Google update again?!

Out of curiosity, for anyone that's seeing negative effects with rankings, what is your percentage split of follow vs nofollow backlinks?
 
Serprobot.com and proranktracker.com are great. I'm currently using Serprobot since it's cheaper, was using proranktracker before that. You can't go wrong with any of these rank trackers
Thank you very much! Awesome, will check them out
 
That’s nothing compared to the real losers. Have a look at dietdoctor.com or bestvpn.com.
Hi . Leith
I have a question to ask personally.
Do not you currently provide pbn links?
I want to use your service.
 
Wonder if the latest is anything to do with Google's new speed test that was released the other day as my Mobile speed rankings have dropped despite me not changing anything.
 
That’s nothing compared to the real losers. Have a look at dietdoctor.com or bestvpn.com.
Great observation Leith! Do you mind if I ask a few quick questions, 1) how did you even notice that? and 2) why do you think they even dropped organic traffic that much? Especially DietDoctor.com, it seems to have been created by a Doctor and has peer reviews by several physicians, is this related to the medic update? I see most of the drop is in September. I would love your expert insight into what happened here, this is a disaster for these two companies! Their organic traffic levels are literally at where they were in mid 2017!!!! Thank you Leith
 
Went from nothing (40/60 clicks a day) to 800/1000 a day, the keywords are getting stable now since I've seen some weird ranking drops but way more better than before.

I'm using serprobot to track them
 
Went from nothing (40/60 clicks a day) to 800/1000 a day, the keywords are getting stable now since I've seen some weird ranking drops but way more better than before.

I'm using serprobot to track them

Are you in health niche? If yes, then what do you think is the most important factors that your ranking is better (compared to your competitors)?
 
Great observation Leith! Do you mind if I ask a few quick questions, 1) how did you even notice that? and 2) why do you think they even dropped organic traffic that much? Especially DietDoctor.com, it seems to have been created by a Doctor and has peer reviews by several physicians, is this related to the medic update? I see most of the drop is in September. I would love your expert insight into what happened here, this is a disaster for these two companies! Their organic traffic levels are literally at where they were in mid 2017!!!! Thank you Leith

Following, especially question no 2.

I realized that DietDoctor.com dropped to position 7 for an important keyword (keto diet) on Sept. 27. Before that date rankings for the KW were fluctuating between 1-4 with variations since August 2017. Since Sept 27 the rankings for "keto diet" got even worse, now ranking between pos. 11-13. If we assume that EAT would be really a concept that had and still has a massive influence on the ranking of YMYL sites, I don't see any reason how DietDoctor.com could be considered to either have low Expertise, Authoritativeness or Trustworthiness (EAT). The site is ran by doctors, they have good backlinks (even though less on the .edu side) and they produce high quality content. If the algorithm updates would have really been about EAT, then DietDoctor.com should have rather GAINED rankings instead of losing their positions.

Any thoughts @Leith @wydos ?

Also, concerning the high rankings of healthline.com and other (more spammy) sites that heavily rely on flashy banner advertising, I don't think that Google sees "deceiving" ads as detrimental to the Trustworthiness (EAT) of a site.

I agree with @mtj85 referring to EAT as "snake oil", invented by Google to deceive users about the real intention behind their algorithm updates and promoted by some SEO consultants who want to sell their services. Instead of being a measure of usefulness and quality of content, expertise of the website, and user experience, from my point of view, EAT is an overall measure of the number of relevant, high quality backlinks. Instead of EAT, we should still refer to it as "domain authority" and work on increasing this authority by building quality backlinks to our money sites.

Hey All - I work on a health site too, we had lots of top ranking, high quality material. Our site traffic has fallen 50% since the update with market share falling massively too.

We also have a forum, obviously the forum users start discussions and people reply. But the content on Bing at least is marked as low quality, where are the medical articles are of high quality.

Do the Forums work against us? At the moment the traffic is 60/40 in favour of Forums. The previous update the forums took at clobbering with clinical up... but this update has hit both.

Thoughts?

We also have a very large forum on our site in the health niche and we were heavily affected by the recent algorithm updates (-80% in traffic over past months, last massive hit in August). When we look at our site overall, our forum represents about 95% off all pages due to the number of threads that were created over the past 15+ years. I am wondering if Google considers forums on YMYL pages as low quality in general...

Anyone had a similar experience or thoughts on this?

