9 year old site - over 70% drop on Sept 23 | Warrior Forum - The #1 Digital Marketing Forum & Marketplace

10 years ago

Read this https://twitter.com/Serpyre/status/523009227598856192 and this Overestimated earnings forecast for new site. : ecommerce - now a server or serious page error causes Google to drop the traffic they send - if you have cheaper hosting (which most do) on a low efficiency platform (WordPress) it can take weeks to months to never to recover but it sounds like it is a secondary issue - it will take a month or two to learn which one of the two it is.

Thanks
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red0x

10 years ago

Originally Posted by serpyre

Read this https://twitter.com/Serpyre/status/523009227598856192 and this Overestimated earnings forecast for new site. : ecommerce - now a server or serious page error causes Google to drop the traffic they send - if you have cheaper hosting (which most do) on a low efficiency platform (WordPress) it can take weeks to months to never to recover but it sounds like it is a secondary issue - it will take a month or two to learn which one of the two it is.

No that's not it. We're running on a DigitalOcean VPS, and if that's not enough, the entire site is CDN'd on Amazon CloudFront.

Thanks

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alsgroup

10 years ago

23 Sept 2014, is a big date in the world of Websites. This day Google has released its Panda 4.1 updates. So all the ranking and traffic got fluctuated.

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tech84

10 years ago

I cant say specifically what happened to your site since you did not mention it, but if we were to base it from the date it dropped.

That's Panda right there.

"thin/duplicate content" is you main issue there, that's what Panda is mostly about.

Thanks

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CRIMSON ASH

10 years ago

Definitely the result of PANDA. It is something that can be reversed. Guess it is time to educate yourself about this animal.... here's a good start:

Google Panda Update | Search Engine Land Explains the Google Panda Filter

Another thing: you may be copying content Verbatim but that does not stop your from adding value by including more information, media, reviews etc.

Thanks

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whlookup

10 years ago

Also, to be sure you should write & ask Google directly. Ask if and why your site is penalized. They reply a bit late but you will get a reply for sure. It happened to one of our site last year and we got their reply confirming that they have not penalized the site. This helped us and we found there was some other problem with our content.

Here is a link to do this : https://support.google.com/webmaster...er/35843?hl=en

Thanks

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red0x

10 years ago

Thanks for the replies everyone. Here is my plan of action:

- Rewrite some of the popular product pages. Basically paraphrase the existing info.
- More blog posts
- Create product walkthrough youtube videos
- Redesign of the website which will finally have a mobile version
- Contact google with a "reconsideration request"

Thanks
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Icematikx

10 years ago

Originally Posted by red0x

Thanks for the replies everyone. Here is my plan of action:

- Rewrite some of the popular product pages. Basically paraphrase the existing info.
- More blog posts
- Create product walkthrough youtube videos
- Redesign of the website which will finally have a mobile version
- Contact google with a "reconsideration request"

Reconsideration request = Useless. It's for manual actions only. Panda = algorithm penalty.

If you fix the issues, you'll have to wait for a Panda refresh, which could take 1 - 12 months; depending on when they next roll one out. For example, there hasn't been a Penguin update in nearly 12-months which shows you the timescale. You won't recover from a Panda penalty until a new Panda algorithm is rolled out - and even then, only if you've fixed the issues.

Duplicate content scraped from external sites = nono.
Thin, poor quality pages = nono.

As you've said though, you haven't done any "SEO". It could be that your lack of links have finally caught up with you, and your competitors have merely outranked you, and there isn't a penalty in play.

Tons of reasons, and no way to definitively say without looking at your site in comprehensive detail - and nobodies going to do that without a fee being paid.

Thanks
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red0x

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Icematikx

Reconsideration request = Useless. It's for manual actions only. Panda = algorithm penalty.

If you fix the issues, you'll have to wait for a Panda refresh, which could take 1 - 12 months; depending on when they next roll one out. For example, there hasn't been a Penguin update in nearly 12-months which shows you the timescale. You won't recover from a Panda penalty until a new Panda algorithm is rolled out - and even then, only if you've fixed the issues.

Duplicate content scraped from external sites = nono.
Thin, poor quality pages = nono.

As you've said though, you haven't done any "SEO". It could be that your lack of links have finally caught up with you, and your competitors have merely outranked you, and there isn't a penalty in play.

Tons of reasons, and no way to definitively say without looking at your site in comprehensive detail - and nobodies going to do that without a fee being paid.

Thanks for the reply. However there is definitely a penalty in play. If you look at the image that I've attached the you can see that the traffic disappears exactly on September 23rd.

