Spam & Core update punishment + possible solutions

[borgosh]

Hi everyone!

Of 146 blog posts, 42 disappeared from Google between 05 and 18 October. I get no impressions and clicks on these articles.

• When I type site:URL, each post appears in Google.
• I do not have a penalty in the Search Console
• Fortunately, 4 of those recovered in 2-5 days to their original position
• The website has significantly better backlinks than many of my competitors

Here is what I did, which might be a reason to get my rankings back:

• review article: significantly updated the article (more text to help users decide, more pictures, deleted/rewrote poorly written sentences)
• second article: did nothing, just asked for reindexing in search console
• Modified the title from 5 best XY to XY - just noticed only a few articles have this type of title in SERPs

I made these changes to many other articles as well, but those did not recover.

Possible reasons for this penalty: (I analysed each article, and tried finding a pattern)

• the last updated date/meta info was updated back on sept 12-14 without actually updating many articles (this mistake is not proven to be the main reason because many articles with significant updates were also punished)
• half of the punished articles include 200-400 words generated with AI (they are pretty relevant and manually rewritten as well)
• some articles are poorly written (only 3-7 out of 32)
• English is not my first language
• many spammy backlinks (the disavow file was updated only a few days ago)

Please share your thoughts, ideas, tactics you used to get the traffic back or the possible reasons you suspect in your case.

 

[provocative]

If you are sure that your content is not spam and not get effected by spam update, you should simply wait until the end of the core update. Especially during the core updates, whenever I got hit (or gain traffic) it usually got back to normal levels week by week after that.

I got hit by this core update (around 10%) but in September HCU I lost between 30% - 50% on my sites, terrible.

When the update is over, I am planning to go one by one for my top articles for each sites to see what I can improve and if I can add more valuable information to them.

 

[borgosh]

If you are sure that your content is not spam and not get effected by spam update, you should simply wait until the end of the core update. Especially during the core updates, whenever I got hit (or gain traffic) it usually got back to normal levels week by week after that.

I got hit by this core update (around 10%) but in September HCU I lost between 30% - 50% on my sites, terrible.

When the update is over, I am planning to go one by one for my top articles for each sites to see what I can improve and if I can add more valuable information to them.

Thank you for your response!

The hardest thing to do is wait when 40% of my site (the main earners) is annihilated )

 

[Warriorne]

The Serp of my keywords is so full of spam sites and redirects to casino sites that I prefer to wait for the October update to finish before I start doing something.

 

[Beklink]

Check out this thread maybe its also the case with you: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/recover-your-rankings-from-last-google-update-working.1536558/

 

[Warriorne]

If you are sure that your content is not spam and not get effected by spam update, you should simply wait until the end of the core update. Especially during the core updates, whenever I got hit (or gain traffic) it usually got back to normal levels week by week after that.

I got hit by this core update (around 10%) but in September HCU I lost between 30% - 50% on my sites, terrible.

When the update is over, I am planning to go one by one for my top articles for each sites to see what I can improve and if I can add more valuable information to them.

When the September update ended, my website started to see a considerable increase in visits.

Then October 5-6 arrived, and my best keywords started to drop in the SERP. Today two are on the second page and one on the third.

I noticed that the first three to four sites for these keywords didn't even move, those below dropped and were replaced by spam sites.

I prefer to wait for this update to finish, but I have already started buying guest posts in my country to improve the site's authority. Should have done this before.

 

[I Am Batman]

2-5 days are too fast to recover. Maybe just GG dance.
Some articles are poorly written: Hard to say that. I just checked and saw many sites with poorly AI suddenly tank top. So poorly for us but good in GG's eye.

 

[borgosh]

Check out this thread maybe its also the case with you: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/recover-your-rankings-from-last-google-update-working.1536558/

Thank you for the link.
I already tried it yesterday. But no positive results at the moment.

 

[borgosh]

2-5 days are too fast to recover. Maybe just GG dance.
Some articles are poorly written: Hard to say that. I just checked and saw many sites with poorly AI suddenly tank top. So poorly for us but good in GG's eye.

