Google releasing a large update today

Visibility down by 60% from 05.03. Loosing positions site-wide. User metrics and site speed are OK. No errors in GSC. Links problem?
 
From daily 6k visitors to 1.4k and still dropping. With this rate in the next 2 weeks, I will be on 0 visitors
Losing keywords, rank, lost all my rich snippets, I was removed from all featured snippets, trash sites are ranking higher, pages do not index, some posts are stolen from me and they are ranking higher than me.
Pinterest, youtube, Reddit are ranking better than me.
Posts with 100 words are ranking better than me.
On bing, I am in the first or second position...
Well this is so sad, I will continue with my site because it is fun for me but at the same time it is depressing to see how google rewards people who are creating unique and original content.
Hopefully they will fix it in the next 30 days if not I will do hardcore blackhat like my competitors.
I wish you guys good luck and stay strong.

We have had same issue...and it keeps going down like there is no stop!
 
When I look at the loser sites I am not surprised that they have lost traffic.
At the same time, it wonders me that websites in my niche, gain visibility which are not optimized at all.
 
My suspicion is that this update is a huge money grab by google to get people to spend money on ads.

Google's losing a lot of money during the covid19 crisis and what better way to try and make a quick buck then to screw over webmasters and try to get them to up their adsense spending during this time.

I foresee google doing this again in the future whenever they need a quick boost to their quarterly earnings.

I don't believe that because there are many keywords out there that have very little to no buyer intent. If someone is googling "is baking soda bad for your teeth", it doesn't matter how badly Google crushes the #1 site's ranking, because no one will spend money to bid on that term, since it has no buyer intent.

This update, as well as all the past ones are hitting keywords that have buyer intent, and do not have buyer intent. If Google is pushing these updates just to increase ad spend, then this is a ridiculous amount of collateral damage they would be accepting.
 
When I look at the loser sites I am not surprised that they have lost traffic.
At the same time, it wonders me that websites in my niche, gain visibility which are not optimized at all.

... 'not optimized at all' is the key. Although I disagree with Josh Bachynski and strongly dislike him as he does more selling then providing useful info, in one of his recent videos titled 'SEO Updates - Nov,Jan,Feb SECRETS' he is right, keyword density and on-page SEO as it was known no longer exist. It began with the Jan. 2020 update. If you want to watch it start at 45 min. so you can skip the selling and save yourself some time.
 
I don't believe that because there are many keywords out there that have very little to no buyer intent. If someone is googling "is baking soda bad for your teeth", it doesn't matter how badly Google crushes the #1 site's ranking, because no one will spend money to bid on that term, since it has no buyer intent.

This update, as well as all the past ones are hitting keywords that have buyer intent, and do not have buyer intent. If Google is pushing these updates just to increase ad spend, then this is a ridiculous amount of collateral damage they would be accepting.

In the case of your example, would it not be a baking soda company or some dental care center that would be spending money on ads to rank at the top? Sure there are some no buyer intent keywords out there but I don't think their algorithm is that smart to differentiate between the two and these non-buyer intent websites are now collateral damage.

I cannot see how it could be another reason except for a major fuck up at google.
 
When I look at the loser sites I am not surprised that they have lost traffic.

I'm not sure about that, from the top
http://whfoods.com/
is run by experts most of them Ph.D. Although it looks outdated (but mobile friendly) they provide TONS of credible and useful info. Info that doesn't change from a week to week or month to month. And they don't run any ads. So, for sure we can take ads out of the equation.

Same goes for:
https://www.news-medical.net/
Run by experts, not a fly by night operation, a legit business with 2 addresses and phone numbers.

Those two websites are a testament that the so-called EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is pure garbage, means absolutely nothing, can be easily manipulated as those two are outranked by lower or no EAT authority websites.

EDIT: The only reason I can think of that those two websites got hit by this update is that maybe they have done something with link building. Content-wise, it makes no sense whatsoever.
 
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You can try to check on Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/) if people are still searching for a specific keyword and compare with previous months.

In my case it is a full combination.
Less people searching for my niche, less indexed pages (Lost 30% of indexed pages in google), lower ranking (drop in almost all keywords).

On the Adsense side, Lower CPC and less ad coverage.

If Corona was not enough.....

talking about adsense is really vary too much ....now but yea always on low CPC side is kinda weird , yesterday still can reach 1 bucks today crap just cents
 
doubts, just innocent victims of this Russian Roulette Update

Possibly, I'm saying that's the case here but in the past big websites were caught in link building schemas, websites that no one would suspect of doing such a thing. I don't have access to the pro SEO tools, but if anyone has, have the time they can run those two websites through the tools and post the links profile here so we can see if links/anchor text have anything to do with this update.
 
According to semrush news-medical.net got a boost in the may update.
 
I'm not sure about that, from the top
http://whfoods.com/
is run by experts most of them Ph.D. Although it looks outdated (but mobile friendly) they provide TONS of credible and useful info. Info that doesn't change from a week to week or month to month. And they don't run any ads. So, for sure we can take ads out of the equation.

Same goes for:
https://www.news-medical.net/
Run by experts, not a fly by night operation, a legit business with 2 addresses and phone numbers.

