I have a question that I'm posing for a friend of mine because we are both a little stumped. A little background --> he launched a product review/affiliate revenue website back in October of 2018. He's gotten some very good press for what he's doing, including coverage from FastCompany. He had some decent growth thru the end of 2018 and into most of 2019 and things were looking pretty good. The domain he's using was purchased and had been dormant since all the way back to 2013 and he found nothing that would lead him to believe that there was anything "bad" in the history of the domain.
Late in 2019 and several times in 2020 he's been hit with the Google De-Indexing bug where his site pretty much disappears and/or entire blocks of pages disappeared. He's not getting his rank lowered, he's getting it pretty much eliminated. The day of the algo update (12/3) all of his stats went up, same thing the next day and the next day. Things started to drop on the 7th and by the 9th, his site isn't getting any impressions (according to GSC). Now it's possible that the the algo update could have caused this behavior, but neither of us have seen anything like this. We've seen impacts of algorithm updates both positive and negative but we've never encountered this constant choppiness with ranking/de-indexing/reduce-ranking/etc.
Here's my question:
- are there any resources out there that would illustrate or have a record of manual actions by google on a domain?
- does this sound like a bad hit from the update? or does this sound like something else to you?
Any thoughts on this would be really helpful, thanks in advance.
[He asked me not to put his domain up here I guess he has his reasons, but I told him I'd ask the community.]
Late in 2019 and several times in 2020 he's been hit with the Google De-Indexing bug where his site pretty much disappears and/or entire blocks of pages disappeared. He's not getting his rank lowered, he's getting it pretty much eliminated. The day of the algo update (12/3) all of his stats went up, same thing the next day and the next day. Things started to drop on the 7th and by the 9th, his site isn't getting any impressions (according to GSC). Now it's possible that the the algo update could have caused this behavior, but neither of us have seen anything like this. We've seen impacts of algorithm updates both positive and negative but we've never encountered this constant choppiness with ranking/de-indexing/reduce-ranking/etc.
Here's my question:
- are there any resources out there that would illustrate or have a record of manual actions by google on a domain?
- does this sound like a bad hit from the update? or does this sound like something else to you?
Any thoughts on this would be really helpful, thanks in advance.
[He asked me not to put his domain up here I guess he has his reasons, but I told him I'd ask the community.]