Diagnosing Underperforming Website Post Panda and Penguin

[absolutezero]

My website had a sudden drop in impression and all SERP about two weeks ago (I’m targeting inner pages, all the kw's were ranked first 2pages)
I have not changed anything recently; I checked the webmaster tools all are looking fine.
I’m wondering what was happening, how can reclaim my ranks and impression back?

[edited by: goodroi at 6:31 pm (utc) on Jul 23, 2013]
[edit reason] Welcome, please no specific urls or keywords as per TOS [/edit]

[goodroi]

Here are some steps I would take in trying to determine what is going on:

1) Check analytics to make sure your traffic is actually going down and its not a simple matter of personalized search results. It sounds like you already did this.

2) While in analytics look to see if any specific keywords or landing pages are impacted or if it is a site wide issue.

3) See if your drop off happened on the same day of a a specific Google update (check here [webmasterworld.com...] )

4) Log into Google webmaster central to see if there is any notice/warning from Google.

5) Check to see if your backlinks had any changes. Did you lose any good links or gain any spammy links?

6) Check to see if your content has been duplicated on another site. There are several tools that can do this.

7) Get serious about developing significant non-Google traffic sources. This will break any dependence you may have on Google and often generates the quality signals that make sites perform better in Google (Google can be a like a woman who hits on a man after he marries another).

[rish3]

To add to the advice above, within Analytics, view just the organic traffic from Google.

In the left hand menu:

Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Search -> Organic

Then, right underneath the chart, you'll see:

Primary Dimension: Keyword - Source - Landing page - Other

Click on "Source" then, click on "google" in the table underneath.

Now you'll have a graph showing just organic traffic from Google. This makes it easier to pinpoint a specific date that the traffic dropped.

[JS_Harris]

Nice tip rish, it makes trying to focus on Google easier and I'm not sure everyone does this.

As Goodroi suggested start digging into your stats! In my experience you will find sudden drops around Panda/Penguin updates and long/slow declines when the rankings loss is because of on-page factors or competitor behavior.

On which exact date did the drop in traffic happen according to analytics?

[netmeg]

One thing you might think about is doing a self site audit. If you Google "site audit" you will find a lot of advice about how to do an SEO site audit (most of which were written by SEOs for SEOs) but there's no reason you can't take some of their ideas and do them yourself. As long as you think you can remain *objective* - none of our sites are as pretty as we think they are.