Those two websites are a testament that the so-called EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is pure garbage, means absolutely nothing, can be easily manipulated as those two are outranked by lower or no EAT authority websites.

EDIT: The only reason I can think of that those two websites got hit by this update is that maybe they have done something with link building. Content-wise, it makes no sense whatsoever.
It has to do with having not enough PBN links.
 
As I said before, I am not surprised that so many websites have lost traffic.

The two sites http://whfoods.com/ and https://www.news-medical.net/
according to Ahrefs and Serush have received more visitors. As also @Kash007 has recognized correctly.

I compared 50 websites (in my niche) and found out that the loser sites
have these deficiencies...


On-page:

Too much advertising.
Page structure not optimal
Little to no external links
Article quality sufficient but not great.

Basically these are 0815 affiliate sites, and mine is somehow part of them.

I have fixed most of these errors. With success my traffic increased by 80% yesterday and by 8% today according to Google Analytics.
My website lost 30% of traffic in the beginning, this refers to 4 pages where I bought the articles on Fiverr for 5$ (1000W)

What I often read here is that Google prefers websites which place ads on Google.
This is not true, there is no correlation between the ranking of a site and the placement of advertisements.

For interest: Tell me one or more keywords where you think that the sites are not relevant in the top10.
 
As I said before, I am not surprised that so many websites have lost traffic.

The two sites http://whfoods.com/ and https://www.news-medical.net/
according to Ahrefs and Serush have received more visitors. As also @Kash007 has recognized correctly.

I compared 50 websites (in my niche) and found out that the loser sites
have these deficiencies...


On-page:

Too much advertising.
Page structure not optimal
Little to no external links
Article quality sufficient but not great.

Basically these are 0815 affiliate sites, and mine is somehow part of them.

I have fixed most of these errors. With success my traffic increased by 80% yesterday and by 8% today according to Google Analytics.
My website lost 30% of traffic in the beginning, this refers to 4 pages where I bought the articles on Fiverr for 5$ (1000W)

What I often read here is that Google prefers websites which place ads on Google.
This is not true, there is no correlation between the ranking of a site and the placement of advertisements.

For interest: Tell me one or more keywords where you think that the sites are not relevant in the top10.

I hope you don't mind, but I would like for you to go a bit more in-depth with the modifications that you made since you are the only one so far that has managed to reverse the ranking drops.
You said too much advertising, what is the optimal ratio that you went for, what type of advertising are you specifically talking about, affiliate links or ads?
For the page structure, do you mean properly tagging the sections (h1, h2, ...), adding a table of contents or do you mean something else?
The external links are an interesting point and as for article quality, sure, although Google is dumb as bricks when it comes at evaluating such things.
 
you are the only one so far that has managed to reverse the ranking drops.
I am surely not the only one but the only one who writes about it

what is the optimal ratio
I'm not talking about the amount of advertising, but for example

549MJ1o


It is then too much advertising if the visitors find it disturbing.
It would also annoy you if you are the first to see an advertisement when you load a page.
 
As I said before, I am not surprised that so many websites have lost traffic.

The two sites http://whfoods.com/ and https://www.news-medical.net/
according to Ahrefs and Serush have received more visitors. As also @Kash007 has recognized correctly.

I compared 50 websites (in my niche) and found out that the loser sites
have these deficiencies...


On-page:

Too much advertising.
Page structure not optimal
Little to no external links
Article quality sufficient but not great.

Basically these are 0815 affiliate sites, and mine is somehow part of them.

I have fixed most of these errors. With success my traffic increased by 80% yesterday and by 8% today according to Google Analytics.
My website lost 30% of traffic in the beginning, this refers to 4 pages where I bought the articles on Fiverr for 5$ (1000W)

What I often read here is that Google prefers websites which place ads on Google.
This is not true, there is no correlation between the ranking of a site and the placement of advertisements.

For interest: Tell me one or more keywords where you think that the sites are not relevant in the top10.
Thank you very much for sharing. Do you have good suggestions for e-commerce ranking and traffic recovery? My e-commerce lost a lot of keywords and traffic
 
In the case of your example, would it not be a baking soda company or some dental care center that would be spending money on ads to rank at the top? Sure there are some no buyer intent keywords out there but I don't think their algorithm is that smart to differentiate between the two and these non-buyer intent websites are now collateral damage.

I cannot see how it could be another reason except for a major fuck up at google.

I have a different thesis.

Google wants to make SEO unpredictable.

The whole reason why SEO exists in the first place, and why people have been able to be successful with it for the last two decades is because it is predictable. If you do X, then X happens.

In my opinion, these broad updates are meant to introduce a level of randomness to the SERPs, in order to make effective SEO difficult. Even more importantly, make it difficult to conduct SEO experiments and figure out what works and what doesn't work.

Think about it, there used to be a time when you could build a backlink, and then within 3-4 days see an effect from it. How did Google react to it? By introducing time randomness to it.

That backlink may kick in value a week from now, maybe 1 month from now, heck it could even take 4 months! Well, if you're trying to test different anchor texts for that backlink, you will struggle to come with a decisive conclusion.
 
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