6 replies to this topic

[BeGlobal]

Hi,

My company's website has always ranked first when someone searches for my company name on Google.

Suddenly, I started noticing that when running the rankings, the rankings software was finding my company's site ranking #1 for "my company name" only some times, and some times I had to run the rankings twice or even three times to find it.

First, I thought it was a problem with the rankings software, but now I noticed on Google Analytics that the visitors that used my company name as keyword to find my site dropped to 50% compared to last month.

Is this a penalty, part of penguin maybe? is this a problem with some datacenters or GA? has anybody else experienced this?

Best,
Carlos.

[chrishirst]

And has traffic dropped off by a commensurate amount? Because checking "rankings" is NOT going to tell you anything that is remotely useful.

You do realise that running regular rank checking for particular words or phrases can/will actually skew your results AWAY from what you would "normally" see, because the "personalisation" factor of results will try to show you some different URLs each time you check.

[torka]

Chris, to be fair, he did check traffic and say visitors using his company name as a keyword have dropped off by 50%. Granted, that doesn't speak to overall traffic, but it does seem to indicate something's up other than obsessive rank checking.

Carlos, that is a good question, though -- how is the total organic search traffic to your site holding up? If the search traffic is about the same, then there must be other keywords that are coming up higher. Can you identify which keywords are taking up the slack?

Or maybe for some reason a larger percentage of your visitors are falling into the dreaded [not provided] keyword category, so while they're still actually searching with your company name you're just not seeing it.

If, on the other hand, your overall organic search visitorship is down, that would indicate there may be some other issue. Perhaps Google doesn't "know" that your company name is a brand, and you're getting dinged a bit for over-use of a keyword? At a first glance and from this distance, it's really hard to say what might be going on.

But the first step, I think, would be to dig deeper into your analytics traffic stats.

My

--Torka

[BeGlobal]

Hi, thank you for your replies.

The overall traffic has dropped only because my company name used to send me a very high % of the total traffic.

The only keywords affected are two different ways to write my company name (let's say "my company" and "mycompany"). When I search for those terms, I always find my company ranking #1st, but like christchrist said it might be just because Google knows my preferences.

When searching with a software, it finds the keywords only about 50% of the times, and the other 50% I have to run the rankings again to find it, which leads me to think I am not showing on some locations or datacenters, or just appearing and disappearing. Furthermore, I've heard of a friend who has had the same problem, and it started on August just like mine.

Best,
Carlos

Edited by BeGlobal, 06 September 2012 - 09:47 AM.

[chrishirst]

which leads me to think I am not showing on some locations or datacenters, or just appearing and disappearing.

Yeah but that's the normal everyday routine.

Furthermore, I've heard of a friend who has had the same problem, and it started on August just like mine.

So It may be that more of your customer base have dropped into the https: idea of Google to block passing keywords for "security" reasons.

[Jill]

What shows up instead of your site? Should it be there? Is it relevant?

If you've lost 50% of traffic for certain keywords, then yeah, it could certainly be a penalty, or more likely a filter such as Panda. Look at keyword stuffing and other potential web spam that you may have on your site.

[BeGlobal]

Thank you guys! much appreciated.

By looking closer, I have noticed that the traffic coming from "my company" and "mycompany" has dropped mostly on 2 cities, I think now that it can be Panda like Jill said, but why specially on certain cities, is there a possibility that Google "thinks" I shouldn't have presence on those cities?

On my friend site's stats, this issue is even clearer. The 3 cities that were sending him most traffic in the last 12 months through his company name were Stevensonville, NY, LA in that order (he has 2 locations, one in LA, one in NY). The traffic from his company name on Stevensonville has disappeared completely, so is there a possibility this is more a Google algorithm change to show more relevant results according to the city, instead of a penalty? Other keywords have not been affected, only those that contain the company name.

What shows up instead of your site? Should it be there? Is it relevant?

No more than the company name. There are no other companies with the same name, btw.