Possible penalty question - need expert help
-
hallo everyone,
I am posting this question to the MOZ community, because I could not find any useful information or proper advice so far, even after consulting a few local SEO experts.
I noticed from the end of september a steady and consistent decrease in visits (please see attached pdf) for my website https://bastabollette.it
I lost so far almost 40%.
Please consider that I have not changed my habits in blog posting lately, both in quantity and quality. I have not made any subtantial change on the website lately.
I did a general audit of the site asking to an expert but apart from some generic suggestions (like: "work on increasing PR, add more quality backliks, use more no-follow links, fix broken links" - things I am currently going to fix anyway) I don't really understand the reason of the drop.
Please also note the strange drop of 11/22/15 (see search console screenshot).
Can you please help me?
thank you.
-
Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Select Bing/Organic
-
Thank you Marie for your honest and complete answer.
One question: how can I check bing traffic in google analytics? I looked for it on google but (how funny) could not find the answer.
-
It's not uncommon to see weird blips like that in Google Search Analytics. I wouldn't get too worried about that unless the rankings stayed down and were legitimately down.
Do you see any manual action in Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions? If not, then it's not a penalty.
This sounds like a question that would need quite a bit of investigation to answer, but here is where I would start:
In Google Analytics - Audience - Acquisition - All traffic and then click on Google/Organic as well as the other options. Is the drop across the board? Or just in Google traffic? If it's Google traffic only and other sources like bing traffic or direct visits are stable, then I'd be worried that you're being considered low quality by an algorithm change in Google. It could be Panda or the Quality (Phantom) update, but it would be hard to say without digging in deeply.
If the changes are across the board, then I'd be looking at things like a seasonal change. (It's not uncommon for sites to see a gradual decline going into the winter.) Or, perhaps a site issue such as a technical problem or a hosting problem or malware, etc.
It could also be that a competitor is outranking you. A drop from #1-#2 on some keywords can have a drastic effect.
From what you've written, it seems like a penalty is unlikely. But, unfortunately I don't have the answer for you.
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
-
GA 4 Question
What differences are you typically seeing in Google Analytics 4 compared to UA? For one site I have, UA says there were 2,342 new users. GA4 says there were 1,899 new users for the same time period. Does that seem like a normal amount of difference between the two platforms?
Reporting & Analytics | | emilycarimus1 -
UTM tracking on a mapped subdomain, is it OK? (DA bonus question)
Hi, This is a technical question. OK, two technical questions. Please bear with me and I'll do my best to explain... We have a WordPress blog (business account, hosted by WordPress). We use it to blog and send traffic to our separate e-commerce site. We use UTM tracking to see which blog posts perform best. Our e-commerce site has a high domain authority. Our blog, not so much. In an effort to increase the domain authority of the blog we have mapped a subdomain of the e-commerce site to the Wordpress blog (still hosted by WordPress). Q1. Will this actually raise the blog's DA? If the blog does get a DA boost, I guess it'll be because Google now sees it as part of a powerful domain. But if it is technically part of the powerful domain... Q2. Should we remove the UTM parameters from the blog? I've read that you should never use UTM on internal links because it messes with your Google Analytics data. But I'm unsure if links on a mapped subdomain count as 'internal links'. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance. J
Reporting & Analytics | | JabeKay0 -
Hi all I want some help
Hi all I want some help can some one help what google dont like on this web site http://www.escort-munich.net/ [staff disclaimer: site is not safe for most workplaces] Escort München ist my keyowrds thancky very mutch all regards jivko
Reporting & Analytics | | jivkojelazkov0 -
URL String Tracking Question--Need help!
I am doing some research for a freelance project and found a URL receiving a decent amount of traffic from search with this url string after the normal page url (xxx.com/credit-card-counseling.aspx?match=e&query=debthelper.com&id=22097628847&id=1810807655) Is this some sort of GA tracking code? Why would it be used on that page to track organic search hits if that happens automatically? Would love some help figuring this out! Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | RickyShockley0 -
Is it possible to get demographic and interest information from DoubleClick cookies?
We use Google Analytics and we are currently extracting information from the Google Analytics cookies about our visitors. Is it possible to access DoubleClick cookies in a similiar fashion and get some demographic/interest information for each visitor to our website (if they have a DoubleClick cookie set)? If so, any information on how to retrieve it would be very appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | WebpageFX0 -
Help! Organic traffic decreased 75%.
Hi all, I've had fairly steady organic traffic to my website (www.toptienmobiel.nl) for the last 2 years. Since the beginning of march however I've noticed that the organic traffic was decreasing. Up until now my total organic traffic has decreased to about a quarter of what it was. It doesn't seem to be a penalty, since I still have most of my important keywords on the first page. They've decreased significantly though, mostly from the top 3 to 7+ position. Any idea on what may have been the reason for this sudden decrease? My link profile is still natural and I haven't done anything radical to the website concerning the backlinks or on-page elements. Could it be an algorithmic (Panda / Penguin) update? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | samerhadionline0 -
Bing Won't Index Site - Help!
For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out why my client's site is not indexed on bing and yahoo search engines. My Google analytics is telling me I’m getting traffic (very little traffic) from Bing almost daily but Bing webmaster tools is telling me I’ve received no traffic and no pages have been indexed into Bing since the beginning of December. At once point I was showing ranking in Bing for only one keyword then all of a sudden none of my pages were being indexed and I now rank for nothing for that website. From Google I’m getting over 1200 visits per month. I have been doing everything I can to possibly find the culprit behind this issue. I feel like the issue could be a redirect problem. In webmaster tools on Bing I’ve used “Fetch as Bingbot” and every time I use it I get a Status of “Redirection limit reached.”. I also checked the CRAWL Information and it’s saying all the URL’s to the site are under 301 redirect. A month or so ago the site was completely revamped and the canonical URL was changed from non www to www. I have tried manually adding pages to be indexed multiple times and Bing will not index any of the sites pages. I have submitted the sitemap to Bing and I am now at a loss. I don’t know what’s going on and why I can’t get the site listed on Bing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | VITALBGS
Stephen0 -
Are Panda/Penguin Penalties not Global but only fired for specific Google CCTLDs?
An international portfolio of web sites has been suffering from Panda and Penguin over the last months. Essentially many of the international sites completely disappeared from the top 50 when before we had many Top 5 positions for competitive key words. Today we noticed that it appears that for all this time rankings for local keywords have not been affected for domains outside of the most relevant Google CCTLD for the page. To give an example: Domain.it / Keyword 1 (IT) = Italian Competitive Keyword Google.it: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 4
Reporting & Analytics | | sp80
Google.it: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position --- Google.com: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 1
Google.com: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position 1 Google.de: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 3
Google.de: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position 4 Have other people observed such behavior? Does this give any pointers towards how the recovery strategies should be drafted? We have experienced that the more search volume a keywords has received the harder the Panda/Penguin impact. So one hypothesis could be that because the international Google domains do not receive overly significant traffic for the localized keywords Panda/Penguin protection algorithms are not being applied with the same force. Any thoughts are welcome. /Thomas1