Did technical problems or algorithmic assessment cause a traffic drop?

[seomanager]

Hi all,

I have a brief case study and question to share about a significant decline in organic traffic. Here are the details:
-A client was doing lots of shady backlinking and received a manual penalty from Google about 16 months ago
-They did some clean up and got the penalty lifted, organic traffic returned
-Six months later they relaunched their site with new pages, URL structure, etc., they bungled some of the redirects and sitemaps, but got most things corrected
-Organic traffic fell off by 85% and has never come back (relaunch was seven months ago)
-However, it was only Google organic traffic that fell off and never came back
-Organic traffic from Bing and Yahoo has continued to climb steadily
-Google organic traffic to article content pages fell off, but organic traffic to the home page stayed the same
-Webmaster Tools shows regular crawling and indexing of the site, most of their pages are in the Google’s index
-Site still has lots of link spam leftover from past link building efforts

The client believes it is still a technical problem related to relaunch and is looking for a specific technical fix.

My hypothesis is that the relaunch exposed the site to a new algorithmic assessment by Google, and continuing to have shady backlinks has made Google lose trust/authority/relevance in the site for the non-branded queries that they used to rank highly for. It is not a technical issue preventing crawling/indexing because that would have affected Bing and Yahoo traffic as well. It is a Google ranking issue that can only be overcome by long, hard work of creating new content, building good links, etc.

Am I on the right track? Are there other ideas about why only Google organic traffic would drop? Thanks

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld seomanager

relaunch was seven months ago

Traction for me has been a big problem since last May's (2014) updates for many of my sites even knowing they are good/unique/relevant plus I know that many others have been experiencing similar.

Unfortunately your client is going to have to wait, IF you have done everything correctly then "whatever new iteration" comes along, you ought to be fine, IF the "new" iteration does not like what you have done, what next?

Clients should not, with Gs latest mesmerisations, expect instant results for everyday sites...it cannot be done.

[goodroi]

They cleaned up the bad links but did they develop good links? Cutting out the poison isn't enough, you also need good medicine to be cure it.

I would also revisit their quality standards. Let's say their pages had 100 words of content. Even if they double that to 200 words of content per article it isn't enough. Make sure they aren't chasing the minimum levels but seeking to surpass expectations.

[seomanager]

Good point about replacing bad links with good links, and ratcheting up the effort in order to go beyond the minimum. Even with that I'm advising it will take a long time to recover.

[goodroi]

I would not advise the company to take a wait and hope approach. When you trigger a big penalty with Google it often is not resolved with Google's regular daily refresh but it has been seven months since they relaunched. That should have been enough time for the changes to be crawled and Google to rerun the ranking algo/filter that is impacting your site. Panda & Penguin both had a big refresh a few months ago. I would lean towards there are still significant issues somewhere on the website.

It could also just be a case of new competition that is outranking you or universal serps diverting the traffic that used to flow to your site.

Have you looked into this possibly being a manual penalty that requires a reconsideration request?

[seomanager]

No, not advising them to wait and see, but to move ahead with more good link building and content creation/promotion.

They did receive a manual penalty in the fall of 2013, which they said was lifted in February 2014. There has not been any other communications from Google through Webmaster Tools about any additional manual actions. That is why I think that still having spam links, combined with not making progress on doing anything proactive with good link building and new good new content, continues to hold them down.