It's not even an issue of our competitors outranking us at this point, for most keywords we are not even in the first 10 pages, where as in early September we were in the #1-3 first search results.

It's so ridiculous that even searching for: "keyword mysite.com" is still not showing us in the first 3 spots.

Obviously Google has decided that we are some spammy content scraping site. I wish that they were more honest about it though so that we'd have someone to explain to that we're not.

I'd rather not publicly mention our site url here since I don't want our customers potentially stumbling on this post and seeing this.

Thanks
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aygabtu 10 years ago

Are you keeping track of your keyword rankings? I check mine everyday, and immediately if I see a drop in traffic. You need to know if one or all of the SERPs for your keywords dropped.
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Icematikx 10 years ago

Originally Posted by red0x

I'd rather not publicly mention our site url here since I don't want our customers potentially stumbling on this post and seeing this.

Then nobody is going to give concrete advice and guidance - all we can merely do is speculate which gets you nowhere - especially since Google doesn't ever release any definitive context on penalties anyway. So to speculate on speculation is useless.

If it's Panda, then I'd be looking for things like:

- Tons of tag pages
- Useless category pages
- Site-wide duplicate content
- Lack of rel=canonical on duplicate pages
- Lack of rel=canonical on query links (such as google.com/add-links/?8312dx-saj (for link tracking / affiliate links etc)

Tons of reasons.
- Thanks
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PaulMeyer

10 years ago

Try to add more content

Thanks

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samk2824

10 years ago

Google Panda 4.1 Hit
You Can Google It For "How To Recover From Google Panda 4.1"

Good Luck Mate

Thanks

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SEOWizard417

10 years ago

Most likely a Panda issue. Might not necessarily be a penalty though. Panda could have pushed other sites ahead of yours pushing you to page 2 or 3 of the serps, which would lead to a major loss is traffic. Without any more info or at least some rankings reports, can't give you much more advice or help.

Check your site for dup content issues for starters and add some relevant content to your site.

Thanks

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Glenn Rodgers

10 years ago

I can be content duplication issue overview your whole webpages content and fix this out.

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Rocketguy

10 years ago

It is most likely a Panda issue. It could be one of several different issues, but that much duplicate content is definitely the first thing I would work on replacing.

Thanks

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red0x

9 years ago

UPDATE: Exactly 1 month after being hit by Panda 4.1 my site has since completely recovered.
New Analytics:
http://i.imgur.com/z9ivc0q.png

So I wanted to update people on the status, and to tell about what I've done to improve the situation.
So on Sept 23 google killed our traffic by 70-80%, and exactly 1 month later on Oct 23rd all the traffic returned.

The perfect 1 month time frame makes me wonder if the recovery was due to something I've done, or if google was simply running some kind of a 1 month long experiment. In fact most of the changes I've planned to implement I did not even get a chance to do yet.

Here's what I've done:

- Our main site links to our separate eCommerce site in the footer and header. I made all of these "nofollow".
- Links from our ecommerce site back to main site, also "nofollow"
- Using rel=canonical everywhere
- Made several duplicate pages "noindex"
- Added a bunch of meta content for twitter cards, facebook, google+
- Started slowly rewriting content (maybe only rewrote 5% so far)

Most Important Change in My Option:
- I've discovered in GWT that there were about 5K links to our site from m.biz and its many subdomains. This is some Chinese search engine. I've disavowed the "m.biz" domain.

Final Thoughts:
This has been a crazy (stressful) month for my company. Even though this story had a positive ending who knows what future algorithm changes will bring. For all I know we could lose all of our traffic again tomorrow.

One good thing that I can take away from this experience is that I've learned a lot about SEO, and will use it to grow my current and any future business.

Thanks
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CRIMSON ASH 9 years ago

Originally Posted by red0x

One good thing that I can take away from this experience is that I've learned a lot about SEO, and will use it to grow my current and any future business.

Great to hear your site bounced back! Hopefully, you also learnt that SEO is just one channel of generating traffic and it should not be the core focus of your business but just one approach to diversify your traffic streams!
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creat1veone

9 years ago

Nice! Congrats on having your traffic back, but as you are aware this can happen again tomorrow, I'd recommend you follow trough with re-writing your content, also the Youtube walktrough with your products might be good to do.

After doing that look into other sources of traffic as a back up.

Thanks
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red0x 9 years ago

Yep, I've realized how reliant we are on google and am now exploring additional options.
More specifically we've started to build up a client mailing list.

I will continue rewriting the content and implementing the site redesign (making it responsive). At the very least it should provide a better experience for our users.
- Thanks
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