Recovery after October update exist as expected

[SirLouen]

Many of my sites were impacted by the October update, but as I was also expecting, some of the sites that had this weird penalty, have recovered after less than 3 weeks.

Obviously, we must clearly assume, that those impacted by the real quality update, are unlikely to be recovered anytime soon, or ever. But for those that have experienced penalties with sites, that despite not having great content, they are not really wrong, I demonstrate here that there is still hope to recover.

This is why going wide is critical when talking about SEO. If you sit on just one or two sites, and this happens, at best, you will be like 3 weeks suffering like mad, waiting to see if you will be able to feed your canaries again.

PS: This is Matomo, the future after GA4

 

[bartosimpsonio]

They rotate the algos. There's several different engines they use. Could be anything really. One month usually doesn't mean you had a penalty, but something else. Could've been a spidering or indexing glitch or whatever.

 

[SirLouen]

They rotate the algos. There's several different engines they use. Could be anything really. One month usually doesn't mean you had a penalty, but something else. Could've been a spidering or indexing glitch or whatever.

100% of my sites that saw the penalty were that exact day: 10th october 2022

Maybe is casualty that massive drop and recover in multiple sites? 100% not.

I believe they will repair the harshness of such update (probably one of the harshest I've seen after the Medical update 4 years ago)

Still, one of my knight sites has dropped from 50K/mo $10 RPM to less than 2K/mo, and trust me that the quality there is massive. But still, I have 100% faith it will recover.

Very often we are looking for cues to find what has happened, but definitely I know that there are hundreds of collateral effects on this massive updates.

This is why I stopped aspiring to lead just 1 super +1M/mo king site, and I prefer to maintain 25-30 less than 50K/mo knight sites

 

[HenryObi]

Many of my sites were impacted by the October update, but as I was also expecting, some of the sites that had this weird penalty, have recovered after less than 3 weeks.

View attachment 231640


Obviously, we must clearly assume, that those impacted by the real quality update, are unlikely to be recovered anytime soon, or ever. But for those that have experienced penalties with sites, that despite not having great content, they are not really wrong, I demonstrate here that there is still hope to recover.

This is why going wide is critical when talking about SEO. If you sit on just one or two sites, and this happens, at best, you will be like 3 weeks suffering like mad, waiting to see if you will be able to feed your canaries again.

PS: This is Matomo, the future after GA4

Or maybe there's a minor update around the corner?

One of my sites that wasn't impacted by the update has been noticing an improvement in position and ranks as well as getting more search impression.

 

[mrneedles]

Or maybe there's a minor update around the corner?

One of my sites that was impacted by the update has been noticing an improvement in position and ranks as well as getting more search impression.

Can you please specify the date when those recovery signals occured? Was it 28-29th October or recently in November? Thank you.

 

[SirLouen]

Can you please specify the date when those recovery signals occured? Was it 28-29th October or recently in November? Thank you.

Exactly, it was 28th October.

Or maybe there's a minor update around the corner?

I must assume that to solve a previous update, they must roll a new update.

 

[HenryObi]

I must assume that to solve a previous update, they must roll a new update.

While this is not yet confirmed, let's watch and see.

By the way I meant the site wasn't impacted, was a typo which has been fixed now.

 

[JessicaSergey]

IMO all will not recover, but some will definitely recover in a short or long time. After seeing your screenshot looks like a natural growth.

 

[AliceInSEOLand]

Since the 2022 May Core Update, this strange "effect" has been rampant.

I like to call this the "2-3 weeks sandbox". And it can hit anytime... Not just after or during new updates.

What I've observed is your site's rankings and traffic will just get wiped out. Either by 80-90% or everything... And it happens within a day without warning. About exactly 2-3 weeks later, it will return and everything is back to normal. However, if there happen to be updates before or during your sandbox period, your returned rankings may improve or deteriorate a little.

I have one whitehat website (100% genuine, handwritten content by native English writers, 90-100 CWV scores, etc) and it has been hit by this "2-3 weeks" sandbox effect 3 times since the May Core Update.
The first hit was on 1st June and it came back on 13th June; 2nd time happened on 1st July and it came back on 17th July. The final and 3rd one was on 6th Oct and it came back on the 21st Oct.
In other words, even if your website is 100% whitehat, you will still become a victim of this.

I have other websites that experienced the same but I'm not going to dig out the info (lazy now).

