Hi all, On August 6th we experienced a huge drop in search impressions according to Google Webmaster Tools. We went from averaging 170 - 200 impressions per day to 16 -22. Below are a few updates that I've made recently over the last 2 months that I'm suspecting my have contributed to the loss of traffic. 1. Added brand name text to logo link in the header. Used padding to push the text out of visibility. I wonder if this would be viewed as "hidden text". Again it's just our brand. Our brand does have important keywords in it. 2. Continuous logins checking Google Analytics to monitor traffic. I became a little obsessed as our traffic continued to grow. 3. Retargeted keywords for home page. Home page was ranking on page 2 for a term that presented the opportunity to drive more traffic. Changed the page title and h1 tags to include that keyword term. Moved us up onto page one for a couple of weeks. Other than that we are not doing anything else that would contribute to a major penalty like this. In fact we just wrote a few really nice posts for our blog that received many shares over social media. According to Google, all of our urls are still indexed. Would we receive a penalty for any of the items listed above? Thanks -Brandon
Keep in mind that Google will often give you a small penalty after making changes to your site, so continuing to make changes can mean the small penalty keeps getting extended. The on site changes would especially cause this.
Keep in mind what Matt Cutts had to say about hidden text. See Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing on https://www.digitalpoint.com/.
OP, did you know there is now a Manual Action section in GWT? http://www.seroundtable.com/google-manual-actions-viewer-17203.html Did you check there? It could be anything. What about your backlinks, did you check those. You need to analyze fully a website, to pay attention to each page. If you're still ranking and only some pages were affected, then maybe it's targeted action. Hard to tell without looking at the actual data.