Google This is Not Done

ranga

ranga

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I watch a lot of sites in a a niche I am in. I saw some big changes in one of the website's traffic and this is what I found.

First a little bit about the website I am talking about. The website is or was very well ranked and was getting 75K visitors as per Ahrefs. The content on website is professionally written. It is not by some expert, but is not junk content, proper researched content.

The website have a good backlink profile with a lot of juicy links.

This is the current status as per Ahrefs

Screenshot 2022-01-03 at 3.58.17 PM.png

The traffic figures still looks decent but Ahrefs takes its own time to crawl and update data. This is the traffic report as per Ahrefs

Screenshot 2022-01-03 at 3.58.37 PM.png

See the big drop, I decided to have a look what happened to the site and found this

Screenshot 2022-01-03 at 3.58.55 PM.png

Screenshot 2022-01-03 at 3.59.06 PM.png

So somebody totally junked its anchor text and made a large number of junk links to the website. It was after these links were made the site traffic nose dived. The links seems to be made in end August or September.

The website is Semi Authority site in the niche with around 800 pages indexed and most of them long form articles.

If such a website can be junked so easily, what safety does a small website have in google?

I would say Google you failed here

Now many people will say there may be other reasons for the drop, but the content and links are good and it was already ranking for some time, so don't see any other reason for drop.
 
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ranga said:
I watch a lot of sites in a a niche I am in. I saw some big changes in one of the website's traffic and this is what I found.

First a little bit about the website I am talking about. The website is or was very well ranked and was getting 75K visitors as per Ahrefs. The content on website is professionally written. It is not by some expert, but is not junk content, proper researched content.

The website have a good backlink profile with a lot of juicy links.

This is the current status as per Ahrefs

View attachment 197629

The traffic figures still looks decent but Ahrefs takes its own time to crawl and update data. This is the traffic report as per Ahrefs

View attachment 197630

See the big drop, I decided to have a look what happened to the site and found this

View attachment 197631

View attachment 197632

So somebody totally junked its anchor text and made a large number of junk links to the website. It was after these links were made the site traffic nose dived. The links seems to be made in end August or September.

The website is Semi Authority site in the niche with around 800 pages indexed and most of them long form articles.

If such a website can be junked so easily, what safety does a small website have in google?

I would say Google you failed here

Now many people will say there may be other reasons for the drop, but the content and links are good and it was already ranking for some time, so don't see any other reason for drop.
Click to expand...
do you trust what ahref reports on traffic?
do you really think it is that easy to bomb a website and do negative seo?
 
Mr Positive said:
Normally the site shouldn’t be effected but in this case the site owner can disavow them and reclaim authority
Click to expand...
Agree, but the attack is from multiple sources, so if will be difficult to keep doing it provided the owner is aware that his/her ranking dropped because of it.

Also, this is a very blatant attack, the most spammy that can come, if Google can't identify it then Google is failing.

Even after disavow it will take time to recover and wait for next update. Plus, there is now going to be a bad mark on the website.
 
fb3003 said:
do you trust what ahref reports on traffic?
Click to expand...
Ahrefs traffic data is only an broad estimation, it will never give exact info, but the direction it gives is right. So the website would have lost traffic and has lost rankings.

fb3003 said:
do you really think it is that easy to bomb a website and do negative seo?
Click to expand...
It should not be, but that's what happened here.
 
Mr Positive said:
Normally the site shouldn’t be effected but in this case the site owner can disavow them and reclaim authority
Click to expand...
Yes it should be ok in the long run, but I'm pretty sure the owner didn't really want all the extra work and missed revenue associated with this.
 
Worst Negative SEO in play here
 
They destroy hundreds of such sites every year. While we don't talk about negative SEO, top brands often do it to kill competition from fast growing low/medium sites. We stick to Google only because we don't have an alternative.
 
I think there are always a lot of factors can be the reason, for one, the Google update.
 
Its possible the site was also hacked with Japanese/Chinese content/redirects and then they pumped cheap links at it to help the hacked content rank higher. I'd say that is more likely. I'd be very surprised if it was that easy to tank an authority website.
 
Am I missing something here?

Before January 2021, the website was NOTHING, NO links and NO rankings, can't say anything about content.
Then they started to build links (a few k within months) and the traffic went through the roof... then there were dips and they added more links and now they are experiencing another dip.
Looks like a churn & burn project to me.
Please correct me if I'm wrong and where.

@jamie3000 , maybe the website is/was in Japanese/Chinese as we can't say anything about content.
 
It's the kind of thing that makes a guy wanna get out of SEO.
I've never had something that dramatic happen to me, but still.
We don't have any real control, at the end of the day.

Maybe native ads are a better traffic source, or just social media to email subscription.
Reliable traffic is a problem, for sure.
The less we have to rely on these fiefdom traffic arbitrators the better.
1641374895745.png
 
jamie3000 said:
Its possible the site was also hacked with Japanese/Chinese content/redirects and then they pumped cheap links at it to help the hacked content rank higher. I'd say that is more likely. I'd be very surprised if it was that easy to tank an authority website.
Click to expand...

No hacked content, all links are made to home page. I also thought it should not be that easy but that's the way it rolled.

praetserge said:
Before January 2021, the website was NOTHING, NO links and NO rankings, can't say anything about content.
Then they started to build links (a few k within months) and the traffic went through the roof... then there were dips and they added more links and now they are experiencing another dip.
Looks like a churn & burn project to me.
Please correct me if I'm wrong and where.
Click to expand...

It shifted from another domain, so the high bump in traffic. Its not churn burn, the content is very good and researched.
 
The other issue is, when this person goes to sell a site, who will buy it with such an anchor profile?
 
ranga said:
It shifted from another domain, so the high bump in traffic. Its not churn burn, the content is very good and researched.
Click to expand...
So they moved to a new domain?

Still doesn't explain 2 dips before.
 
praetserge said:
Still doesn't explain 2 dips before.
Click to expand...
It dosen't, but there are ups and downs with any website. This time the drop was quite drastic so checked. Nobody can say for certain that this dip was due to those links because we never know. The same way we never know the increase in rankings was due to some backlinks. Its never 100% cut and dry.

But what we know is that the links were created in Aug/Sep and Drop in Nov. Lets see if it picks up again, but right now the owner will be feeling the pain.
 
Interesting find
It's hard to see legit sites tank while garbage floats all over the SERPs
 
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