83% Drop in Google Traffic

As of August 2nd my Google traffic has completely dropped. Here's a screen shot:


Just as a reference here's what my webmaster tools looked like for the first week of July:


And now here's what it looks like in August:


From what I can gather, I'm still indexed, and ranking fine for most of my keywords.
I've been running some pretty mild SENUKEX blasts the last month or so for one or two keywords, but I can't imagine that could be the problem...is it?
What's the best bet to see what the cause of this problem is?
Have my ketwords just gone down in rank? Have I been hit with an update? Am I missing something?

I'm not an SEO luddite, so I feel stupid asking these questions, but can't think of anything else?
Cheers,
B.

What do you consider as a "mild" campaign? Which keywords dropped? Was it the ones you're targeting with Senuke?

What kind of anchor text are you using and are you building any other types of backlinks?

What is the uniqueness % of the articles you're sending out?

How old is your site?

What is your link velocity? Do you build consistent links or do you blast periodically?

Did you make any on site modifications in the last month?

It could just be a google dance but its hard to tell without providing more information.

Looks like a penalty.

My guess is you got hit by Penguin. Targeting only 1 or 2 keywords is suicide.

Awe struck by Penguin.

Did you make any changes to your website? Did you add or remove any content/code? It could definitely be penguin if you Haven't been using enough generic anchor text for your senukex campaigns.

Sorry to hear though that's rough. Hopefully it is just anchor text diversity because if your running mild campaigns you can just diversify the text in the next few blasts to recover.

dave718 said:

I think google wiped out most of the bog tools (including senuke / xrumer / scrapebox) w latest algo update.

Focus on quality now.

Click to expand...

This is false. Tools are still working great. You're right tht quality is more important now though.

I agree, its not the tools that are wiped out, its how people were using the tools. Tools are only as good as the person using it.

That's a penalty if I've ever see one. It may sound like an SEO cliche, but focus on quality for a while (if the website is worth it) and see how that can help.

Yes you miss something.
Never blast your $$ site with SeNuke,SB ...

same happen to mine lost 75% of traffic due to the latest update BUT it came back and GAINED rank. I stopped all backlinks in june and it seems like the updates does not bother me much money has came back to normal if not increased. I think they are comming down on backlinks that are not natural. Just mytocents hope it helps

mytocents said:

same happen to mine lost 75% of traffic due to the latest update BUT it came back and GAINED rank. I stopped all backlinks in june and it seems like the updates does not bother me much money has came back to normal if not increased. I think they are comming down on backlinks that are not natural. Just mytocents hope it helps

Click to expand...

John Mueller of Google did state the penalties would expire. Hopefully someone at Google looked at the SERPS and decided it was time to expedite the expiration of those penalties.

The OP may have also been hit by a manual review. Google is doing many of those these days since their algorithm is broken.

did you use "generic anchor text links" ?

Totally.
Thanks for all the help and inspiration. As a follow up to some of your questions...
I have only used senuke on 3 campaigns the past month or so. I nuked about 10 different keyword variations for each campaign (but no generic like 'click here' 'website domain' etc), but like mentioned before, they were for the most part, nuking to my money site.
The site is not specifically a "money site" more of an authority site on my general topic. The site has been around for a few years, but I think the junky links I've been sending it these few months might have garnered this sudden drop.

I've probably been sending out too much junk articles / crappy uniqueness. Didn't think it would hurt the site as I was more interested with learning senuke & seeing how targeting a keyword could build rank. I was blasting forum 2.0 profiles, social networks, and article directories. They were sporadic blasts. Sometimes 60 in one day, for a few days. And then take a break for a week. Not as natural / slowly dripped as probably should have been. Those were the only type of backlinks I was building.

To answer more questions, I've noticed a drop on the ENTIRE site, not just the 3 keywords I've been targeting. Hopefully with stopping the link building in general, and adding some more value content, I'll see the traffic start to flow back in.
The funny part is that these keywords are still ranking on the first page in google when checking with ranktracker, market samurai, and just good old google search myself. Maybe I'm missing something more???

Maybe you are just dancing in the SERPS a bit. I had that happen on a site I was working on and the dance lasted a couple days and the ranks returned slightly better.

Try to send some good quality signals to Google with some high quality links. That should help. Good luck

I have seen quite a few sites maintain first page rankings for primary keywords, but completely lose all of their longtail traffic. This might be what has happened here, as it's quite common in the "penguin era".

you should diversify your keywords, urls etc. then google might take out penality. just forget your previous keywords and use new ones, and much more. your on-page can stay the same.

Something similar has happen to me..I ordered from someone on here..just to the 1st page for numerous keywords..My site is 4 years old..I diversified, I even did a 5k blast with random achor texts to try and get it back..its been gone from the serps for almost a month now.. I did notice one of the keywords came back but it is dancing in the 8th page range.. I think the issue that messed me up is I copied a known sites meta description..i think thats what gave me the penalty..since then ive changed the content to be unique and it still hasnt come back...google last crawled my site aug 6th...I have a 2 pagerank and didnt get deindexed. Any ideas on how much longer you think id be penalized, or has anyone had something similar happen. please let me know

Generally if you get a manual penalty you'll see your site demoted a certain number of pages. From my experience each time when I was on page 1 I got demoted to page 6. These are manual penalties and are easy to spot. You should also get a notification in webmaster tools.

osomkes, yours sounds like an algorithmic penalty to me but can't say for sure without looking at it properly. I've had these too.

The good news is that you can recover from them. If it's a manual penalty you can clean up your links and file a reconsideration request. I got back in within three weeks from my last manual penalty. If it's algorithmic it can take longer and be more complication, but again, clean up what's messy and hang on tight.

Not sure if that's been of any use to anyone.

There was no panda nor penguin refresh on that date so most likely your site was hit for over optimization, unnatural links, or spammy links.