Google update again?!

I struggle with exactly the same problems. Losing one page in weight and one in the beauty niche. Both dropped exactly on 26.09. Someone here in the thread has suspected pagespeed could have become more important. I can deny that. I accelerated one of the pages to 600ms at the beginning of September. But its affected by the drop too...

I analyzed some top-5 serp competitors too and saw some great winner with extremely poor backlinks (arab, chinese, russian anchors like hell)

Out of the people who saw drops over the last few months, have you checked search console to see if your whole site was crawled right before the drop? That happened in most cases I've seen, so that might help confirm it wasn't just a coincidence in timing. If you haven't already done so, I'd start with checking out how you compare on page to the sites that moved up, they definitely tweaked some things related to on page over the past couple months. Also, do you think the sites that moved up might have better user signals?

I don't monitor keyword rankings on Bing or Yahoo, has anyone who does track those search engine metrics, seen any changes that coincide with changed google rankings?

The Curator said:

I don't monitor keyword rankings on Bing or Yahoo, has anyone who does track those search engine metrics, seen any changes that coincide with changed google rankings?

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Rankings appear to be pretty consistent (although I admit I don't check them as much as big G) with a couple anomalies here and there. Traffic from Bing and Yahoo, for me, has remained relatively stable throughout the G update(s). However, it seems a bit harder to get indexed on those 2 than it used to be. These are just my experiences though.

Was analyzing one keyword that I track yesterday. I was #1 for 1 year, and since 1st of August my site was on decline each day, now I am at rank #20.
I analyzed the top 20 results (with my site being on position 20.) to see who overtook my positions. 8 out of 20 sites were some private medical clinics with same exact content, copied from NHS website. Literary same content on all these sites. All these sites are now ranking before me. In other top20 results there are some very legit sites in there and also some sites that do not even provide an answer to the keywords query. So in my opinion, 3-5 sites deserve better ranking than me, but the others don't as they're literary the same content, packed under different website.
Perhaps a sole case, but I will looking into other keywords as well. Seems distracting that google shows same content in top results on so many sites.

And in other news - there was a decline again on 5. of October. Anyone noticed it?

Again?! I don't have time to check for updates, so thanks!

mtj85 said:

Was analyzing one keyword that I track yesterday. I was #1 for 1 year, and since 1st of August my site was on decline each day, now I am at rank #20.
I analyzed the top 20 results (with my site being on position 20.) to see who overtook my positions. 8 out of 20 sites were some private medical clinics with same exact content, copied from NHS website. Literary same content on all these sites. All these sites are now ranking before me. In other top20 results there are some very legit sites in there and also some sites that do not even provide an answer to the keywords query. So in my opinion, 3-5 sites deserve better ranking than me, but the others don't as they're literary the same content, packed under different website.
Perhaps a sole case, but I will looking into other keywords as well. Seems distracting that google shows same content in top results on so many sites.

And in other news - there was a decline again on 5. of October. Anyone noticed it?

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I lost around 60% of my traffic at the end of September and about 10% on the 5th, so I guess you're right.

I don't know why you guys keep guessing at what's underway.

Links do still have a say in SEO but it's NO longer the ultimate decider.

With Google AI algorithm and user-intent algorithm, also known as neural algorithm working in tandem, your referring domains, DA, social signal, link profile are not the ONLY deciding factors in terms of ranking.

It's NOT about domain age either. It has nothing to do with ONLY relevance-- relevance is just a ranking factor, NOT an intent factor.

You still need a strong link profile, awesome content but it's NOT the end of the road if your SEO consultant and copywriter are NOT aware of how to game user-intent algorithm.

Signal512 said:

It sucks seeing 500-800 word spam posts listed at the top with big throbbing red arrows pointing to golden “buy now” buttons.

I don’t get it.

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You didn't beat that spam post in terms of "user-intent". Even though that site has a lot of spammy links, the fact they hit a home run with "user intent" saw them through.

Zbigniew said:

I did a little test.

I published an article on one of my sites that were hit (that has good backlinks, articles, bounce rate and so on). The site writes a lot about health, but also about fashion and other things. The article I published is unrelated to health. A couple of days went, it was indexed after like 4-5 days. N/A in rank, though.

I deleted the article. Bought a new, fresh domain and published the same article on it. It's now ranking place 33 after 2 days.

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The same goes for this one.

In fact Google AI algorithm understands user intent so thoroughly that some sub-niches in health niches and a few others are no good for webmasters in terms of ROI.

Cshark said:

You didn't beat that spam post in terms of "user-intent". Even though that site has a lot of spammy links, the fact they hit a home run with "user intent" saw them through.

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Well, if pages like these score on user intent, Google has a problem to identify intent. A crappy doorway page is certainly not what the user wants, same goes for the hacked redirects with spun content or PBNs you see ranking instead of moneysites in some niches. If that's really the great content that makes users happy, I'll re-install the content spinner I uninstalled like 8 years ago.

starki said:

Well, if pages like these score on user intent, Google has a problem to identify intent. A crappy doorway page is certainly not what the user wants, same goes for the hacked redirects with spun content or PBNs you see ranking instead of moneysites in some niches. If that's really the great content that makes users happy, I'll re-install the content spinner I uninstalled like 8 years ago.

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It's a new algorithm and I believe things will require a little time to settle down, at which point issues like the one you discussed about above should not exist.

My website suddenly went from the second page of google to out the top 100 for our main keyword. No manual actions were reported, link building didn't stop.

I personally think this update was intended to squeeze the mid-level players so they start to depend on PPC - they have the most to lose and the most to spend...

