Hi
@starki
what you describe, is exactly whats happend to our site.
Yes, we too. We did that in Oktober 2017 without any ranking problems. The site has got a big + in December 2017. I thought this was the h t t p s bonus but I ready something about the maccabe update...
Still strong page 1 rankings for quite a few competitive terms
yes, same here. Still strong for alot of keys.
but it lost a lot of longtails (like thousands of rankings moved from page 1 to 2+) with less competition
Exactly. Some are on page 2 now, some are on page 3. The avarage los of all keys is arround -5 / -10
The whole SERPs in this niche significantly changed, popular general magazines with really short articles took over, including slightly related subpages of big brands that mention a keyword, but aren't straight on topic, weird results overall.
Yes, magazines and websites I never noticed before. Maybe the wastn on my focus because I found my site always on page 1. I see also a lot of blogs.
Maybe the update is related to the core update. Google said about the core update, that If our site got hit, we cant do anything about. Google said also, that they list underrated sites now better. I try together with my wife to find reasons about the google note "If, you got hit, you cant do anything"...what a reasons, where I cant do anything? When we find this reasons, we can find the reason what we can do. When the reason would be thin, then you can do anything against thin...
I cant do anything when...
- a filter exists now for pages that rank to good in a niche, that they dont get more then X % of traffic
- content becomes a different rate with core update. Maybe they changed the category mix of each serp. Google add your site in a category. For example medical / healthy. Now they say, that each medical serps get a mix of 80% underrated sites and 20% authoritys.
- when they test just the serps with different values?
- when a page with user generated content got less trust now ( does your site have user generated content?
- do you know more reasons?
The site had survived Penguin without a scratch, was never touched by Panda, never showed any negative reaction to any update in the last years, never got any manual action
Same here. I lost some websites in pinguin for bad links from the past..but this site NOT. This site dont know any Panda and like you said, any negative reaction.
To find out whats going on, we lost also our rich snippets stars at the same time. You loose rich snippets when google doestn trust the website.
Constantly gained/earned links without buying anything, including links from a few universities, no spam, no negative SEO. Sure, sometimes moved a bit up and down, but the average volatility was like 2 positions up/down from time to time for most keywords with some odd exceptions
Yes, for the last years only minimal reactions...but mostly always it goes up and not down. I really thought, this page a pretty good example what google means with "natural links"...
What is the biggest common denominator of our sites? Why google think now, that we cant give the users what they have searched for. There must be a reason and I hope anybody send us in the right direction....When I think how much I loose each day, its very frustating..but I already resigned to it...only sometimes I am depressed about it...like I said, I will do a complete redesign to get a differnt rating but I think, there is only a less chance to recover...
ahhh, one thing i noticed. Maybe this helps to find out whats going on. At the moment I am at vacation with my family. I am in greece for the next 10 days. Of course I checked the greece serps for my websites and for a moment I was very happy, because I thought the page is recoverd over night....with exactly the same keys I am dropped in germany, google.gr seemes to be normal. All positions are fine like before the update or filter. Then I switched to google.de (germany) and checked the serps again.... still the same, the positions are fine...but I dont trust the serps so I changed the google settings to "dont use my geo location position" and then I saw the bad serps again. That means, the update or the filter is only for german located peoples. When you are in a different country, that filter is not active. Maybe this has to do with the backlinks? Maybe google doestn count our geo located links anymore?!
My feeling still says, it looks like a panda penalty...
this is sad!
