| Manual action revoked and Google traffic has *stopped*?
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1script
msg:4546529 | 5:54 pm on Feb 18, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Trying to wrap my head around this situation. A site has been penalized for a very long time. I'm not even all that certain why, my suspicion was that it was just rounded up together with the rest of my sites, some of which did have real issues, mostly of the "inorganic" kind. The penalty for this particular site resulted in only a trickle of Google referrals, on the order of only 20-30 visits a day (down from 2000).
Anyhow, I've never given up on it and completely redone the site lately and decided to submit an RR just for the heck of it. There were significant changes in layout and some changes in URLs, too (small - I decided to lowercase all URLs where some were and some weren't before). I have also removed or no-indexed quite a few (about 10% of total) low quality pages.
So, I got a response from Google saying "Manual action revoked". So far so good. Three days later the traffic from Google completely stopped - and that's quite a head scratcher. You could say that it has been reduced by another 90% - I'm still getting 2(!) Google referrals per day. Surely not something you'd expect after manual action has been revoked?
I know three days is probably too soon to see any results, and I was ready to wait several weeks for any changes but such negative result almost right away? Did anyone else ever see something like that? What may be causing this, any ideas?
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bwnbwn
msg:4546538 | 6:14 pm on Feb 18, 2013 (gmt 0) |
1st thing I would do is check the pages were the traffic was coming from search terms and see if you lost the few terms you had.
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netmeg
msg:4546546 | 6:35 pm on Feb 18, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Is it possible that once the manual action was revoked, one of the algorithmic changes finally kicked in?
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1script
msg:4546551 | 7:06 pm on Feb 18, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Thanks, guys. @bwnbwn: the search terms the traffic was coming in on before were the best I can describe them as random. The KWs were never stable enough for me to notice any one in particular. Besides, having only 20 visitors a day does not really entice you to spend any time analyzing that traffic, so perhaps I did miss one or two stable KWs. Anyhow, they are ALL gone now. The ones I do get *some* google traffic on look like mostly hackers googling my site for known exploits - not the actual themed KWs.
@netmeg: everything is possible I guess, but, man, what a potent algo, more dangerous than an outright penalty?! My other guess would be that the site might have gotten into a precarious position where all its pre-penalty links have been stripped, so it's like it's a brand new site without the benefit of the "honeymoon" period. Which brings me to another question: does anyone know what happens with the *good* remaining pre-penalty links: do they ever get used in the PR calculations again?
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bwnbwn
msg:4546755 | 1:36 pm on Feb 19, 2013 (gmt 0) |
netmeg might be right thinking a little here. If your site is under a manual penality it (not sure) probably isn't effected by algo changes, but since it was lifted your site was thrown in the mix. Not knowing how long you were under the manual your better to just give it a month or so. I agree with it being a new site
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1script
msg:4565293 | 4:49 pm on Apr 16, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Bizarre as it may sound, by now I have *three* instances of sites coming out of penalties and seeing their rankings plunge. Two months after this has been posted, the first site about which I wrote this post originally, is still receiving G traffic at "just" about the level that it had before the penalty was revoked.
In other words, it took two months to recover from removal of a penalty! Two other sites that had their penalties revoked later, are still suffering from traffic at about 60% of pre-removal level.
Those three sites with penalties removed is my entire sample size, so from my experience it looks like a significant traffic drop after a penalty is revoked is nothing short of mandatory!
That still blows my mind - makes no sense to me. What do you guys think can be at play here?
The sites had penalty since Aug 2011. So, it's post-Panda and post-Penguin but there were a few reruns of them since. Do you think it makes sense to consider penalized sites "shielded" from algo changes? Why would you design your anti-spam system like that? You would think if the site is marked as "spam" or at least "questionable", the effects of algo changes would be rather exaggerated for it, not diminished (or completely removed).
Is there anybody else here that sees this phenomenon?
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