Penalty or Dance? Sudden SERP drop!

[pike222]

I guess nobody here knows what happened for sure or had any success recovering their sites , at least no one is speaking about it... On December 17th most of my keywords on one site dropped from top 5 to page 2, 3 or completely out of serps..I have managed to bring one kw back to top 5 by putting nofollow in sidebars , returning wordpress to older version and adding few links from my pbn..Other kw that i also linked from same pbn didnt budge from 22nd place even tough that kw also was in top 5... So im not sure if any of the things i did made any difference as all other kws are on same places that were after i got hit...Would love to hear more suggestions from other guys and if anyone managed to recover their sites completely ..

 

[PhotoshopDesign]

Google update as mentioned, i noticed it as well, unfortunately. Annoying

 

[fastlinks]

the thing mention a lot on forum are PNB, may be google also watching and finding the pattern?

 

[moneyflower]

the thing mention a lot on forum are PNB, may be google also watching and finding the pattern?

You mean PBN? I dont have any PBN pointing to one of my affected site... yet, the update affected me too

 

[rodyrathore]

i dont think it is related to PBN.
because i never use any PBN or paid link....
my site's traffic drop from 6th Dec, whereas the update rolled out on 15 Dec and last of Dec....
May be upgrading to wordpress 4.7 could be an issue....
did anyone have downgraded his version and checked about this?

 

[CarlSagan]

Apparently there's a popup 'penalty', so if your sites use big popups then you'll likely be losing mobile traffic if this is the case.

 

[rodyrathore]

Apparently there's a popup 'penalty', so if your sites use big popups then you'll likely be losing mobile traffic if this is the case.

i dont have single pop up.....
and one more thing, i lost desktop traffic... mobile traffic kinda same..

 

[zacatictac]

i dont have single pop up.....
and one more thing, i lost desktop traffic... mobile traffic kinda same..

Same here. Searching for any answers. Google changed something and we need to find the common denominator. It seems like everyone affected was doing very well before and then just got shit on to nothing?

 

[spectrejoe]

Same here. Searching for any answers. Google changed something and we need to find the common denominator. It seems like everyone affected was doing very well before and then just got shit on to nothing?

Well my traffic literally dropped 50%.

I have an amazon affiliate, no popups, updated to wordpress1.7 , all images have alts etc

 

[zacatictac]

Well my traffic literally dropped 50%.

I have an amazon affiliate, no popups, updated to wordpress1.7 , all images have alts etc

Mine was an amazon affiliate site as well. Maybe google devalued sites with a lot of Amazon links?

 

[spectrejoe]

Mine was an amazon affiliate site as well. Maybe google devalued sites with a lot of Amazon links?

No.

Another user has a journey here, he has 30-50 affiliate links per post (1-2k words) and his traffic only rose up.

I have 20-30 at most.

 

[zacatictac]

No.

Another user has a journey here, he has 30-50 affiliate links per post (1-2k words) and his traffic only rose up.

I have 20-30 at most.

Well I have no idea then. I ranked first page for many keywords for over a year, most of them dropped but a few still hung on. I've been wracking my brain trying to figure it out.

 

[CarlSagan]

No.

Another user has a journey here, he has 30-50 affiliate links per post (1-2k words) and his traffic only rose up.

I have 20-30 at most.

Well I have no idea then. I ranked first page for many keywords for over a year, most of them dropped but a few still hung on. I've been wracking my brain trying to figure it out.

1. What anchor text ratios do you both have for your backlinks on the pages that dropped the most?
2. What KW densities do you both have for your pages that dropped the most? (1 word, 2 word and 3 word). Tool here to find out: http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

Could find a common denominator here maybe.

 

[spectrejoe]

1. What anchor text ratios do you both have for your backlinks on the pages that dropped the most?
2. What KW densities do you both have for your pages that dropped the most? (1 word, 2 word and 3 word). Tool here to find out: http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

Could find a common denominator here maybe.

My highest anchor text is brand and it's only 10% lol.

5-6 word 1-1.5% max

 

[moneyflower]

1. What anchor text ratios do you both have for your backlinks on the pages that dropped the most?
2. What KW densities do you both have for your pages that dropped the most? (1 word, 2 word and 3 word). Tool here to find out: http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

Could find a common denominator here maybe.

Thanks for this Nice Tool bro, one of my page that was hit has a kw density of 3.93 for my main keyword, its a one word keyword, all other long tails that are affected have a Keyword density higher than 3, I personally think that is very high, Nevertheless, I will wait for others that are affected too to check their density too before reducing it

 

[domainmadness]

This is happening to my sites as well. Best money keywords have been slowly, but constantly dropping while some not so important keywords stick.

Would like to take a look at some of your sites to find common nominator, please PM if you want and I'll share my findings.

 

[Trinity Smith]

I guess no one is really sure of what happened to your website, you might just continue doing your normal SEO. Update your website on a regular basis by adding unique and useful content. Remove bad links on a regular basis as well.

 

[domainmadness]

I'm seeing some correlation with the following, but would be lot easier to analyze if I get more sites to look at.

1. Old links getting devalued
Penguin 4.0 is iterative algorithm and it would make sense that the rankings are dropping slowly instead of clear 'penalty-like' drops. Especially SAPE kind of links could be losing their power. That would explain why many of you (and our sites as well) are reporting losing rankings with their 'money keywords' since you probably have been using those with you most powerful links.

2. 301 Redirects
There's some signals that 301 redirects could losing their power, but then again, there's some exceptions.

3. User signals
Bounce rate, page views, time on site and dwell time (pogo sticking) are clearly something that Google's AI is analysing, but it's very hard to analyze since we only get data from our own sites, not from the competition. Anyway, this could be a reason for some sites slowly dropping. How is your site design compared to your competitors - would you honestly say that you should have better user engagement stats than them?

Any thoughts?

 

[kasabian21]

It's all very odd.

I have two very similar pages in terms of content length (4,500 words), keyword density (around 1%), 1 video, 3 images, same number of h2 and h3 tages...the only thing that is different (apart from the content obviously), is the % exact match anchor text (both one word). The one that has higher exact match anchor text has stayed around the same ranking give or take a place or two (between 11 and 15), the one with the less exact match and more varied anchor text has dropped off the face of the planet (20 to nowhere). This has happened for a few other pages. Very odd that the page with a stupidly high exact match % would remain.

 

[moneyflower]

2. 301 Redirects
There's some signals that 301 redirects could losing their power, but then again, there's some exceptions.

Any thoughts?

I have a 301 Redirect on my affected blog, but recently, I did a 301 to one of my competitors (Forgive me Oh Lord) and I was tracking his rankings on Serplab, the page I did the 301 soared higher on Google, the 301 stayed only for about two Weeks, before I removed it, so I dont think its a 301 thing, btw, the backlinks from the 301 are complete Spam, about 6,000 of them. LOL