And it's being reported a lot in BHW threads/posts. The comments in SERoundTable and many other SEO forums have reported the same.

I honestly can't say if this is a bug, or part of Google's intentions to throttle one's organic traffic to pressure you to go for paid ads.

 

[SirLouen]

I honestly can't say if this is a bug, or part of Google's intentions to throttle one's organic traffic to pressure you to go for paid ads.

I would call it the "core update sandbox" and I've also observe it, but my theory is that the algos are in "harsh" mode: many sites with this kind of unbalanced content (classic service site with 5 pages for services and 1500 blog posts talking about services that they don't even work), are subject to some degree of shittyness.

This is why I said this:

But for those that have experienced penalties with sites, that despite not having great content, they are not really wrong, I demonstrate here that there is still hope to recover.

Try to identify if whitehat site with 100% genuine content is, on a scale of 1 to 10, probably a 5 on quality. I must say 100% of my super tier sites are never touched by algo updates.

Why? Because its not only genuine content but killer content (and also we have to admit that generally killer content is under optimized, for obvious reasons)

In fact, the site that is still penalized and I mentioned above that has not recovered is a YMYL site that used to have killer content, but at some point, with my brilliant mind, I decided to overoptimize it.
For example, one of the pages, could be technically analyzing the evolution of the Hemorrhoids and the article was citing like multiple papers and all that stuff.

Then, at some point I decided to insert H2 like:

And structure the content on that way.

And despite I noticed a great upturn, the page over the time has not done anything but plummet. First I started thinking that it was a YMYL issue, but since Dr. F. L. ""joined"" our team, I could say that YMYL was not a thing, but probably the over optimization that converted many killer aticles in so-so stuffed s**t that could be written by any writer in any marketplace. Why I did that? I felt that the page was 100% stuck and I wanted to squeeze it a little more. And since I restructured the site in many other ways, a rollback no is not viable (and completely unexpected how results will behave with such idea).

I feel that there will be two branches on how Google will be (and is) treating sites with all this updates: the mass content creators (black hatters, trying to deceive the algo with many techniques) and the mega-spezialized (real EAT people that write of what they really know), and all the people in the middle will be out of the game. In fact this is the paradox of the Artificial Intelligence and automation: most of the jobs "in the middle of the process chain" will be destroyed because automatism will be slowly replacing them. And I think that since BERT, this starts to become a reality in this industry.

I honestly can't say if this is a bug, or part of Google's intentions to throttle one's organic traffic to pressure you to go for paid ads.

This said, I think this is very unlikely to be the intention, since Google also make business from the ad network, not only Google Ads. I feel it's farfetched that they could be willing to kill their ad network to favor real ad spenders, and probably this is one of the reasons on why many newspapers are unifying their assets into one huge subdomained site (I hope that Google solves this anytime soon), because it feels that Google is putting too much importance into Domain page-rank-level, rather than URL page-rank-level, meaning that the sites that are always benefited from this "core-update-sandbox" are ALWAYS the subniche subdomains from huge domains.

 

[mrneedles]

I would call it the "core update sandbox" and I've also observe it, but my theory is that the algos are in "harsh" mode: many sites with this kind of unbalanced content (classic service site with 5 pages for services and 1500 blog posts talking about services that they don't even work), are subject to some degree of shittyness.

This is why I said this:


Try to identify if whitehat site with 100% genuine content is, on a scale of 1 to 10, probably a 5 on quality. I must say 100% of my super tier sites are never touched by algo updates.

Why? Because its not only genuine content but killer content (and also we have to admit that generally killer content is under optimized, for obvious reasons)

In fact, the site that is still penalized and I mentioned above that has not recovered is a YMYL site that used to have killer content, but at some point, with my brilliant mind, I decided to overoptimize it.
For example, one of the pages, could be technically analyzing the evolution of the Hemorrhoids and the article was citing like multiple papers and all that stuff.

Then, at some point I decided to insert H2 like:

View attachment 231712

And structure the content on that way.

And despite I noticed a great upturn, the page over the time has not done anything but plummet. First I started thinking that it was a YMYL issue, but since Dr. F. L. ""joined"" our team, I could say that YMYL was not a thing, but probably the over optimization that converted many killer aticles in so-so stuffed s**t that could be written by any writer in any marketplace. Why I did that? I felt that the page was 100% stuck and I wanted to squeeze it a little more. And since I restructured the site in many other ways, a rollback no is not viable (and completely unexpected how results will behave with such idea).

