Position: 1, Impressions: 1 - all over again

[Omen40]

Hi, as a newbie I have a question that might be kind of stupid, but I'll ask anyway, as I wasn't able to find an answer for it yet.

What does this kind of post/page behavior in SERPs indicate usually? (Image below)

It's a post on an established domain (~2 years old) which all in all has/had quite a few articles ranking "normally" and receiving daily traffic, albeit that has been crushed presumably by the last years October algo update.

The article seems to rank on the first position for precisely 1-2 people/search queries for a day and then goes back to nothing, this repeats now for months. And no, I'm sure that I'm not generating these single impressions by myself.

It's not only that one post, as since the update I have several other article pages behaving this way (even ones that used to receive reasonable traffic earlier, for up to 40 clicks a day). Newly indexed posts also tend to behave this way as of late.

Throughout all my domains I've experienced that on just the one I'm mentioning here.

I wonder why does that happen, and I cannot really come up with anything. I'd understand this kinda behavior on half-assed articles dealing with high-competition keywords, sure. But not on the ones that used to rank without trouble and that were built based on targeted low-comp niche kw.

If anyone has experienced a similar thing and would like to share some insight I'd be grateful. I mainly wonder what would be the right thing to do with all the articles that started to behave like this. Thank you in advance!

 

[tazarbm]

last year's October update has been about spam IIRC, which is usually about backlinks.

Check whether the pages that are bouncing in and out of the SERPs have gotten any backlinks, and what their quality (and anchor texts) is. Of course, bouncing for so many months is not normal and might not have anything to do with backlinks, but I can't figure out what could be wrong, so you have to start somewhere

If no links have come / are coming into the bouncy pages then do the opposite and link to them and see what happens. Point a few (2-3) internal links with exact match anchor from established pages, to them, and see if this fixes whatever might be broken.

If internal links don't at least stabilize the rankings (even if it's on pages 5-6+) then it's most likely a content or even google issue. Google have been behaving weirdly lately, so it's possible that there's something wrong with their algo.

 

[Omen40]

last year's October update has been about spam IIRC, which is usually about backlinks.

Check whether the pages that are bouncing in and out of the SERPs have gotten any backlinks, and what their quality (and anchor texts) is. Of course, bouncing for so many months is not normal and might not have anything to do with backlinks, but I can't figure out what could be wrong, so you have to start somewhere

If no links have come / are coming into the bouncy pages then do the opposite and link to them and see what happens. Point a few (2-3) internal links with exact match anchor from established pages, to them, and see if this fixes whatever might be broken.

If internal links don't at least stabilize the rankings (even if it's on pages 5-6+) then it's most likely a content or even google issue. Google have been behaving weirdly lately, so it's possible that there's something wrong with their algo.

First of all, thanks for the reply!
Yeah, I've already started pointing internal links to these articles a while ago and I don't believe that it changed much. What I haven't done is I haven't really checked the backlink profile of the pages that started ranking like this (just because of their sheer amount).

I'm checking this right now and I have over 60 links with Spam score 60%-82% and DA 5-8 pointing to my site - mostly from "domain list" sites, low content .xyz sites and other spammy domains (one even from a seemingly porn spam related site from all things). For anchor text the links use either my domain name or curiously - simply the domain name of the referring spam domain. All of these links had appeared organically over time. I haven't done any paid link building on this domain.

The majority of these low quality links point to my homepage, however a few point to a selected number of the articles that now have these severe ranking issues.

My main question now is: I heard about disavowing links a lot here. Should I disavow all of these spammy links (of course while exercising some caution).
I already see that for that I'd have to create an additional url-prefix property in gsc as this site was added as a domain property originally.

Thank you very much for the reply once again.

 

[Omen40]

New articles do the exact same by the way, and the example below "isn't even that bad". This for one, is a fully optimized article that catches related queries in serps.

I start to wonder if this is not some kind of invisible domain-wide penalty kinda situation (my manual actions tab is clear). Although I don't want to jump to conclusions.

 

[tazarbm]

My main question now is: I heard about disavowing links a lot here. Should I disavow all of these spammy links (of course while exercising some caution).
I already see that for that I'd have to create an additional url-prefix property in gsc as this site was added as a domain property originally.

I never bothered with disavowing, so I don't recommend it. Besides, even if you disavow them they'll still keep popping up, almost every (popular) site has these links and they don't necessarily harm. And it might take google months to remove any negative effects that these links might have, so it's really pointless IMO...

I think you'd be much better building a few quality links to those specific pages that bounce up and down, but I will be honest, I can't figure out why they've been bouncing for so long. From my experience, Google dance usually happens in 2 scenarios: your site is new, or you're build rankings-impacting (so, quality) links, and the dance can happen for a few days until the rankings stabilize. But dancing for months is unusual, and I can't figure out why it's happening, sorry. If I were to guess, I'd say that it's a google issue, but I don't know...

I start to wonder if this is not some kind of invisible domain-wide penalty kinda situation (my manual actions tab is clear). Although I don't want to jump to conclusions.

It could be, but then wouldn't you lose all rankings instead of just some?

Something else that I could think of (although it's a long shot) could be your server going down frequently and google detecting these changes in real time, this can definitely be a case but this should usually happen only when google stays on your site 24/7 to detect these changes... And even so, it still doesn't explain why only some pages bounce, so I'm really at a loss here

Anyway, throw a few quality links at those pages specifically and see if it helps...

As a last resort, have a look at this page to understand what google considers spam and see if you can find some match between these policies and the bouncy pages:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies

 

[Omen40]

It could be, but then wouldn't you lose all rankings instead of just some?

Yeah, the weirdest thing for me is that if it would've been a site-wide penalty then I think I'd almost definitely lose ranking / average position on my pages. Instead of that, the traffic is just "limited" in a sense - still high average positions for articles, very high ctr but next to no impressions compared to the time before the update, resulting in low/non-existent traffic.

I see how this could've been a server issue, but I'm using the same shared hosting for 3 of my domains and there are no issues like that on these sites + the host has virtually no downtime, so I don't think that's the case here.

Anyway, back to square one I guess. I'll focus on pushing out some new content, review some of the older articles once again keeping the spam policies in mind, and maybe finally try and get some paid links.

Thanks again for your help, a fresh look on things like these is much appreciated.