@mayneframe : How did you find out that Bing marked your forum content as low quality?
 
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Following, especially question no 2.

I realized that DietDoctor.com dropped to position 7 for an important keyword (keto diet) on Sept. 27. Before that date rankings for the KW were fluctuating between 1-4 with variations since August 2017. Since Sept 27 the rankings for "keto diet" got even worse, now ranking between pos. 11-13. If we assume that EAT would be really a concept that had and still has a massive influence on the ranking of YMYL sites, I don't see any reason how DietDoctor.com could be considered to either have low Expertise, Authoritativeness or Trustworthiness (EAT). The site is ran by doctors, they have good backlinks (even though less on the .edu side) and they produce high quality content. If the algorithm updates would have really been about EAT, then DietDoctor.com should have rather GAINED rankings instead of losing their positions.

Any thoughts @Leith @wydos ?

Also, concerning the high rankings of healthline.com and other (more spammy) sites that heavily rely on flashy banner advertising, I don't think that Google sees "deceiving" ads as detrimental to the Trustworthiness (EAT) of a site.

I agree with @mtj85 referring to EAT as "snake oil", invented by Google to deceive users about the real intention behind their algorithm updates and promoted by some SEO consultants who want to sell their services. Instead of being a measure of usefulness and quality of content, expertise of the website, and user experience, from my point of view, EAT is an overall measure of the number of relevant, high quality backlinks. Instead of EAT, we should still refer to it as "domain authority" and work on increasing this authority by building quality backlinks to our money sites.

Look at the trends for Keto Diet, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=keto diet&geo=US

https://ibb.co/cWTQUf

Steep drop off at the same time the algo hit. I've noticed for some sites, there's a loss of rankings, and for some there's a loss of traffic for their keywords (like Google decided what the average traffic per keyword gets and reshuffled it into other keywords that channel similar intent) - and others it was a loss of both...
 
omg I hate google updates every time it messes up my site And decreases my domain authority!
 
I'm just throwng something into the convo that came across my desk the other day. It seems with this latest Google algo change they have massively factored in the speed that the site loads. I got a few recommendations about server speed, caching, load speeds and the one that really caught my eye was "mobile load speed" and Google is looking at under 1 seconds times as "ACCEPTABLE" so that kind of set me to thinking about how to best optimize large sites for that kind of load speed. I am not gonna lie I AM NOT Even close to being proficient in the optimzation part nor am I an expert on hosting servers etc,. so Google looking at all that would scare me to death if I had a very large site.
 
Wonder if the latest is anything to do with Google's new speed test that was released the other day as my Mobile speed rankings have dropped despite me not changing anything.

how much drop are we talking about? what about desktop rating?
also, how is your speed when you check it in gtmetrix and webpagetest?

I'm just throwng something into the convo that came across my desk the other day. It seems with this latest Google algo change they have massively factored in the speed that the site loads. I got a few recommendations about server speed, caching, load speeds and the one that really caught my eye was "mobile load speed" and Google is looking at under 1 seconds times as "ACCEPTABLE" so that kind of set me to thinking about how to best optimize large sites for that kind of load speed. I am not gonna lie I AM NOT Even close to being proficient in the optimzation part nor am I an expert on hosting servers etc,. so Google looking at all that would scare me to death if I had a very large site.

how is your speed across gtmetrix and webpagetest.org? also, what kind of site do you have? wordpress? joomla?
 
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I'm just throwng something into the convo that came across my desk the other day. It seems with this latest Google algo change they have massively factored in the speed that the site loads. I got a few recommendations about server speed, caching, load speeds and the one that really caught my eye was "mobile load speed" and Google is looking at under 1 seconds times as "ACCEPTABLE" so that kind of set me to thinking about how to best optimize large sites for that kind of load speed. I am not gonna lie I AM NOT Even close to being proficient in the optimzation part nor am I an expert on hosting servers etc,. so Google looking at all that would scare me to death if I had a very large site.

My site is lightning quick and got murdered by the updates. While speed is something I think it's overvalued unless your site is in the bottom quartile performance wise.
 
My site is lightning quick and got murdered by the updates. While speed is something I think it's overvalued unless your site is in the bottom quartile performance wise.
Same here. Some sites that replaced good, high quality sites in the SERP, has 5-6 seconds load time.

So I don't think this is related to speed.
 
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