I feel that there will be two branches on how Google will be (and is) treating sites with all this updates: the mass content creators (black hatters, trying to deceive the algo with many techniques) and the mega-spezialized (real EAT people that write of what they really know), and all the people in the middle will be out of the game. In fact this is the paradox of the Artificial Intelligence and automation: most of the jobs "in the middle of the process chain" will be destroyed because automatism will be slowly replacing them. And I think that since BERT, this starts to become a reality in this industry.



This said, I think this is very unlikely to be the intention, since Google also make business from the ad network, not only Google Ads. I feel it's farfetched that they could be willing to kill their ad network to favor real ad spenders, and probably this is one of the reasons on why many newspapers are unifying their assets into one huge subdomained site (I hope that Google solves this anytime soon), because it feels that Google is putting too much importance into Domain page-rank-level, rather than URL page-rank-level, meaning that the sites that are always benefited from this "core-update-sandbox" are ALWAYS the subniche subdomains from huge domains.

That's exactly what has happened to us in this Update, the main trigger at least. Instead of leaving a great piece of content as is, we have decided to squeeze the shit out of it with multiple short question-answer blocks + PAA-styled H-subtitles. And while the answers were researched and correct, and we have ranked in the top for most of them for a few months, the overall profile of those bread-and-butter pages and the site as a whole got matched to that of spammers.

 

[Deleted member 731332]

Exactly, it was 28th October.

I must assume that to solve a previous update, they must roll a new update.

I lost half of my traffic during this time frame. I think the update was a tweak to the October spam update. Not a rollback.

 

[Adeebkhatri]

Have You Recovered Any Site Which Is Hit In Google Spam Update

 

[praetserge]

I would call it the "core update sandbox" and I've also observe it, but my theory is that the algos are in "harsh" mode: many sites with this kind of unbalanced content (classic service site with 5 pages for services and 1500 blog posts talking about services that they don't even work), are subject to some degree of shittyness.

This is why I said this:


Try to identify if whitehat site with 100% genuine content is, on a scale of 1 to 10, probably a 5 on quality. I must say 100% of my super tier sites are never touched by algo updates.

Why? Because its not only genuine content but killer content (and also we have to admit that generally killer content is under optimized, for obvious reasons)

In fact, the site that is still penalized and I mentioned above that has not recovered is a YMYL site that used to have killer content, but at some point, with my brilliant mind, I decided to overoptimize it.
For example, one of the pages, could be technically analyzing the evolution of the Hemorrhoids and the article was citing like multiple papers and all that stuff.

Then, at some point I decided to insert H2 like:

View attachment 231712

And structure the content on that way.

And despite I noticed a great upturn, the page over the time has not done anything but plummet. First I started thinking that it was a YMYL issue, but since Dr. F. L. ""joined"" our team, I could say that YMYL was not a thing, but probably the over optimization that converted many killer aticles in so-so stuffed s**t that could be written by any writer in any marketplace. Why I did that? I felt that the page was 100% stuck and I wanted to squeeze it a little more. And since I restructured the site in many other ways, a rollback no is not viable (and completely unexpected how results will behave with such idea).

I feel that there will be two branches on how Google will be (and is) treating sites with all this updates: the mass content creators (black hatters, trying to deceive the algo with many techniques) and the mega-spezialized (real EAT people that write of what they really know), and all the people in the middle will be out of the game. In fact this is the paradox of the Artificial Intelligence and automation: most of the jobs "in the middle of the process chain" will be destroyed because automatism will be slowly replacing them. And I think that since BERT, this starts to become a reality in this industry.



This said, I think this is very unlikely to be the intention, since Google also make business from the ad network, not only Google Ads. I feel it's farfetched that they could be willing to kill their ad network to favor real ad spenders, and probably this is one of the reasons on why many newspapers are unifying their assets into one huge subdomained site (I hope that Google solves this anytime soon), because it feels that Google is putting too much importance into Domain page-rank-level, rather than URL page-rank-level, meaning that the sites that are always benefited from this "core-update-sandbox" are ALWAYS the subniche subdomains from huge domains.

This is a fantastic post.
At times, I think I try to over-optimise the ranking pages, it's so tempting.

 

[mikaop]

what canges have you made ?