Big Rankings Drop Late September - Help With Analysis

[webwonderment]

Hi

I suffered a big rankings drop late September (50% down in UVs from organic Google search clicks) and have no Manual Actions in the Google Webmaster Tools and I'm at a loss to why this has happened. I've spent much of the last 2 months trying to figure what has happened.

Has this coincided with a Google algorithm update and/or does anyone know how to figure out what's happened and why?

[adder]

Have you pinpointed the actual date the drop happened?
There was a core algo update on 20th August and a minor Penguin update on 4th October. Mind you, depending on your location, you may see a delayed action.

A good way to establish what has happened is to divide your site into sections and then spend time on Analytics comparing the traffic "before" and "after"

Set your data range to compare two exact periods before and after the alleged penalty and go to
Analytics -> Behaviour -> Site Content -> All Pages

Divide your site into sections, like homepage, blog, product pages, landing pages etc
In the search box enter the footprint of the particular section, for example: /blue-widget-products-subfolder/ and see if any of the sections show a massively different percentage.

If you happen to identify a section that has suffered significantly more than other sections, look at the links pointing to that section and look at the content (quality, duplication issues)

Also, using GWT and Analytics, you can establish which queries have been hit the hardest: long tail or one/two-word keywords.

[webwonderment]

Thanks for the reply - we haven't been using Google Analytics because we've got our own reporting system but we'll give it a try.

The site's main source of search traffic is via image search - are rankings the same with this?

The rankings drop may have coincided with a slight site restructure - that's the only thing I can think of - but it was put back to like it was before literally days after. Would this cause a big drop? I initially stated 50% drop - but that was across the whole site - it's actually closer to 75% for Google traffic.

[webwonderment]

And also I've got evidence of websites taking the images, putting them on their website and getting results on Google Image Search whereby ours are nowhere to be seen. It's like rubbing salt in the wound.

[adder]

Ok, that explains a lot.

One of the main factors in ranking images is uniqueness. If you know that people steal your images, use this:
[images.google.com...]
and identify the biggest thieves. Then get them to remove your content from their site and if they don't comply, submit a DMCA.

Other ranking factors include:

• surrounding text
  
• image file-name
  
• the overall health of your site's optimisation

Have you made significant changes to any of these?

I remember seeing a lot of similar cases reported back in January/February this year when Google changed the way it ranks images and displays images on its results pages (a trick to make sure the user stays on Google instead of visiting the target site)

[webwonderment]

Thanks adder, no I haven't changed any of them. I've just spent hours trying to figure out why the rankings dropped into oblivion - I hope it picks up soon. Do sites recover from big rankings drop? And if so what's the timeframe?

[adder]

may have coincided with a slight site restructure

What did the restructure entail?

I've got evidence of websites taking the images

If it were my site and I was confident I hadn't bought links, done cloaking or other grey/black-hat stuff, I'd consider the duplicate content to be the most likely cause of the traffic drop. Difficult to say without a proper investigation.

By the way, have you checked the positions of your images for the keywords you know you used to rank high for? Does GWT indicate that you've lost rankings or impressions?

This is unlikely but a traffic drop may have been caused by changes in Google's interface or trivial things like people losing interest in the particular topic. I'm not saying this is the case, but you often arrive to the conclusion by process of elimination.

Do sites recover from big rankings drop?

Theoretically they may. A manual penalty may expire or an algo update can restore a site that was previously taken down as a false positive but this is an aberration and you shouldn't bet on it or give yourself a false hope.

Oh, by the way, have you checked GWT to confirm that you haven't got a manual penalty? It's the most important thing to check especially if a drop occurs outside the dates of the known algo updates.

[webwonderment]

There are no manual penalties at all on GWT. Some pictures may be fairly similar - like a TV cap of a person doing a different facial expression - but they're different and there aren't even many of these. To take a 75% traffic drop for that is a farce if it's true.

This SEO game seems fickle at the best of times and unreliable. Spending 1000's of hours of work (several hours a day literally over years) and they decide to dump at a whim.

Why would an image be good for months, then suddenly it's no good? It doesn't make sense and with no feedback or ways to ask Google what am I supposed to do?