Crazy Google Dance In The Last 24 Hours

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My site also got hit very hard. It's an affiliate site in the fitness & weight loss niche. It lost about 80% of the traffic. Before this update a lot of pages where ranking in the top 3 for many keywords. I only had 1 ad on the site, no thin content. A lot of content with tips (2500+ words). The reviews on the site have 1500+ words, are unique and some of them have more than 100 user comments (product questions) and I always answered them.

My weight loss and fitness tips pages even outranked sites like webmd, huffingtonpost, prevention and other high authority sites. One of them even had the info box listing above the organic results and this for more than a year. One page ranked #10 for a competitive weight loss keyword without links. These pages also received a lot of organic social shares and never got hit by any previous penguin or panda update. Now only one weight loss tips page ranks #10 and all the others are more or less gone.

The keyword density for these pages is less than 1.5% (most of the time even less than 1%). I also don't have a lot of internal links. I don't use that a lot. Mostly the internal links are coming from the menu, sidebar or related content section. When I use internal links, then I always use a different anchor for each link I create.

I really have no idea what the reason for the drop could be. Maybe bad links?

Has anyone some tips, on how I could get the rankings back? Every tip is much appreciated.

Try 301 the site to new domain.
 
I am having a pretty good recovery from Fred. Hoping someone can relate my recovery to their site, I am sharing it.

My website has about 750 articles (1000 words in average) and was generating about 3000-5000 views a day from Google and a lot of keywords were on top 10. The backlinks were all strong and I never did comment/forum links. Links were all high-quality auction PBN domains, guest posts and links acquired using skyscraper technique.

The main issue was that a competitor had done negative SEO (spam comments and forum links) to the home page of my site. Negative SEO started on Dec, 2016 and continued ever since. But I never really noticed any rank decrement due to negative SEO and was just disavowing the links that I could see using tools like Ahrefs, Majestic.

One major thing to note is that the spammy links were all pointing to the home page and not a single one was pointing to any internal pages. The anchor texts of sites were thus spammed to hell due to the negative SEO and guess what, Fred hit and my views went down from 5000 to 1750 per day. 65% traffic reduction!

On March 24, I 301 redirected my website to a new domain. I didn't redirect home page of the old domain to the new one as the older home page has spammy links pointing to it. I also made sure that all internal pages are correctly redirecting to the new domain's internal pages and also, marked 'site address change' in Webmaster Tools.

By not redirecting the home page, I successfully managed to reduce the negative SEO effects, I think. It's only a matter of time before Google confirms that my new domain no longer has all those spammy links pointing at it and I assume that's what's helping me right now.

A week later, by April first week, I started to see ranks coming back. Some keywords were pulled down from the first page to 200-300 range and they started to show up in 5-15 again. Each day things were getting better and also, I was capable of having a closer look as I am tracking about 355 keywords (of 355 articles out of 750) in SerpLab. As the site is pretty huge, the transition to the new site is still not over (not even 50% done). So, I am 100% sure things will improve a lot again and I will be where I was a month later or even better.

Now more information regarding my site,

  • It has zero internal links and yet, it's recovering, which implies that not having internal links is not a reason for getting hit by Fred.
  • I checked the rankings of all articles where an external link is pointing. I have noticed that articles with a higher keyword anchor text ratio took huge fall in the likes of 10 -> 250. Whereas, pages with generic anchor texts took only a small fall in the likes of 5 -> 10, which actually happened site wide to even pages without any links pointing to it.
  • Negative SEO campaigner was using naked URL anchor text "mydomain.com" as a major anchor text. After Fred, even a few pages which had legit links with same anchor text "mydomain.com" took gigantic falls to 200-300 range in Google. Pages with other generic or naked URL anchor texts didn't get hit that much. So, if you have keyword rich anchor text for your site or if one anchor text is very predominant, that could be one of the major cause.
  • My website has about 80-90% bounce rate as one article is not much related to the another article and for the same reason, people rarely click to read a second page. I have done nothing to change it and it's still as it was. So bounce rate issue is not causing any hurdles in getting my site's rank back.
  • The site has one AdSense ad on the top and I haven't changed that either. So if that could have been the real cause of Fred, I wouldn't have had a recovery.
I can only point Fred update to one thing - "Backlink quality and anchor text ratio". This is from my own experience and your case may or may not be different. The site's traffic has touched 3000 again from 1750 within 2 weeks and the future is looking good again! :)
 

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I am having a pretty good recovery from Fred. Hoping someone can relate my recovery to their site, I am sharing it.

My website has about 750 articles (1000 words in average) and was generating about 3000-5000 views a day from Google and a lot of keywords were on top 10. The backlinks were all strong and I never did comment/forum links. Links were all high-quality auction PBN domains, guest posts and links acquired using skyscraper technique.

The main issue was that a competitor had done negative SEO (spam comments and forum links) to the home page of my site. Negative SEO started on Dec, 2016 and continued ever since. But I never really noticed any rank decrement due to negative SEO and was just disavowing the links that I could see using tools like Ahrefs, Majestic.

One major thing to note is that the spammy links were all pointing to the home page and not a single one was pointing to any internal pages. The anchor texts of sites were thus spammed to hell due to the negative SEO and guess what, Fred hit and my views went down from 5000 to 1750 per day. 65% traffic reduction!

On March 24, I 301 redirected my website to a new domain. I didn't redirect home page of the old domain to the new one as the older home page has spammy links pointing to it. I also made sure that all internal pages are correctly redirecting to the new domain's internal pages and also, marked 'site address change' in Webmaster Tools.

By not redirecting the home page, I successfully managed to reduce the negative SEO effects, I think. It's only a matter of time before Google confirms that my new domain no longer has all those spammy links pointing at it and I assume that's what's helping me right now.

