Tuesday July 12th = We suddenly lost all our top Google rankings. Traffic cut in half. Ideas?
-
The attached screenshot shows all.
Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic.
Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back.
Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine).
Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong??
-
couldn't they edit out the links back to your site?
-
something to throw into the mix from a guy I know who was also hit hard by the panda update was the incoming links cname. Do the incoming links you have all come from one particular source or host ?
-
It's a possibility. There have been ongoing discussions on internal linking on most of the major SEO forums for quite some time.
My personal feeling is that most websites can effectively reduce the number of internal links by auditing their link flow, determining their "ideal" real estate and ensuring that they are not necessarily duplicating unnecessary links, which would steal some of the juice that might otherwise go to some of the bigger pages.
Only <5% of people ever see the footer in the average website, so my opinion has always been that the footer should contain supporting links to areas to help the user in "context". Contact, About, Sitemap and Investors, for examples, are classic links one might find there.
Big real estate - or important pages in the website - should be linked to from your main nav or areas above the fold with lots of user exposure.
Keep in mind when changing and removing links - it is a process. Do not go in and remove all or a significant part of your links in one week.
Make one or two good changes, then wait for a period of a week or so, then make others small changes over time
Hope this helps.
Todd
www.seovisions.com -
OK. Well, my suggested strategy would be:
- Go through the list Todd gave to make sure that there is nothing wrong on your site. If not, you can probably assume it was a Google algorithm tweak, so proceed to...
- Work on improving your site, starting with any areas you know of that might be an issue. I would say any content that is not unique would be a good place to start.
-
If you think people are scraping your content, you might want to look into making sure you link back to your pages within your content so that you always get links back in those cases.
I noticed that when scraper site pick up SEOmoz content, tehy dont pick up the footer with the author links back. So make sure to keep links in the actual body text
I also saw a number of site that pull seomoz content into an iframe on their site. Places like twitter and Flickr detect when their pages are opened in an iframe and give a error message -> tabs.to/POL-Lp
-
Thanks - reading up on rel=author now. Looks kinda complicated from the Google instructions..
-
Great advice - I especially like the suspicious inbound links idea.. never thought of that.
We have had experts say that we have too many links per page on average on our site, and that we should consolidate the links in the sitewide footer as they add so many links per page.
Is this a good idea? Are we being hurt by having so many outbound links and such a link heavy footer?
Thanks
-
Place links within your content too if people are talking your content, also add the rel=author attribute.
I would also look at the link profile for your site, have you added any dodgy links recently.
Regards.
-
Drops such as the one you have experienced can be difficult to assess. I would advise the following procedures to rule out other issues first. As Egol correctly stated it is important to not jump to fixes right away, for two reasons. First of all, the situation could be temporary and could revert. Second of all, changes you make will obscure the potential issues, making it more difficult to find problem spots.
1. Check robots.txt to ensure there are no issues with file additions that could be blocking major pages
2. Check link canonical tag, if you use it, to ensure there are no issues there with incorrect urls
3. Check inbound links both using inbound link tools and Webmaster tools for any suspicious bursts of links or links that look dodgy you might not account for
4. Run a sitewide meta check on all titles and meta descriptions and ensure everything is correct. There are software companies that offer fairly inexpensive options that will spider the entire website relatively quickly. Do this late at night post-swell
4. Use Xenu to check all broken links and fix. Even if there are only a few.
5. Run the google bot indexing tool in GWT and check for any instances of funny code or potential problems
6. Analyze your analytics to determine which keyword clusters lots the most positioning. This can often give you clues as to what might have happened.Hope this helps.
Todd
www.seovisions.com -
Study this... implement carefully....
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920
-
So at the footer of any article we publish by another author have a link to that author's original article with rel="author" in it?
-
Hold your fire. Your traffic might come back tomorrow.
However, it looks like you are on the edge of whatever Google does not like because you are flashing in and out.
Hang in there, keep working to improve and iron out any problems that you think might be causing this.
-
One thing that I would do is implement the rel="author" attribute in a link to your author pages if you have not already done that.
-
That page has been around for 10 years on our site, and as you can see, many many people are ripping it off, along with all other pages on our site.
