6 replies to this topic

[suzstephens]

On January 29, a client's site suddenly dropped in Google SERPs, anywhere from 2 to 7 pages per keyphrase. I can't find anything in GWT that might indicate why it has dropped or even if it has been penalized for something.

This particular site experienced a similar drop about a year ago, but was back within a week.

I know this probably falls into the "sh*t happens; wait it out" category, but is there anything more I can do to figure out the cause or to fix it? Naturally my client's leads have fallen off and he's upset.

[Jill]

Sure, there are tons of things you can do. Start by looking for technical things that they may have just done. Most often, that's the issue.

Also, see these articles regarding traffic loss:

Panda Issues

Solve Lost Traffic With Analytics

[suzstephens]

Thanks for the links, Jill. I've read those articles and didn't find anything that seemed relevant.

The only change I can think of that was made on this site was made on Jan. 9 (and made to several other sites at the same time — none of those have been hurt).

Basically, the system automatically posts new MLS listings as blog posts. The system was changed Jan 9 so that the blog category name was automatically inserted before the title. For example, "5328 8 Mount Landing Tappahannock VA 22560 MLS# 1203715" became "Tappahannock VA Real Estate - 5328 8 Mount Landing Tappahannock VA 22560 MLS# 1203715".

On this particular site, around 15,000 posts would have been updated. There are dozens of categories, with the biggest having around 4000 posts. I have a dozen or so other sites that have the same blogging system; none of them have lost ranking.

Whatever the reason, on Jan 29, traffic dropped from around 175 visitors/day to around 35-40. It still shows up in SERPs, but several pages further back.

Does that mean that Google has imposed a penalty on it?

If it has been penalized, should I submit it for reconsideration? Wait to see what happens? Or what do you suggest?

Thanks for your help, as always!

[Jill]

Could be a penalty could be a technical issue. With the latter being more likely. Although it could be a dupe content issue.

None of us could say without a thorough review of the situation.

[suzstephens]

Last night I examined the list of crawl errors downloaded from GWT. Looking especially closely at those errors with discovery dates around the time the site went in the toilet, I found about a half dozen links from that look like they could be link farms. Some in English, a few in Japanese, but all essentially pages of links and text that are nonsensical.

I requested that my client's link be removed from one site, but the others have no contact info.

Are these likely to have caused the penalty?

[suzstephens]

There's some good news, at last: this afternoon the site has reappeared on page 1 in Google SERPs for a handful of its keyphrases. I guess some is better than none!

[Jill]

It's doutbful it would be a penalty since your competitors could add those links to try to harm your site.

Unless of course the site doesn't have any real links of real sites that actually like them and are linking to them naturally.