TheGreene
Junior Member
- Mar 13, 2017
- 138
- 16
Hi,Ok, I've spent some time searching for a pattern and here is what I found out:
First of all, on March 7-9th there were at least two types of updates, one, probably for content (too much ads) and second one for backlinks - that's why so many debates.
I work in a payday loans niche, so most websites here have no ads. Three of my websites got hit, also several competitors' websites got hit.
As for my websites, I have exactly the same backlinks as most competitors do: no PBNs, some business catalogs, some comments, profiles, paid catalogs like botw etc,
so the quality of the backlinks can be excluded since other websites with same links are still ranking.
The next thought was anchor text density, but I haven't found any pattern here since some websites with much more spammy anchor text profiles are still ranking.
After some more research I might have found the reason - ratio of low quality to good quality backlinks.
Low quality = the website has no organic traffic at all (checked via ahrefs).
Just think about it, if the websites can not be found in Google, so how did anyone add a link to it?
Most of the websites that got hit had at least 1/3 of low quality links, while the websites that are still ranking have at most 1/4 of such links.
I'm pretty sure that these ratios vary from niche to niche.
My site was getting 100K traffic a month and I got hit. I was ranking #1 for many Medium/ key keywords .. The update that u thought was Ad Related do u believe that update was first? Because my site dropped Mar, 7th.