As you know, many sites, big and small, that are related to link building faced a sudden traffic drop with the Penguin 2.0 update announced by Matt Cutts on May 22. One of these was Reeds.com. Reeds is an e-commerce site founded in America in 1946. It is a large company with a total of 66 sales stores. But as you can see, the Penguin 2.0 update can blacklist you regardless of your deep-rooted history.
Availability Values
First, let's observe the performance decrease by considering the decrease in findability values. Reeds.com is a site consisting of many subdomains. Therefore, the decrease rates of the main domain and subdomains differ.
As we mentioned in our first case study, Marcus Tober listed the sites most affected by the Penguin 2.0 update in an article he published on the Searchmetrics blog on May 23, 2013. According to this list, Reeds.com experienced a 40.5% loss in findability. This rate, which was at the top of the list, was a significant rate and caused a sharp decline. According to homeowner database the graph below, while it experienced a much more serious loss in SEO findability compared to its competitors, its competitors increased their findability in search engines. SEO findability is the result of the analysis of data such as the search volume of the searched words, how often and in what position Reeds.com is included in the related words, and the statistical value of the traffic distribution. The reason for this may be that its competitors benefited from Reeds.com's decline, or Reeds.com did not have the reasons for the decline that we will examine in detail.
We just mentioned that Reeds.com has many subdomains. There are a total of 16 subdomains with different traffic values, such as collections.reeds.com, watches.reeds.com.
In the table above, each subdomain is examined and summarized separately. As we can see, the highest traffic difference between before and after Penguin 2.0 belongs to bridal.reeds.com after Reeds.com. Subdomains with high findability values lost more traffic. At the same time, there are subdomains that gained traffic. From here, we can conclude that “Penguin 2.0 update was reflected in different penalties for each subdomain.” In other words, we can reach the conclusion that domain subdomains are evaluated as completely different domain names in Google.
Finally, if we examine the keywords that Reeds.com is searched for and the declines it has experienced, we see that it has experienced the biggest decline in searches for “engagement rings , Pandora bracelets and kay jewelry”. You can see this in detail in the table below.
Where Does Reeds.com Compare to Its Competitors?
First, let's look at the domain metrics of Reeds.com and its 4 biggest competitors . These competitors are; bluenile.com, jared.com, macys.com and tiffany.com. The two values that are important in comparison are the CEMPER Power and Trust values. We can call these values the "profile report card" of Reeds.com and its competitors. As Yiğit mentioned in the first article of the "Penguin 2.0 Comprehensive Article Series" , the optimum situation is when the Power and Trust values are in balance. This report card shows that we are on the right track before starting a detailed analysis. Because while the values of its competitors are generally balanced, Reeds.com's Power value is much higher than its Trust value. This may indicate that Reeds.com has a "spam link profile.
