Overnight Drop in Rankings
- Thread starter ibosan
- Start date
johndefoe
Senior Member
- Sep 27, 2009
- 1,002
- 103
We run a service that use partly SAPE links (heavily filtered, English and only with highest metrics, no cheap or russian sites). I was monitoring updates on this thread and I see some of you guys that got hit today use our links too, so I decided to be fully transparent and share our experiences with this issue so far from the service provider point of view:
Okay, something is definitely happening. We noticed drops on small percentage of campaigns we run first thing in the morning and rushed to do full analysis for each site that had ranking drops. After checking the campaigns, it appears that there exists a clearly visible pattern - all the sites we noticed that dropped are either obvious affiliate sites with cloaked links and in the following niches: credits/loans, hacks, pharmacy, gambling and CPA offer promoting sites. What is the most obvious pattern is that most of the sites had cloaked links. None of other site types we promote got a hit and they are performing normally, either stable or with ranking increased. So, because the fact that big majority of sites we promote wasn't affected, I believe we can exclude SAPE links as a cause for now, at least in general.
After reading many forum posts and reports and after speaking to few people, our first wild guess was Panda 4.2 or recent update related to hacked sites, as types of sites that got a hit strongly suggest the update is on-page/content related.
What confuses us still are manual penalties people started getting. It looks like big G penalized sites on content/on-page algorithmic basis and after that started manually reviewing part of them, maybe those which raised flags for some reason, either huge number of backlinks or extremely spammy type of links. Only 2 of our clients reported manual penalties to us and both have other links, not just our.
To conclude, we are still researching the whole update and trying to figure out what happened exactly. As a service provider of (partly) SAPE links, I can confirm that SAPE links are not the cause as only small part of sites we promote got a hit, and there is a visible pattern among these sites that is content related.
I hope I helped with this. If we'll have more news, I'll post them here.
Okay, something is definitely happening. We noticed drops on small percentage of campaigns we run first thing in the morning and rushed to do full analysis for each site that had ranking drops. After checking the campaigns, it appears that there exists a clearly visible pattern - all the sites we noticed that dropped are either obvious affiliate sites with cloaked links and in the following niches: credits/loans, hacks, pharmacy, gambling and CPA offer promoting sites. What is the most obvious pattern is that most of the sites had cloaked links. None of other site types we promote got a hit and they are performing normally, either stable or with ranking increased. So, because the fact that big majority of sites we promote wasn't affected, I believe we can exclude SAPE links as a cause for now, at least in general.
After reading many forum posts and reports and after speaking to few people, our first wild guess was Panda 4.2 or recent update related to hacked sites, as types of sites that got a hit strongly suggest the update is on-page/content related.
What confuses us still are manual penalties people started getting. It looks like big G penalized sites on content/on-page algorithmic basis and after that started manually reviewing part of them, maybe those which raised flags for some reason, either huge number of backlinks or extremely spammy type of links. Only 2 of our clients reported manual penalties to us and both have other links, not just our.
To conclude, we are still researching the whole update and trying to figure out what happened exactly. As a service provider of (partly) SAPE links, I can confirm that SAPE links are not the cause as only small part of sites we promote got a hit, and there is a visible pattern among these sites that is content related.
I hope I helped with this. If we'll have more news, I'll post them here.
Last edited:
Ambitious12
Elite Member
- Jun 26, 2014
- 3,109
- 616
Happened same with me one month ago but I managed with good link building activities which made them good ranks.
mootonandy
Supreme Member
- Jun 21, 2010
- 1,283
- 246
All my links are cloaked. Just having discussions with my SAPE seller and he said its related to cloaking links too, which is causing manual reviews.
ambushiv11
Senior Member
- Apr 13, 2013
- 926
- 374
2 of my websites got hit as well, manual action for "unnatural links to your site" (I do use sape links only for these 2 websites)
mootonandy
Supreme Member
- Jun 21, 2010
- 1,283
- 246
U using affiliate link cloaker?
brucewayne90
Regular Member
- Dec 19, 2013
- 424
- 149
Cloaked links as in On-Site or Off-site? As far as i'm concerned, I didn't cloaked any of my links but still got hit. All I did was shortened my affiliate links using the amazon url shortener from amazon.com itself.
- Feb 23, 2011
- 7,570
- 746
We are a fairly large SAPE provider as well and can confirm most of the findings in this post. We track over 500 unique SAPE campaigns and as of now have identified less than 30 sites/campaigns which have been affected by this update. This may of course change as the update continues to roll out, but for the time being it does not appear that SAPE or a specific link type was targeted specifically, otherwise the damage would be far more widespread for SAPE-related campaigns.
On a related note, we have prepared a detailed guide for affected people/sites on how to recover their rankings/traffic, which we are sharing with our affected customers. It primarily involves 301 redirecting your money site to a brand new domain (with some important bits of information to go along with it). If there is interest, we can post the full guide on this forum later for people to look at and maybe share other methods they have found to be effective in recovering rankings/traffic.
EDIT: here is the mentioned guide:
Hit by the recent Google update? Try this to recover your rankings and traffic.
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mootonandy
Supreme Member
- Jun 21, 2010
- 1,283
- 246
I'd like to see it, thx.
f1br3opt1c
Registered Member
- Jul 21, 2012
- 69
- 32
This has happened to me as well. Dropped about 30 rankings and then after a few days got back 14 ranks and stays the same there..
ambushiv11
Senior Member
- Apr 13, 2013
- 926
- 374
I do CPA, no cloaked links.
PaperToy
Regular Member
- Jul 2, 2013
- 349
- 102
I don't use SAPE / PBN / or cloak / use affiliate links. I own all the sites and promote only packages for vacations.
The sites I build links via social bookmarks, web 2.0, social signals (Twitter & FB) and backlinks.com were all hit.
The sites I did absolutely no link building to, stayed the same.
One competitor got 75,000 scrapebox links a few days ago and they are still #3 for a very competitive keyword.
The strange thing is that one of my sites went to #2 from the 4th page right after I sent direct traffic to it and stayed there for 36 hours, then dropped.
The sites I build links via social bookmarks, web 2.0, social signals (Twitter & FB) and backlinks.com were all hit.
The sites I did absolutely no link building to, stayed the same.
One competitor got 75,000 scrapebox links a few days ago and they are still #3 for a very competitive keyword.
The strange thing is that one of my sites went to #2 from the 4th page right after I sent direct traffic to it and stayed there for 36 hours, then dropped.
asap1
BANNED
- Mar 25, 2013
- 4,956
- 3,262
I would like to see the guide.
- Feb 23, 2011
- 7,570
- 746
Hi guys,
Posted the guide here so as not to derail this thread:
Hit by the recent Google update? Try this to recover your rankings and traffic.
Posted the guide here so as not to derail this thread:
Hit by the recent Google update? Try this to recover your rankings and traffic.
xenmaster76
Regular Member
- Dec 21, 2014
- 248
- 106
Same thing here. Got creamed! Blogger blog
virginpose
Regular Member
- Jan 30, 2011
- 311
- 137
I took action and am using Roman's 301 advice on 2 of my sites yesterday, going to try and chill for the weekend and hope next week is better. Good luck everyone...
peter2will
Registered Member
- Feb 2, 2015
- 64
- 4
Probably another Panda or Penguin update?
domainmadness
Supreme Member
- Jun 22, 2011
- 1,313
- 474
Could you specify what kind of cloaked links, it has quite broad meaning. The simple '/go/affcampaign/' type redirect or something more advanced based on JS or IP's/UA's?