Would you recommend an aggressive campaign of "cease and desist" emails to these plagiarizers, coupled with more addition of unique content??
-
All of our top ranked articles are unique, although many people rip them off and it's hard as heck for us to track them all down and get them to remove our content.
I recently did this for our "Raised Garden Bed" Page, which contributes a huge amount of our traffic. It was very labour intensive.
Our blog has a lot of articles that other authors have written and are republished elsewhere.
-
Adam is asking the right question. On http://eartheasy.com/live_water_saving.htm, I grabbed some text "Many beautiful shrubs and plants thrive with far less watering than other species. Replace herbaceous perennial borders with native plants. Native plants will use less water and be more resistant to local plant diseases." That text appears on a bunch of sites. I tried this with several other phrases from different pages on your site, and almost every time several other sites shared identical text to yours.
Google is penalizing you because your content is identical to a bunch of other sites. The more unique, original content you have, the more you should see your rankings rise.
-
Are your articles unique or are they syndicated?
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
-
One of our top visited page (login page) missing primary keyword, does this makes ranking drop of our homepage for same keyword?
Hi all, So, I have removed the "primary keyword" from login page, which is most visited page on our website to avoid keywords in non related pages. I noticed our homepage ranking dropped for same "primary keyword". Visitors of this login page directly land without searching with "primary keyword". Then how removing it from such page drops our ranking? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Why Google changed our page-title suddenly which has been same for years
Hi all, I know Google shows a different page titles. Happens when over optimised or when we copied competitors page title. But we did neither. Suddenly Google changed our homepage page title in search results. Our page title suffix "brand name" has been moved to beginning. Our page title is still for years.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Can someone explain the attached rankings?
I just don't understand how we can have a long list of 1's and 2's in google, but in Yahoo and Bing, some are close, some are in the 20's and some are not even in the top 50. Is there something that Yahoo and Bing care about, that google doesn't? I know about the meta language being more important for Yahoo and Bing than Google, so I added that. There's nothing I can do about the domain age, which I know is important to Yahoo and Bing. Is there anything else? thanks, Ruben [URL]]([URL=http://imgur.com/Vem594l][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Vem594l.jpg[/IMG][/URL]) [IMG]](http://i.imgur.com/Vem594l.jpg[/IMG])
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
What happened on September 17 on Google?
According to mozcast: http://mozcast.com/ and to my own stats, Google had a pretty strong algorithm update on September 17. Personally I have experienced a drop of about 10% of traffic coming from Google on most of my main e-commerce site virtualsheetmusic.com. Anyone know more about that update? Any ideas about what changed? Thank you in advance for any thoughts! Best, Fab.
Algorithm Updates | | fablau1 -
Google Rankings Jumping Around
Hi, Since January, the Google rankings for one of our sites has been jumping around. Sometimes it's on page 1, then it disappears and comes back around 1 month later. It's strange because it's only a small section of the site that it's happening to. Every other section of the site is doing really well. Just wondered if anyone else is having this problem, or has had it and can suggest any fixes. There are no technical issues, no changes have been made to the site, all I can think is it's Google messing around with their algorithm? Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Karen
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0 -
SEO updates and rank changes
We have been updating page titles and meta descriptions for a client (not changing ANY links and the content we are replacing is "fluff," no major keywords or any relevant information) yet in the past few weeks, rankings have plummeted. I used the SEOMoz grader to check and make sure we have the keywords in there, in the right places for the updated page source info, and we're getting A's yet for those same keywords, the website is nowhere to be found. For example for the phrase "organic t shirts," we get an A for this page: http://greenpromotionalitems.com/organic-t-shirts.htm but when searching organic t shirts, no Green Promotional Items... Ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | laidlawseo0 -
Some rankings fluctuate dramatically
Hi guys, just a quick query this one. For one of our keywords, the rankings are fluctuating wildly. One week we went up 32 spots, then the next friday we were down 28. Nothing dramatic was being done to the site, I have not been trying to "force" any rankings instead focusing on just making our content better. It just seems odd that one week we're on page one, then a few days later we're down on page four. It seems impossible to actually maintain a reliable ranking. I know to expect some fluctuation but every week it's up 20/30, then down 20/30 the next. How can we try to give this keyword some stability? Ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | JetBookMike0