Google's Sep 16 Penguin Updates - Traffic Recovery Help

[shaunm]

Hello All,

Three of the tool sites I'm currently working on have been seeing traffic drop starting from the mid of Sep 2016 which is when Google has supposed to have rolled out a major update to Penguin.

I did a backlink audit of the affected sites by combing all the links from different backlink tools and I don't really find the traces of any unnatural link buildings. These sites have high number of link shares from forums though. But these are genuine mentions from genuine users and there's no exact matching anchors but only brand mentions. Other than that these sites(tools) being an integral part of IT support, there will be a link back to the main home page from the support section of various other sites. I found these mentions from Majestic tool which is famouse for crawling site-wide links and links that other backlink tools might not reach. So, I'm skeptical about whether Googlebot can find these links as well.

Q. What do you thiink could have gone wrong for these sites?
Q. From Gary's twitter replies, it looks like Penguin either demote or devalue. In either case, finding the root cause links and disavowing them won't help right?

Thanks for your help!

[goodroi]

What could have gone wrong? Anything. There are countless ways a site can lose rankings ranging from the numerous penalties to simply not boosting their ranking power fast enough and being overtaken by competition. To better diagnose your site you should do a full site audit and competitive analysis or hire someone to do it for you.

As for penguin, I prefer to focus less on the negative aspect and focus more on building positive link power. Too many sites with penguin issues spend all of their time disavowing links. If you never grow good links it is unlikely you will be happy with rankings. Building good quality traffic generating backlinks is smart. Worst case your Google rankings don't improve but you don't care because your traffic still goes up due to the traffic from your new cross promoting link partners. Good luck.

[dipper]

if it's not links, then it's most likely onsite factors - could it be thin content? duplicate content across websites? UX issues on mobile/desktop etc? could it be a technical seo issue?

If you've discounted links being an obvious problem then look at the websites themselves - are they providing value to visitors, to repeat visitors, good UX. Focus on the websites.

[martinibuster]

These sites have high number of link shares from forums though...

Do you agree with the assessment by Majestic's Trust Flow metric of what the site in question's major niche topic is? Is it pinpoint accurate?

Do you regard a high number of forum link shares as normal?

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I'm skeptical about whether Googlebot can find these links as well.

There is no basis for skepticism other than a lack of understanding of how Google works. There is a lot about how Google actually works that you need to know. I encourage you to do some research into this because it will help you find the answers you need to solve these kinds of problems.

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Your approach to Penguin is one-sided by dealing exclusively with the negative. I don't blame you for approaching Penguin that way because that's how most people approach it.

However there is more to Penguin than the negative. You are only dealing with half the problem.

Good luck,

Roger Montti

[shaunm]

Thanks all for your valuable insights. I've been doing backlinks audits for many years now and this is the first time I noticed the traffic decline for all the sites (sharing the same platform) during the same time.

As for penguin, I prefer to focus less on the negative aspect and focus more on building positive link power

Yes, that's exactly what I always intend to do other than removing the toxic links even if it might have less impact after Penguin has became real time.

I also believe I found the root cause of the issue. It has something to do with the sites' robots.txt and I'm looking to fix it. Thanks once again.