Was That a Penguin Or Panda That Just Slapped You?

They’re both black and white but they are very different animals. I’ve spoken to a lot of business owners in the last 8 week’s because their traffic has gone through the floor. Most of them seem to know vaguely the time of the slap but they are a little hazy on the dates. You need to determine this now as the antidotes to the ranking drop are quite different.. and what if you got bitten by both?

Google Webmaster Tools will give you the answer

Go into Google Webmaster Tools and click on Search Traffic then head to Search Queries. Change the date range to start from the end of April and have a look at the blue line. This represents the amount of times you have appeared in search over the period.

This Is What Penguin Looks Like

On or around May 22 you will see a graph like the one below if you got hit by Penguin.

 

There are two types of fixes for Penguin. If you got a notice in your Webmaster Tools saying unnatural links had being detected you’re going to have to use make a reconsideration request as there was a manual penalty. If there was no notice but the graph looks like the one above you may just need to clean up you backlinks, remove spammy ones and change the anchor text on the good ones so it doesn’t all say the same thing.

This Is What Panda Looks Like

It’s like the air leaking from a balloon.

A gradual decline in traffic over the month of June. These are quality issues so things to check are;

Google Index In Webmaster Tools

If the graph looks like the back of a stegosaurus you have issues. It means Google is indexing and deindexing a lot which could be duplication or other structural issues.

Check HTML Improvements in Google Webmaster Tools

Check out last week’s SEO Video on how to use this to find duplicate content.

This Is What Pandguin Looks Like

We see the characteristic drop around May 22 which represents Penguin and then the continual slow demise in traffic eaten up by a fat Panda.

Any questions? Fire away!