SEO Nightmares

[Ted]

What are the scariest parts of SEO? What is the nightmare scenario that you hope to avoid that stresses you out just thinking of it?

 

[rogeryin]

To me it would be a sudden drop of all rankings and never be able to find out what happens

 

[Corey]

This year I got a client who had a solid Shopify but was angry with them and determined to be on Big Commerce. He had 40K skus with 60GB storage at the time. I got him moved over, got everything working OK again then Big Commerce was not working for him. So we moved again to Inmotion. Got it setup, again it wasn't working for him. Moved again to Greengeeks, got that working for him — and currently finally hitting our stride.

But that was a nightmare. I'm sure I shaved 3 years off my life doing these moves. Getting everything working right then hitting a wall before you can have a sunshine period is demoralizing. Doing it 3 times in 9 months can have you questioning a lot of things.

 

[Dan Hale]

To me it would be a sudden drop of all rankings and never be able to find out what happens
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why wouldn't you be able to find out what happened? Do a comparison using the new date range where everything plummeted against a previous date where things were humming along. Go to pages and sort by click/impression differences to see the largest negative numbers. Those are the pages that dropped. Hone in on those and click queries to figure out what queries are no longer driving impressions/clicks. 4 minute analysis to find out where you lost. Fixing it may not be an option, but maybe it is.

 

[Targetedseoservices]

My biggest nightmare now is I will be hit again with 10K of Spammy links. It worked great for the Ass that attacked my two sites, traffic was halved on the two sites.

 

[Juan Izq]

'We will fix it post migration as it is not mission critical to launch'

 

[KevinB]

Experiencing something like Penguin again, where dozens of our sites disappeared for all/most generic terms overnight. Thankfully were never hit like this again as we diversified traffic sources and seo factors but a hard and expensive lesson to learn at the time.

 

[rogeryin]

why wouldn't you be able to find out what happened? Do a comparison using the new date range where everything plummeted against a previous date where things were humming along. Go to pages and sort by click/impression differences to see the largest negative numbers. Those are the pages that dropped. Hone in on those and click queries to figure out what queries are no longer driving impressions/clicks. 4 minute analysis to find out where you lost. Fixing it may not be an option, but maybe it is.

In this particular case, every single page and keyword dropped out of the top 100. Nothing major was changed during this period, I suspected an althorithm penalty but there were no obvious violations happened on this site. As you can see from the chart the clicks jumped up a second time before it went completely back to zero, not sure what caused this as nothing was changed on the original site. I have hence 301ed the site to a different domain and we have slowly getting traffic back. I dont know why google suddently disliked the old site.

 

[GeoffM]

All client sites being wiped out from search overnight due to an algo update.

 

[CharlesTaylorOnline]

To me it would be a sudden drop of all rankings and never be able to find out what happens
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Feel free to reach out to me, I may be able to help you.