Cshark said:

In fact Google AI algorithm understands user intent so thoroughly that some sub-niches in health niches and a few others are no good for webmasters in terms of ROI.

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I would like to hear more about how to game query intent if you would be so kind. Thanks, in advance.

Carpacchio said:

I would like to hear more about how to game query intent if you would be so kind. Thanks, in advance.

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And me

...
In fact Google AI algorithm understands user intent so thoroughly ...

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Understands? Right.

They know user habits by spying on them (people allow them), yes, and they know what a user might click on average when searching for a particular keyword. There's no AI per se behind this. It can't be. That would be exact-prediction AI, which can't exist. Or if they did invented it then they should rather use it to foresee lottery results perhaps?
Unless you're saying that statistics are now AI.
What I'm getting at here is that such "AI" can't be mature enough to be put into production. Or if it is, it cannot have such weight on rankings that all of a sudden now sites that sat on page1 for a year are now deranked to page3+ or that some rankings are devaluated to page 100+.
Google, a high tech company, are still pioneers and they use our data (google without data is not google that we know today) to advance, but at the end of the day, they're still learning and they do this on peoples and companies expenses. One day they rank you high, next day they remove you from converting positions on SERPs without any explanations. Just to try out different algorithms. Without user's data / websites, google search engine would not exist. But they're so integrated in everyone's life nowadays that they know they have the upper hand and they can do whatever they want. And all they give back as feedback is "create good content / yes we tweaked the algo but we can't tell what". Screw that. I understand that google will not reveal its algorithm, they're not stupid, otherwise that would allow anyone to reverse engineer it. But they could point people in right direction when they do a major update, instead of throwing out misleading info, just to add to confusion.
I do not have anything against google, and I think they're a progressive company. But they should give back something useful when they do update the algo. After all, the biggest scrapper and duplicate content website is indeed google.com.

mtj85 said:

One day they rank you high, next day they remove you from converting positions on SERPs without any explanations.

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That's the thing I don't get, you are relevant for years, then your aren't relevant at all. Especially with evergreen content and constantly positive user signals (low bounce rate, high time on site, good conversions, positive feedback via email, many returning visitors) it's hard to imagine that a site suddenly severely lacks relevancy. Yes, things change, but e.g. "How to build a chicken coop" content is as helpful today as it was ten years ago and as it will be in 10 years. There are no news, no need to change anything, no need for updates and additions. Same with recipes, either it's a good recipe or not, an "ossobuco alla milanese" will always be an "ossobuco alla milanese" and always require the same ingredients. So the corresponsing content is either relevant (and always was) or not and if people seach "How to build a chicken coop" or "ossobuco alla milanese recipe" the user intent is pretty obvious.

Cshark said:

I don't know why you guys keep guessing at what's underway.

Links do still have a say in SEO but it's NO longer the ultimate decider.

With Google AI algorithm and user-intent algorithm, also known as neural algorithm working in tandem, your referring domains, DA, social signal, link profile are not the ONLY deciding factors in terms of ranking.

It's NOT about domain age either. It has nothing to do with ONLY relevance-- relevance is just a ranking factor, NOT an intent factor.

You still need a strong link profile, awesome content but it's NOT the end of the road if your SEO consultant and copywriter are NOT aware of how to game user-intent algorithm.



You didn't beat that spam post in terms of "user-intent". Even though that site has a lot of spammy links, the fact they hit a home run with "user intent" saw them through.



The same goes for this one.

In fact Google AI algorithm understands user intent so thoroughly that some sub-niches in health niches and a few others are no good for webmasters in terms of ROI.

Click to expand...

What a load of bollocks.

You say you don't understand why people keep guessing in this thread, and then you continues giving us absolute reasons to why people's sites are tanking. You say it's not about domain age, as if it's the ultimate truth. You don't have any idea if domain age comes in to play at anything. Nobody does, apart from Google.

I don't think you know what you are talking about at all. "You didn't beat the spam post in terms of "user-intent", come on dude. It's enough proof in this thread that the update is not SEO friendly NOR consumer friendly. I believe there are a enough testaments on here to prove what you're saying is nonsense and probably just a way of marketing the service in your signature. Because it's all about content and user intent, right? Maybe you can help us with that

Considering the amount of websites that got hit by this, and the activity of those webmasters on different forums, I think your arrogant approach is showing how unaware you are about the update and Google algorithm.

Based on my data (many websites in portfolio) relevancy is also not a major thing.
2 sites that were as relevant to the tracked keywords as they can be were dropped out of top 100.
1 site is about bathrooms. Has bathroom-related articles, bathroom related links and is overall on bathrooms (obviously) was dropped out of top 100 for all bathroom related keywords that I track.
Another website on gardening experienced the same (gardening articles, links with gardening anchors), dropped out of top 100 for all tracked keywords, except for "brand name", which I track for different purposes.
These 2 websites had good content (nothing revolutionary) and were ranking mostly for images. In no way was the content spinned or poor quality. The links were decent.
So my point here is that even though the relevancy was spot on, and the rankings were on average about 10th - 20th position in SERP the keywords were dropped out. Again, I don't need to explain what kind of results sit on page 10. Worst than my sites on many levels.

Most probably, the links got devalued. I can't see other reason. You don't need much authority and expertise to talk about gardening, right? At least not for leisure purposes (part time gardening)...

Last 48 hours I have jumped up about 255% on one of my websites and the rest of the websites are slowly starting to rebound. Seems weird slew of updates lately going up and down testing different features. All of my websites are very large in size so a 255% jump is 40,500 - 80,000 users different a day.

Given traffic figures this week, I also wonder whether there is another update. It isn't so much the size of the change in traffic as the pattern in the days preceding. Its hard to tell.