Andrew Youderian
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April 29, 2013
It was just over a year ago that one of my sites lost nearly 80% of its organic web traffic due to Google’s now-infamous Penguin update. As much as I wanted to blame Google, sadly I was the one responsible for my misfortune.
What SEO mistakes did I make? And how can you prevent this from happening to your business?
As many of you know, I started my first eCommerce business, Right Channel Radios, in 2008. As a solo founder with an eye on expenses, I bootstrapped everything myself, including SEO. I reached out to blogs, wrote articles and built personal relationships. In short, I invested a lot of time connecting with others, guest posting and creating valuable resources. And it worked! Within a year, I’d built a solid reputation, and the business was growing largely due to organic traffic.
With some traction under my belt, I decided to launch my second site, TrollingMotors.net. I figured I could use the cash flow from Right Channel to grow my new site quickly by outsourcing much of the SEO. So I hired an SEO firm to improve my rankings, thinking it would free me up to focus on other aspects of the business. No need for me to get down-and-dirty with all this difficult work to increase my organic traffic! This time I was going to take it easy.
I had good intentions to monitor the firm’s progress, but as time went on, I didn’t follow through. I was busy with other aspects of my businesses, and because I knew the SEO firm’s owner, I assumed things were being handled well.
Then last April I was checking my rankings in Google when I noticed I’d slipped from #2 to #10 for ‘trolling motors.’ Figuring it was just a temporary adjustment or data center issue, I checked my site analytics. Horrified, I discovered that the site’s organic traffic had dropped 80% over the last few days. After some frantic research, I realized what had caused it: Google’s Penguin algorithm update, which targeted over-optimized sites and backlink profiles:
Some long-overdue analysis revealed a trail of over-optimized links, with one page having 14 of the 15 linking domains using similar anchor text. And while I knew the SEO firm hadn’t used 100% squeaky-clean link techniques, I unearthed strategies and links that were downright spammy and embarrassing. It was amazing I hadn’t been penalized earlier.
Not surprisingly, the Penguin update didn’t negatively affect the traffic for Right Channel, my business where I’d done all the SEO and marketing work myself. If anything, I even saw a small boost in traffic as a result.
So what did I learn thanks to Penguin and my outsourcing debacle?
I’m sure this is a no-brainer to most people, but sometimes you need to learn lessons the hard way. When you outsource your SEO, you’re trusting someone with the future of your business; it’s imperative you monitor them closely. This is even more important if you drop ship! Due to the smaller margins, it’s much more difficult to build a profitable drop shipping business with paid traffic versus free organic traffic.
It was easy to justify my lax oversight with the fact that I had a personal relationship with the firm’s owner, and I knew he was using the same methods to generate traffic for his own businesses. Big mistake. Had I been monitoring things closely, I likely would have been able to catch and correct many of the over-optimization issues that occurred.
But even assuming you’re committed to careful monitoring, outsourcing causes you to miss out on crucial feedback. Engaging with people during marketing gives you the opportunity to learn about their problems, issues and pain points. In turn, this allows you to offer better solutions and products, and helps build your knowledge and expertise. You miss out on all of this when you outsource SEO, especially when launching a new business.
So be warned and learn from my mistake! Outsourcing can seem like a great way to get additional traction with your SEO and marketing efforts, but it comes with strings attached.
The best marketing and SEO is done by a committed in-house team that builds real relationships with others in their niche. And if you’re marketing your first site, I strongly recommend doing your own SEO and marketing to learn the ropes and build your experience. If you ever do decide to outsource it in the future – or hire your own in-house team – having the knowledge from doing it yourself will be crucial to properly manage the process.
At the very least, if you do outsource, make sure you keep a close watch on the processes and results.
While the pain caused by the Penguin update was ultimately self-inflicted by my poor oversight, it drove home how risky it is to rely on Google for the majority of my customers:
When you play by the rules, Google is obviously a (well, THE) best source of ongoing traffic you’re likely to find. But my run-in with Penguin made me realize how crucial it is to invest in other sources of inbound traffic so my businesses don’t rely primarily on Google. Here’s how I’m planning to diversify my traffic stream:
Despite having a great database of customers, I never made email marketing a priority. A quality email list/newsletter offers the ability to drive traffic on demand. As I highlighted in my previous post, we’re ramping up our email marketing efforts for 2013 and will be sharing the results on a quarterly basis.
Just last weekend I was talking with an SEO expert about how building a brand is the only way to have guaranteed long-term success with eCommerce. People visit websites. They talk about, recommend and are loyal to brands. And the more well-known your brand, the more likely people will actively seek you, generating traffic that’s not dependent on Google.
Going forward, we’ll be sponsoring more events, giving away stickers, holding contests and continuing to focus on great customer service in order to improve our brand recognition. “Brand building” can sound like hokey marketing jargon, but the KISSMetrics blog just wrote a great article on the power of brands and how to build your own.
Pursuing strategies that emphasize traffic in addition to link juice is a great way to improve visits and to diversify against Google. I’ll be focusing on SEO opportunities that generate traffic AND link juice.
Although this post is mainly about the broader lessons I’ve learned, I want to share some technical data points regarding a few keywords that were hit hard and others that weren’t affected as severely. Be warned: Geeky SEO talk ahead. 🙂
The chart below lists keywords that were affected by Penguin and are grouped by how severely their rankings were hit. The “On-Page Fix Improvement” column refers to how the keyword rankings changed after I un-optimized the page for a given keyword. “Anchor” refers to the anchor text in the links pointing to the page a keyword ranked for.
Please note that this is a VERY small sample size, so these conclusions are by no means scientifically provable. But that won’t prevent me from hypothesizing about a few things anyway. 🙂
After reviewing the pages that were hit the hardest, I realized that my on-page SEO reeked of over-optimization. My keyword phrases appeared far too often on-page, and far too prominently, so I quickly made changes to address the problems.
Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the issue and resulted in many further declines (refer to the ‘On-Page Fix Improvement’ column). You could make the assumption that the Penguin penalty isn’t primarily an on-page one, as de-emphasizing my on-page SEO only made things worse. Over-optimized anchor text, it could be argued, seems to be the primary culprit.
This hypothesis is a bit weaker than the others, as many believe the Penguin penalty only updates/corrects occasionally, instead of on a daily or weekly basis like Google’s overall algorithm. So it’s very posible that the de-optimization changes could have helped if I’d left them alone long enough to be recognized by a Penguin update. That being said, from all the other research I’ve done, it appears that over-optimized anchor text is one of – if not the – biggest triggers of the Penguin penalty.
One hundred percent of the anchor text for my “minn kota riptide” page was “minn kota riptide,” which you’d expect to trigger a penalty. And it did – the ranking page dropped five spots, from #1 to #6.
But it didn’t drop nearly as much as our page ranking for “minn kota.” Despite having anchor density that was less concentrated than the “minn kota riptide” page, the “minn kota” page dropped 42 spots, falling from #7 to #49. Ouch. The most noticeable difference? The number of unique linking domains: 4 to the “minn kota riptide” page and 15 to the “minn kota” page.
It’s likely that Penguin penalties are more aggressively applied for pages with more incoming links. If two domains link to a page with the same anchor text, it doesn’t necessarily imply over-optimization. But if 150 out of 300 do, an orchestrated SEO campaign is much more likely.
If you’re trying to recover from Penguin, it may make sense to start with your best ranking pages with the fewest number of incoming links. You may need just a few new anchor text variations to lift the penalty and restore your rankings.
One of the most painful aspects of irresponsibly outsourcing your SEO is the massive mess you’re left to clean up. Trying to scrub lots of spammy and over-optimized links is a daunting, confusing and involved process. While I won’t be offering a detailed description of how to do this in this post, there are a number of great pieces on Penguin recovery, including this one on the SEOMoz blog.
Over the last year, we’ve contacted site owners in attempts to have links removed. We’ve re-examined the optimization on many pages including keyword usage in product descriptions and category descriptions. We also removed keyword-optimized footer links from the site. We’ve also built a number of new high-authority links in an effort to boost our authority with Google and “dilute” the percentage of over-optimized links.
While we still have a ways to go, we’ve seen some encouraging progress. Initially down to just 20% of our original visitors, our organic traffic has risen to 45% of our pre-Penguin levels. It’s still a far cry from where we were, but it’s an improvement. And our recent relaunch of the site doubled revenue per visitor, which helps offset the loss of so much traffic.
Despite these improvements, a painful reality remains. We’re still under a penalty, one that will take significantly more time and resources to remove. When you consider the cost of initially hiring the SEO firm, the loss in sales and the cost of trying to repair the mess, it would have been so much cheaper to simply do things right the first time.
As the old adage goes: “The longest way round is actually the shortest way home.”
Hopefully my sharing this experience will help you avoid making some of the same mistakes! It’s tempting to take shortcuts with marketing and SEO, but you always end up paying for them – either now or in the future.
As always, I’m happy to answer your questions! Please leave them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.
If you found this article interesting or helpful, please share it!
187 Comments
Sorry to see what happened, Andrew.
I do not think all of your traffic drop is Penguin related, as there may be a bunch of indirect factors in play, that added to the overall downturn.
Though, I did not hire an SEO, I can still relate 100% with you in the sudden(almost sudden) crash in rankings/ traffic with drops from page one(around 2nd to 4th position) for some high quality / volume terms, to around 500+ .
My major crash seemed to happen around April / May , this year, and there has been almost no recovery.
Google has had a few Algorithm adjustments around that time, though, I don’t believe this is the main contributing factor…
I had no warnings from Google and have been in Good standing ( no unnatural links warning in Google Analytics) I don’t buy links or do any dodgy “dark side” tactics, so now I need to go through my whole site and try to come up with answers.
One thing that did “throw a spanner in the mix” was a few server side issues within my hosting file manager, with a couple of data base issues, and this may have been the Catalyst that then created some kind of snow ball effect, of “site performance, issues…
As to hiring an SEO, the number of SEO companies(sites) seems to have increased quite dramatically, so along with that there is going to be an increase in “shonky” companies.
A large number(if not most) companies would be outsourcing their SEO work these days, and this makes the whole thing very “hit & miss” as to what you will end up getting in the long term.
I think that for smaller to medium sites(less established) it would be better to go over every possibly aspect of their own sites performance, and also to do some cleaning up and editing of their posts.
Bye the way, Love your Genesis 11/40 theme and how you added your own custom logo(simple , yet, effective).
Sorry to hear about your SEO issues, Danny! Although I’m pretty sure the vast majority of my issues were Penguin related as they occurred exactly when Penguin was released in 2012 (last year).
Best of luck with your recovery efforts and thanks for reading!
Good advice and it’s something I will take into consideration because I’m just starting off here and don’t want to make callous mistakes. Anyway if you have time and don’t mind could you email me, I have some questions about guest blogging.
I myself had a big trouble outsourcing SEO firm for my tech websites, things went bad because of those inexperienced guys.
Yep, outsourcing SEO often leads to trouble. Sorry to hear, John.
Andrew,
This is one of the reasons I always try to advocate that people train the people they hire in the Philippines. People always want to hire someone who “already knows SEO” so they don’t have tuo understand it. I always think it’s such a big mistake because you have no idea what crap they might be doing to your business.
My team of Filipinos is pretty darn good at SEO. They were good at it 3 years ago (when all you had to do was spam google), and they’re pretty darn good at it today.
Hi! Andrew.
Thanks for sharing your experience. As I am also thinking about to launch some of my own niche websites but before stepping in to that I just wanted to learn some basics of all the fields that will be used in good niche website thats because I have came across many entrepreneurs who have some what same experience like yours.
I am also learning about Domaining and EMDs (Exact Match Domains) and the myths around them specially after Panda-Penguin Update. I like to share a great article about that from DomainSherpa.com. I thought it will be of some help to the fellows here. Here is the link- http://www.domainsherpa.com/exact-match-domains/
Good stuff at Domain Sherpa – thanks for sharing Bashar!
This is great advice! Just like you did with your first site Trollingmotors.net I have always thought that SEO is more of an extension of a good solid marketing tactics. It seems that you get rewarded when you do things that build your brand and business as a whole, if your site benefits from the link itself and not just the authority passing metrics from that site than you know its a win-win!
Thanks Luke! I think you’re dead-on. 🙂
Nice and Helpful info…Thanks!
Very welcome, Saba!
Wow! what a story 🙂 Thanks for sharing your story. Managing and growing a website is not an easy job. And putting all your trust n another person whose primary interest is to make money from you is a risky business. That is why it is necessary for one to monitor these activities and make appropriate changes as soon as possible. At least, you have learned your lessons to know that you have to keep an eye on who ever you entrust your site on. And thank you for sharing your experience with us so we could learn from it as well.
Very welcome! Glad it was helpful.
Just finished reading the thread discussion between Kira and Andrew… Insightful, thoughtful, informative information. Thank you for this wonderfully, refreshing, detailed and respectful discussion.
Thanks Tara!
Hi Andrew,
I am facing 80% drop in my website’s ( bizbol.com ) traffic (mostly from Google organic search) from 4th Sep 2013.
There was no change in the website. There is no changes in indexed pages also in Google.
My Unique visitors was 1500 per day which has gone down about 250 since 4th Sep. Do not see any sign of recovery.
What could be the reason? What steps should I take to recover?
That’s “approximately” the time the Hummingbird algorithm went into effect, but it could also be something else entirely. Hard to say, and sorry for the loss!
[…] The SEO Mistake That Wiped Out 80% of My Traffic Andrew Youderian Follow @youderian Andrew Youderian’s post on the eCommerceFuel site looks at how he outsourced his SEO to another firm in attempt to free up time and improve rankings, and as you may have worked out… it didn’t exactly go as planned. After noticing that his keyword rankings were dropping, he discovered that his site’s organic traffic had dropped by 80% after the first penguin update. This post looks at lessons which were learned after this whole debacle, such as diversifying your traffic, utilise email marketing (which was mentioned last week), build your brand, etc. Tweet Andrew’s blog: Tweet […]
Thanks for this informative article. It was really helpful. But there might be many more ways of getting traffic. I you can please let me know, it would be very nice of you.
Great insight. I have been doing the SEO for my business on my own. There are a plenty of times I feel like outsourcing it. However, most companies I reach out to do not have their keywords ranking in google. That makes me wonder, if they haven’t helped themselves, how will they help me.
Ha, I love it! That’s a fair question Anshu.
Andrew:
I’ve learned alot from your SEO and E-Commerce fuel book. I’m in the direct sales industry and really want to capture no customers. Having a blog and writing good content seems to be the key. How would one compete with SEO when several others sell the same products. My site is http://www.easyscent.scentsy.us.
I want to be able to tap into some strong SEO marketing. It’s not a technical product. It’s wickless candles. Any thoughts?
WOuld you sugggest EZARTICLES or PRWEB?
Thanks,
Mike
I meant NEW customers!
Choose long tail keywords appropriate for our content. When we place long tail keywords throughout our web content, search engines will list our website on its results pages whenever web visitors search for our particular keywords. That’s why it’s important to choose long tail keywords instead of short keywords. For long tail keywords will have a better combination of the words searchers type into the search engines.
[…] I’ve publicly written about before, the site was impacted by Google’s Penguin update and lost a significant amount of its organic […]
[…] I’ve publicly written about before, the site was impacted by Google’s Penguin update and lost a significant amount of its […]
[…] The SEO Mistake That Wiped Out 80% Of My Traffic […]
Thanks for the information I’m having a difficult time with seo. And how the process works. I was thinking about outsourcing the job to someone else to also save me time to focus on other things. But know I know what to watch for. Thanks again
Great case study on what can happen when you don’t choose the right SEO company and don’t do your homework. The frustrating thing I see time and time again is businesses choosing an SEO provider based on their price and not the quality of their work. 99% of the time this decision will come back to bite them. Business owners need to educate themselves, go with a company whose optimisation strategies are transparent, high quality, and focused on long term results and brand building.
Hi
Great info. I read your post because story is similar with me. I have only 1 site and managing SEO by my self every thing is slowly picking up. Then I register my site in google anyalitics
and after 3 days I found that my PR ranking drops from 3 to 2 then I realize that site traffic gone almost 80% after that I studied at net for this and found that lots of people complaining for this situation. I quickly removed analyitics but site never recovers. I am not an SEO expert so learn every thing from google documents and never force or done any wrong thing for more traffic. Please tell me is my small business gone forever?? or is any way I can recover the things. how to check penguin for a site?
I don’t trust outsourcing SEO because we don’t know if what is behind the SEO processing of those people we trust in building our SEO campaign in our site. I preferred to have an SEO in organic matter or what we called our “own seo building” because we prevent those having a bad backlinks.
I can see how that one little mistake could cause problems, so it’s good to know what to look for when we have someone else build a site for us. Thanks!
We also encountered the same problem with our website. We hired an SEO company, and it turned out that they put our links to the unrelated website which is a no-no. Anyway, I’m glad that I come across this article. It really affected our sales and we are now doing email marketing as well as attracting customers not just through web traffic. When you rely too much on Google traffic, a sudden significant drop down is painful especially when your business is at stake.
[…] https://old.ecommercefuel.com/seo-mistakes-organic-traffic/ […]
Google is the most sought organic traffic by almost all blog and website owners. However, google works on its own concealing everything about its algorithm. That’s why, it is indeed wise not to rely on it especially if your site is new, like mine.
Over the past 4 years, I’ve experienced this several times on many of my blogs. Penguin and Panda both had a huge impact, and at first I panicked, but both times my blogs made a slow recovery.
In the past year I have not been doing hardly any link building. Instead, I have been focusing on making sure that I had quality unique content on my blogs with no duplication at all and doing proper on-page SEO. One of the main things I have been focusing on is keeping my keyword density at or around 1% and making sure I have a good inner linking structure.
I’ve noticed that just writing quality unique content and focusing on providing the most value to the visitor is really what Google wants. Several times I have written review posts and did very little backlinking only to have them rise above posts that have been on page 1 and 2 for a long time.
Google has made it clear that the most important thing to them id their user experience. Give them that, and you are 90% there! Great post BTW. Very informative.
Great article thanks for sharing! I think I will stick with doing all SEO myself. Outsourcing SEO appears to carry some risks.
Hey There-
Thank you so much for this. I have had the same issue – my traffic dropping dramatically, but not due to Penguin. Mine changed when I changed my wordpress theme. Any insight there?
Thanks in advance!
Best advise. Do what Google says. If this fails nuke domain site and start over from scratch.