We began the process of link removal, reconfiguration and disavowing. We had already planned to change our domain in early 2014 to coincide with our SSL certificate renewal and although we were hesitant to do this with the manual penalty still there we proceeded and 301'd most of the site but left the pages that were the landing page for most of the exact match links as 302 to the new domain. We continued to work on removing the manual penalty for the old domain as we didn't want it to pass over to the new one and eventually this was removed n March 2014 Now the penalty is gone are we safe to change those 302 redirects to 301 so everything redirects. The problem we have is that six months on, a lot of the pages for the old domain are still indexed and even though we are indexed for the new domains are rankings haven't recovered. Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty or we missing something else
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Top 5 tips you would give for an ecommerce blog
Hello, What are the top 5 tips or resources you would give to an ecommerce site that is starting a blog? If EGOL could share, too, that would be great. He's the best. So far we are doing: 1. Around 1000 words per blog post, but varying depending on the topic 2. New product and best product reviews for some of the posts. 3. I'm doing my best to have the writer make them best-of-the-web 4. After we've got a track record, I'll analyze the statistics to see what's working. 5. There's very little blogging in our industry Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Google Manual Action Disappear
Hi Guys, I have a website that received unnatural link message. We had started link removal process, disavowed not approachable links and file reconsideration four times but all the times Google sent some samples of unnatural links and rejected our reconsideration. Last week we again disavowed non approachable links and planned to file reconsideration after a week but today when i tried to file reconsideration, Manual action message was disappeared. We haven't received any message from Google. The same case was happened with one more of our site earlier. Manual action disappeared means it has been revoked or something else??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Should you give all the posts in a Forum an unique description? Or let it empty so Google can make one with the crawled keywords .... ...
To make all descriptions for all forum posts unique is a hell of a job.... One option is to crawl the first 165 characters and turn these automaticly into the meta description of the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
If Google thinks the meta description is not suitable for the search query, Google will make a own description. In this case all te meta descriptions are unique, like the Google Guidlines want you to do. How will Google think off the fact when we delete the meta description tag so Google will make all the descriptions by herself?0 -
Google Manual Action (manual-Penalty)- Unnatural inbound links
Dear friends, I just get from Google two "Unnatural inbound links" notifications via Google Webmaster Tools, the first is for our WWW version of the site and the second is for the NON-WWW version. My question, I should send two identical reconsideration request for WWW and NON-WWW or treat them as different sites? Thank you Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs. Having just read this excellent discussion, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains. I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689 Is it safe to 301? What's the latest thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy0