Penalty or Dance? Sudden SERP drop!

@pollaris75 / @spectrejoe / @Takoona / @gtull2 / @uesat / @pike222 / @pakissa / @nicefor / @Melvin Rajiv / @rodyrathore / @domainmadness / @umerjutt00 / @zacatictac

Guys any positive update on your end? Do things settled for you, did your sites regain previous rankings?

On 18-th of December, a local business site I manage in medium to high comp niche, dropped in rankings on a several KWs from page 1 (3-5 position) to the second page, some of them dropped even lower. Those KWs were dancing around the lower pages and now settled on page 2 with slight bounces every day something like 2-3 positions.

Before the drop, I was going very lightly with the links. I was building only foundational/pillow type of links (the site is 3 years old and has decent link profile). Just before the drop, I built 2-3 web20s and maybe some of the previous links got indexed by that time, nothing heavy in general. The interesting part is that after the drop, I built like 10 PBNs and never saw any movement, it's been 4 weeks or something. The site just did not respond at all.

Perhaps, there is one thing in common with some of you. The site has a booking form in the sidebar on nearly every single page, that form was leading to a subdomain on other site. It is not aff link but if there is a possibility that the algo hit aff sites, my site could be considered in the same category. Before 2 days I changed the sidebar booking to link to an inner page. No positive changes so far.
 
@pollaris75 / @spectrejoe / @Takoona / @gtull2 / @uesat / @pike222 / @pakissa / @nicefor / @Melvin Rajiv / @rodyrathore / @domainmadness / @umerjutt00 / @zacatictac

Guys any positive update on your end? Do things settled for you, did your sites regain previous rankings?

On 18-th of December, a local business site I manage in medium to high comp niche, dropped in rankings on a several KWs from page 1 (3-5 position) to the second page, some of them dropped even lower. Those KWs were dancing around the lower pages and now settled on page 2 with slight bounces every day something like 2-3 positions.

Before the drop, I was going very lightly with the links. I was building only foundational/pillow type of links (the site is 3 years old and has decent link profile). Just before the drop, I built 2-3 web20s and maybe some of the previous links got indexed by that time, nothing heavy in general. The interesting part is that after the drop, I built like 10 PBNs and never saw any movement, it's been 4 weeks or something. The site just did not respond at all.

Perhaps, there is one thing in common with some of you. The site has a booking form in the sidebar on nearly every single page, that form was leading to a subdomain on other site. It is not aff link but if there is a possibility that the algo hit aff sites, my site could be considered in the same category. Before 2 days I changed the sidebar booking to link to an inner page. No positive changes so far.

Nope. Still sending links about 1/week and the sites are still stuck in the same range for the past 2-3 months.
 
see the same problem for last several weeks, new links just doesnt work(mostly used my own pbn, which worked great half a year ago)
 
Hey, not much movement for me in terms of Google. Definitely not back to normal for me. I've not built any more links to the site but disavowed a whole bunch of spam sites that were linking to mine. Hoping things pick up soon. Problem with my site is that it does have a ton of content, and a ton of affiliate links to go with it. And I'm not removing the links, so we'll see how it goes. Try disavowing some links to see if that does the trick.

I've kinda been saved this week though. I don't know why or who (Don't use Instagram but do have my link there), but someone must have mentioned my site or done a shout out on Instagram for one of my pics and it's generating some decent traffic. There's some mini viralness going on.:D
 
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Two of my sites started to losing rankings in December. Both lost alt tags with the latest WordPress update (the sites are Gallery sites; the alts are a big portion of the text in any page). I fixed both but one of them was cloned.

One recovered completly (took two weeks after I fixed the alt problem) but the cloned one still didn't recovered yet. After I filled an abuse complaint to cloudflare, the cloner stopped to clone my site, but GWT still shows 1850 backlinks from that clone. The cloned pages were deleted, but Google still indexes 140 pages and keep them in the cache. I think when Google deleted all of them I will recover my rankings, but who knows?
 
Same ... two russian websites have cloned the site ... cloned in october, drop in november. Google still indexes all the pages (over 6000) after the clone closed the website.
But I started to lose positions slowly (1 month) on almost all kewyord in general.. Penguin 4.0 links index update?
For now no recovery.
 
Hey, not much movement for me in terms of Google. Definitely not back to normal for me. I've not built any more links to the site but disavowed a whole bunch of spam sites that were linking to mine. Hoping things pick up soon. Problem with my site is that it does have a ton of content, and a ton of affiliate links to go with it. And I'm not removing the links, so we'll see how it goes. Try disavowing some links to see if that does the trick.

I've kinda been saved this week though. I don't know why or who (Don't use Instagram but do have my link there), but someone must have mentioned my site or done a shout out on Instagram for one of my pics and it's generating some decent traffic. There's some mini viralness going on.:D

I will never understand why blackhats disavow links, you're literally writing the next Penguin refresh for Google. If you don't want to use spam... don't use spam.. but don't disavow and ruin it for the rest of us.
 
Hey all!

Anyone have anything new about the drop?

I have seen keywords losing rankings since Dec on many sites. These all is WP sites.

I try to find out if this is only happening to WordPress sites, to sort out a bit where to look next.