A week later, by April first week, I started to see ranks coming back. Some keywords were pulled down from the first page to 200-300 range and they started to show up in 5-15 again. Each day things were getting better and also, I was capable of having a closer look as I am tracking about 355 keywords (of 355 articles out of 750) in SerpLab. As the site is pretty huge, the transition to the new site is still not over (not even 50% done). So, I am 100% sure things will improve a lot again and I will be where I was a month later or even better.

Now more information regarding my site,

  • It has zero internal links and yet, it's recovering, which implies that not having internal links is not a reason for getting hit by Fred.
  • I checked the rankings of all articles where an external link is pointing. I have noticed that articles with a higher keyword anchor text ratio took huge fall in the likes of 10 -> 250. Whereas, pages with generic anchor texts took only a small fall in the likes of 5 -> 10, which actually happened site wide to even pages without any links pointing to it.
  • Negative SEO campaigner was using naked URL anchor text "mydomain.com" as a major anchor text. After Fred, even a few pages which had legit links with same anchor text "mydomain.com" took gigantic falls to 200-300 range in Google. Pages with other generic or naked URL anchor texts didn't get hit that much. So, if you have keyword rich anchor text for your site or if one anchor text is very predominant, that could be one of the major cause.
  • My website has about 80-90% bounce rate as one article is not much related to the another article and for the same reason, people rarely click to read a second page. I have done nothing to change it and it's still as it was. So bounce rate issue is not causing any hurdles in getting my site's rank back.
  • The site has one AdSense ad on the top and I haven't changed that either. So if that could have been the real cause of Fred, I wouldn't have had a recovery.
I can only point Fred update to one thing - "Backlink quality and anchor text ratio". This is from my own experience and your case may or may not be different. The site's traffic has touched 3000 again from 1750 within 2 weeks and the future is looking good again! :)

How did you do it? just added 301 code in htaccess for every page besides homepage?
 
I was thinking about that too. If the site would really be in penalty, wouldn't I pass the penalty to the domain with the 301?

Manual penalty does pass to the new site...but not always (50/50)...but this is an algo penalty and almost never passes the penalty. I had 2 sites hit by this ipdate and al i did was 301 both to a new domain or url and got the rankings back.
 
I think we've finally cracked FRED everyone, keywords in alt tags, LMAO.

You still didn't get it right ? Guess what most of most of the sites, which got hit, had it common running the Yoast Plugin in Wordpress. The simply took the parameters from the Yoast for a well optimized site and hunting the sites down, by this data. It takes a while, till people and yoast will spot that.
 
Find the pages, which suffered the most. Check the bounce rate and time on page. Then go to analytics audience > behaviour > engagement and tell what your percentage of duration 0-10 sec is (visible on mouse over). Then I might be able to help you.

this mine
KAh8wZi

any suggestion?

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You still didn't get it right ? Guess what most of most of the sites, which got hit, had it common running the Yoast Plugin in Wordpress. The simply took the parameters from the Yoast for a well optimized site and hunting the sites down, by this data. It takes a while, till people and yoast will spot that.

wow, what a fact. So for now the best method is to manual checking keyword density?
If my competitor in big 3 spot have KD 1%, should I follow them or make lower density?

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I have keyword on image too, all my image containt keyword and LSI.
should I delete all keyword? or just image that containt exact keyword?
 
any suggestion?

Hey thanks for your trust. Problem is, with such a high bounce rate, it's hard to get any kind of meaningful recovery.

However there are some tricks:
- Get a wikipedia style, table of content on top of your page
- Place your pictures in a way, the see just half of the picture loading the site. Make them scroll. Check this by pageinsight tools, how it will look.
- Offer some type of quiz
- Put the most important sentence on top of your page

This 4 things are relativy easy to implement and should decrease your bounces by around 20% and will make your page look more quality. Use manipulative but not deceptive tactics. Like blocking the back button or such crazy stuff cause problems.

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Yep, I had a page with 2 keywords and significant drops by fred. The first increased after I decreased kwdensity and the second after it removed the pictures from the alt tags.

You should go in the 0,5% to 0,8% kwdensity range. Like your competitor, just a little bit less overoptimized.
 
You still didn't get it right ? Guess what most of most of the sites, which got hit, had it common running the Yoast Plugin in Wordpress. The simply took the parameters from the Yoast for a well optimized site and hunting the sites down, by this data. It takes a while, till people and yoast will spot that.
Oh I get it, you're saying Google is fighting spam by targeting users of Yoast, specifically ones who use keywords in alt tags, an option in that plugin. LMAO! I mean WFT. That is tin foil hat shit mate, and total bollox for a start. Even if it was remotely believable, you have fuck all proof. You're just another self proclaimed seo clown.

*Waiting for the seo sales topic any day now...
 
. That is tin foil hat shit mate, and total bollox for a start. Even if it was remotely believable, you have fuck all proof. You're just another self proclaimed seo clown.

Well, at the very least I ridicule nobody for getting their sites slapped. Did I recover my site ? Yes and I uploaded the data here. Did my advice help other, it did. As you can see here

I have been updating random sites with different things and I also have a part time contractor simply adding 500 words to each index (thanks to the advice of german seo on this forum) and not use main keywords in the text.

So, what exactly do you have to offer, except calling other people nuts ?
 
Well, at the very least I ridicule nobody for getting their sites slapped. Did I recover my site ? Yes and I uploaded the data here. Did my advice help other, it did. As you can see here



So, what exactly do you have to offer, except calling other people nuts ?

I had a site slapped, I also recovered it.

What did I do? Nothing.

That's what I have to offer.

Stop spouting wild speculation as fact.
 
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