How to Identify Which Algorithm Update Has Affected You.
Hello and welcome to this week’s video blog. I’m Kieran
and I’m standing in for Nick this week while he’s busy falling down icy slopes whilst pretending to ski.
This week I want to talk about my specialised area – penalties. More specifically, how to identify if your site has been hit by one of the Google algorithm updates.
Firstly, if you’ve been affected by one of the Google updates you’ve likely seen a noticeable drop in your positions or organic traffic from Google. At first, it might not obvious what has happened but hopefully running through some of the points in this video blog will help you determine if you have been affected by an update and what the issues are or if you need to start looking elsewhere.
Firstly, you want to take a look in Google Analytics. Navigate to the organic traffic section and look at the graph for any sudden drops in visits. If nothing stands out as being obvious, filter in to some of the keywords you believe may have been affected. You might want to pick ones that used to appear on page 1 of the search results as this is likely to show the biggest difference.
Do things drop off at a sudden point? Does this match with the dates that your keywords dropped? Maybe look at the data by week instead of by day as this may show more obvious drops. Filtering to view traffic from Google specifically may help further.
If your site is relatively new or hasn’t been pulling in too much traffic from the search engines or if you want to double check before you make any rash decisions take a look in Google Webmaster Tools at impressions under Search Queries. Again,
look out for any sudden drops in overall impressions and again at the keyword level using any keywords you suspect as being affected.
If you’ve been affected by the Google update these check quick checks will most likely highlight the keywords that have been most affected, the date at which you were affected (to help you determine which algorithm update you were hit by) and which pages were most affected by the update, helping you to plan a strategy to overcome the penalty. A full list of the Google updates is in the supporting blog post. (http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change)
We will run through some of the ways to combat the Google penalty in a video blog further down the line. I hope this helps you in your online success and, if you’re stuck and are in need of recovery – you know where we are.
Thanks for watching this week’s video blog if you have any questions please leave them in the supporting blog post.