@pollaris75 / @spectrejoe / @Takoona / @gtull2 / @uesat / @pike222 / @pakissa / @nicefor / @Melvin Rajiv / @rodyrathore / @domainmadness / @umerjutt00 / @zacatictac / @Scraper9

Are you all using WP or is the same storm going on on other sites as well?

The idea that Google would penalize a CMS that accounts for something crazy like 1-10% of the entire Internet is ludicrous... quit worrying about this nonsense.
 
@pollaris75 / @spectrejoe / @Takoona / @gtull2 / @uesat / @pike222 / @pakissa / @nicefor / @Melvin Rajiv / @rodyrathore / @domainmadness / @umerjutt00 / @zacatictac

Guys any positive update on your end? Do things settled for you, did your sites regain previous rankings?

On 18-th of December, a local business site I manage in medium to high comp niche, dropped in rankings on a several KWs from page 1 (3-5 position) to the second page, some of them dropped even lower. Those KWs were dancing around the lower pages and now settled on page 2 with slight bounces every day something like 2-3 positions.

Before the drop, I was going very lightly with the links. I was building only foundational/pillow type of links (the site is 3 years old and has decent link profile). Just before the drop, I built 2-3 web20s and maybe some of the previous links got indexed by that time, nothing heavy in general. The interesting part is that after the drop, I built like 10 PBNs and never saw any movement, it's been 4 weeks or something. The site just did not respond at all.

Perhaps, there is one thing in common with some of you. The site has a booking form in the sidebar on nearly every single page, that form was leading to a subdomain on other site. It is not aff link but if there is a possibility that the algo hit aff sites, my site could be considered in the same category. Before 2 days I changed the sidebar booking to link to an inner page. No positive changes so far.

99% of algorithm updates that affect blackhats are link-based. A silly form on the sidebar isn't going to drop your ranks. Obviously Google didn't like whatever links you built and pushed you down a bit. Penguin 4 loves relevance, perhaps even relevance over authority (in some cases), so build some relevant links... it will help more than worrying about a silly sidebar widget.
 
Same happened to me for about 5 websites back in December. Main reason were PBN links. When I just made web 2.0 blogs I didn't see such an impact (just a normal google dance).

About two sites gained back its rankings. One site came back much stronger about one month later. Other two websites still in this "sandbox". On one of these two I totally gave up and redirect the URL to another strong expired domain. Rankings came back to its position before I made the PBN links to it.

These days I try to figure out how to avoid this sudden drop, while making pbn links. I tried to lower the velocity - means two pbn links per week for another new website. Doesn't seem to work, not that huge serp drop, but still a heavy one from #15-20 to #45-60. Now I am counting the days on how long the drop will last. Maybe it also has something to do with the anchor text? I will make a new try for my another website (you see I got a lot money sites) and just make branded/url anchors.

This huge serp drop can be really frustrating (well played google...well played). I had many websites on position #8-15, after building pbn links they dropped to #50-80 and stay there for a few months.
 
What happens if you remove PBN links ?? Do you regain old rankings or after you remove those you build more web 2.0s and other kind of links ??
 
What happens if you remove PBN links ?? Do you regain old rankings or after you remove those you build more web 2.0s and other kind of links ??
I tried that for one website - no impact. Serp drop still existing.
 
You said two of your sites got its ranking back so im interested to know more on what you did to bring them back..OR you think by adding PBNs you end up in a sandbox for some time before you regain your rankings back...On sites where i used PBNs i saw huge drops for pages that had no links at all but on both of these sites i did use PBNs ..On a another one i never used any and its rankings and traffic remained the same...

I also see on many other sites huge dance like few KWs i have in top 3 would just go back to page 5-6 and few days later it would come back..On these pages i never built any links at all...
 
You said two of your sites got its ranking back so im interested to know more on what you did to bring them back..OR you think by adding PBNs you end up in a sandbox for some time before you regain your rankings back...

I did nothing to bring them back. After all I thought I have to be patient and it might be a google dance (yes, it is...but an extreme version). The pbn links were the reason why the drops happened.

It is like googles algorithm see there are some strong backlinks made recently...the website goes into a kind of "sandbox" and the algorithm decides if everything is legit or not, also the algorithm checks the behavior, means if there are still backlinks made after this drop happened. Best thing to trick the algorithm would be to keep up making backlinks, so that everything seems to be natural. To say it clear: Only people who are building links manually will stop making links when they see a drop in serps/traffic and this is a huge flag for google.
 
Looks more like a dance to me. What types of links did you build in that last 7 days ?
 
I will never understand why blackhats disavow links, you're literally writing the next Penguin refresh for Google. If you don't want to use spam... don't use spam.. but don't disavow and ruin it for the rest of us.

You think I'm spamming my own money site with a ton of shit? That would be smart wouldn't it. :rolleyes: I think you have misunderstood what I posted.. Next time take a moment longer to actually read and understand what someone has written before jumping to conclusions.
 
I've not built any more links to the site but disavowed a whole bunch of spam sites that were linking to mine.

You disavowed "spam links" what does "spam links" mean and why would random spam links be pointing at your site that you didn't build?
 
You disavowed "spam links" what does "spam links" mean and why would random spam links be pointing at your site that you didn't build?

Because their are some kiddies in the SEO game existing which blast your money site with 200k "cheap viagra" backlinks. Called NegSEO.
 
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