I 100% agree with you

After the update ends I will further improve the articles...and if it won't help...hopefully increasing the nr. Of high quality backlinks will

 

[Knossi]

Thank you for the link.
I already tried it yesterday. But no positive results at the moment.

Did it work today?

 

[borgosh]

Did it work today?

None, unfortunately. I was able to recover 3 posts by updating them...updated other articles as well with the exact same approach but without any success...

Unfortunately, it seems I have to wait a few weeks to see what happens

 

[gvidass]

With the previous update, I saw significant rankings changes, and traffic increased by around 80% to top-ranking posts. But right now, it has dropped tremendously. These top articles have been live for about 3-4 years. I noticed that almost with every other update everything goes to the shitter, and then everything recovers and starts doing well once again, and then bam once again shitter. Like others say just wait a bit until the update is complete.

 

[borgosh]

With the previous update, I saw significant rankings changes, and traffic increased by around 80% to top-ranking posts. But right now, it has dropped tremendously. These top articles have been live for about 3-4 years. I noticed that almost with every other update everything goes to the shitter, and then everything recovers and starts doing well once again, and then bam once again shitter. Like others say just wait a bit until the update is complete.

How much would you wait until you take serious steps? End of the update + 2 weeks or +2 months or until 1 core update?
It's pretty weird that the articles were dropped off completely...and no ranking losses...but disappeared from SERPS...

Hope is the only thing I can do now

 

[gvidass]

How much would you wait until you take serious steps? End of the update + 2 weeks or +2 months or until 1 core update?
It's pretty weird that the articles were dropped off completely...and no ranking losses...but disappeared from SERPS...

Hope is the only thing I can do now

Just see if the situation gets better after the update is done. If you still see a flat line after one week, once the update is done, try taking some significant actions. But before that, you can work on improving your content. It seems like, for some, it helped remove videos; I bet for others, it might help add videos. Some while ago, I remember it helped when I added FAQ

That's why I try as much as possible to rely on other traffic sources. You never know when they will go to the shitter. I just made the same mistake when I started relying on FB traffic too much. From being 60% of traffic bringers FB became 0-1%. But I get it. Your situation is different. That's just some food for thought.

 

[borgosh]

Just see if the situation gets better after the update is done. If you still see a flat line after one week, once the update is done, try taking some significant actions. But before that, you can work on improving your content. It seems like, for some, it helped remove videos; I bet for others, it might help add videos. Some while ago, I remember it helped when I added FAQ

That's why I try as much as possible to rely on other traffic sources. You never know when they will go to the shitter. I just made the same mistake when I started relying on FB traffic too much. From being 60% of traffic bringers FB became 0-1%. But I get it. Your situation is different. That's just some food for thought.

100% agree with you. I used to focus on email marketing and social media as well...but was lazy when the traffic grew...watched movies all day long...hit the gym ))

Better not becoming lazy...

Thanks for the tips

 

[robin222]

Is the update not finished yet?
My 4 most profitable pages disappeared and my income dropped to 0, a bad week.

 

[borgosh]

The last was finished yesterday 19.10.2023.
Hope for the best...

I'm seeing positive movements on articles where I started updating stuff and deleting AI written parts.
It seems google has issues with me not having enough authority...so I change articles based on their advice from previous helpful content updates

 

[borgosh]

Just noticed something in my search console.
After 17th of september I got a bunch of searches through my site search witch chinese letters (obviously spam/attack)

I did not have the proper crawl settings in my Yoast SEO plugin...so google crawled these pages but did not index them because of no-index tag.

As you can see there is a strong correlation between getting less impressions from google and getting more not indexed pages because of these spam/attack chinese searches on my site.

I solved the issue of getting these searches ...

but is there anything else I can do? How can I delete these crawled, not indexed pages?

 

[hwaback]

I solved the issue of getting these searches ...

How did you solve it? I'm having the same problem..

 

[borgosh]

How did you solve it? I'm having the same problem..

I'm using Yoast SEO plugin. In the settings, it has a crawl section. There I activated some settings to block spam searches and limited the number of characters they could enter in the on-site searcher.
Additionally, I blocked google from crawling unnecessary pages like feeds etc. Yoast setting as well