Penalty or Dance? Sudden SERP drop!

[newon]

On 17th December 2016, SERP for few of my main keywords dropped drastically.

I checked WMT, no manual action.
No recent backlinking
No major change in the posts... except few YT videos removed from posts (1 per post).
Changed color combination & logo for the site during start of December.

Can't understand what might have went wrong... any idea?

 

[cdn_craigs]

is this a new domain? content unique? if this is a new domain, the dance will happen

 

[newon]

is this a new domain? content unique? if this is a new domain, the dance will happen

It's 2 years' old domain... contents are unique and high quality. Most of the keywords were in top 10.

 

[pollaris75]

The same has happened to me also. Semrush reports a -50% drop in traffic. Google is being google again.

 

[newon]

The same has happened to me also. Semrush reports a -50% drop in traffic. Google is being google again.

In my case it's -18% ... can't understand what's going on and how to recover

 

[pollaris75]

Just don't understand anything. Build more quality backlinks until you're back on your feet.

 

[ferghb]

the same here

 

[spectrejoe]

Yeap ~30-40% less traffic since the 17th and most of my articles rank went down

 

[spectrejoe]

Just don't understand anything. Build more quality backlinks until you're back on your feet.

easier said than done honestly

 

[pollaris75]

easier said than done honestly

Well.. yes. I'm struggling with this also.

 

[Takoona]

Me too. One of my sites has been hit hard.

 

[thashytt]

you aren't alone - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-update-23146.html

 

[wierdoguy]

It keeps happening, we just have to allow time and see how things settle.

 

[gtull2]

I lost around 50% traffic to my primary offline site. No changes to the content or back linking in a year or so.

 

[spectrejoe]

I lost around 50% traffic to my primary offline site. No changes to the content or back linking in a year or so.

wow strange as hell

 

[gtull2]

wow strange as hell

Yeah, not happy about it at all.

Taking a glance I think that just about all of my sites were negatively impacted.

On one of my offline business blogs I added a new generic post 4 days ago. Traffic fell like a rock for that whole site.

This has me a little worried.

 

[romeoesteban]

Updated to WordPress 4.7? Check your ALT tags.

 

[spectrejoe]

Updated to WordPress 4.7? Check your ALT tags.

care to explain?

 

[romeoesteban]

WordPress 4.7 made I lose almost all alt tags on around 500 posts. I lost 2/3 of my traffic between dec 8 and today (34k a day to 12 k).

Previous versions of WordPress worked this way: the filename of the media would become the TITLE of the image, and the TITLE would also be the ALT, unless you specified an ALT manually. WordPress would use all media TITLE as ALT on all your posts. This changed in version 4.7. My site is image heavy and the ALT are very important for my rankings. I AM currently manually editing all of them.

 

[uesat]

Same here. But I lost rankings for about 15 websites today. No idea why. None of them are even close to being over-optimized back-links wise. And stuck on page 2 for months for a bunch of them too.