The SEO Scientist, (which is a great blog - subscribe immediately) wrote a post called “the anatomy of a Google Filter / Penalty” last week and his timing was spot on, only we didnt see or read the piece until a week later and by then we’d gone ahead made sweeping changes and seem to have induced exactly the sort of affect or filter he’s talking about.
Following on from our seo experiments - modifying index page post last Sunday we’ve now had a chance to have a good look at the scenario. Basically, following some fairly aggressive optimisation and nav changes on recaching on Saturday 17th May, the main site just suddenly tanked right across the board as shown below, and in particular ** SEO ** & **SEO services ** vanished off the radar.
The site just dropped away from its current rankings right across the board and then held pretty stable at new, much lower levels for a couple of days.
we then got fed up waiting around, reduced the kw density back to more sensible levels (6.8%) and whittled back the number of links off page again to increase the linkjuice back into the individual pages as we initially thought this was the most likely cause of a sitewide drop. We deleted and resubmitted our xml sitemap in webmaster tools (..handy tip for getting Google back to recache the page much quicker than they otherwise would do) and they recached it again on 22nd (Thursday)
Since then the site has mostly risen to somewhere near where she was, just slightly lower, ie. 2’s and 3’s where she was #1, but much closer to before the crash.
Except, one of the main terms we are realigning it for - ** seo services ** does seem as though it may have been - 950′d..?
..when compared to the webmaster tools panel from the week before.
..Interesting huh?
Obviously #239 is not exactly the top , but it was coming up fast until that point, and had been at approx #450 a week earlier, but from the caching of the changed page onwards literally just vanished immediately from the charts.
..and from looking at the scanner now it really looks keyphrase related, with a lot of phrases totally unaffected, others possibly still suffering from just slightly reduced linkjuice inwards by comparison with before the 1st changes, and very strangely indeed ** SEO Services Malta ** (latest foreign SERP invasion -page 5 days old) is showing @ #3-5. Try Google Search
..So anyway the site is now back to somewhere near where it was before, structurally anyway, apart from the nav changes where anchors were changed (inserting “seo” mainly) which according to the Webmasterworld threads on the -950 filter is exactly the sort of thing that seems to cause it.
So it does indeed look like we might have induced this effect and now get to play with it by a process of gradually reducing the “seo” s from the navigation and watching the response.
..More waiting about.. thats the worst part of SEO.
Updates..
