Google update again?!

Google is playing with two of my sites like a cat plays with a dead rat.

Medic update
Both sites lost a lot of ranking.

Update 1 week ago
Both sites got a boost in rankings. Rankings were still not like before, but got some keywords back to first page. Earnings increased a lot.

Last night
A heavy drop in rankings once again.

The instability is incredible.

I noticed that all of my old sites lost traffic on the 21st of March. All of my newer sites got boost in rankings. Both old and new sites have fresh published.

The ranking boosts I received in the March update keeps on disappearing slowly.

Anyone else experiencing the same?

yes, i have some concerns about this......

Yep, first an increase after March update, a spike at 03/21 (traffic tripled on that day), then a sharp drop for the last days. Seeing a similar pattern here for the sites that were affected by the medic update.

Seeing some flux here as well. The drop isn't sudden though. SERP extremely volatile. Practically on each refresh the position is different.

Hola,

My advice to recover is the following:

If you built any dirty backlinks lately, Delete them + disavow.

My site went from position 18 to 50 March 14th (Started march 14th then kept getting worse), and now its back at the second page.

All I did was: Deleted all dirty links I did recently + submitted a Disavow.

This update has a lot to do with quality of your backlinks. I'm running the test on 3 different sites, and this is what's showing up.

Cheerios,

What do they mean when they say there is nothing webmasters can do about it? Could it be that others sites have just been given preference?

Backlinked said:

Hola,

My advice to recover is the following:

If you built any dirty backlinks lately, Delete them + disavow.

My site went from position 18 to 50 March 14th (Started march 14th then kept getting worse), and now its back at the second page.

All I did was: Deleted all dirty links I did recently + submitted a Disavow.

This update has a lot to do with quality of your backlinks. I'm running the test on 3 different sites, and this is what's showing up.

Cheerios,

Click to expand...

Side note on backlinks, last few days I shock to see i lose quite a lot backlinks ,

I wonder just gone like that? Or will recover? and why it gone?

My traffic seems to be down to a trickle today after a huge recovery last week. Whatever they did today has reversed some of the gains. I think it's better to not get too excited anymore :/

Backlinked said:

Hola,

My advice to recover is the following:

If you built any dirty backlinks lately, Delete them + disavow.

My site went from position 18 to 50 March 14th (Started march 14th then kept getting worse), and now its back at the second page.

All I did was: Deleted all dirty links I did recently + submitted a Disavow.

This update has a lot to do with quality of your backlinks. I'm running the test on 3 different sites, and this is what's showing up.

Cheerios,

Click to expand...

Please keep us updated, interesting (and promising) experiment.

guys, my ranking for my keywords are keep getting better after the florida update. How is it for you guys?

i see ranking improvement for all my keywords across all of their corresponding pages. What I have done over the last few month that might have a correlation to this improvement:
[1] have made substantial on-site improvement for all of my pages. Did this by understanding what other competitive sites have in common and just did a little bit better. For example, keyword density, number of words, use of H tags, etc.
[2] have created lots of back-links using exact match query for each page
[3] have made sure that our contact information is mentioned in all the footers: email, phone and address
[4] speed improvement. made sure that I got real good scores on webpagetest.org and gtmetrix.com. specially "first byte time". gave up on trying on getting good scores on google pagespeed site. I have all A's on webpagetest and gtmetrix. this involved using plugins in wordpress. also, as part of improving my site speed, I removed google analytics code from my site, since I had not looked at it for more than 2 years. just using google webmaster tools.
[5] and no, i am not using disavow tool. my own personal tests has showed to me that anytime I use it, it results in negative impact on my ranking.
[6] I am not running any advertising or affiliate links on my site. It is a business site, where users sign-up to use the application. My signup page was signup.domain.com and my login was login.domain.com. I made changes so that both are now www.domain.com/signup and www.domain.com/login. this way I have increased my CTR and also showing google that users are taking action on my domain. do note that www.domain.com is different from signup.domain.com and login.domain.com from google's perspective. by making sure that all initial user activities remain on www.domain.com I think I have taken positive steps from google perspective. It shows user engagement and also returned visitors.
[7] I have pushed my click to action button to above the fold so that users take action immediately. I dont want them to jump around. I want them to action as soon as possible.

Also, I think my getting no-follow backlinks from high DA sites has had a positive impact on improving the authority on my site, hence helping all of my pages.

hope this helps.

p.s. I was one of those who got impact with yeoast plugin issue. saying this, to show that the negative impact of yoast is gone and the workaround they provided did work apparently.

also, I did the following
[8] added a lot more text to about us page
[9] add more content to my tier 1 sites.
[10] made sure all of my PBNs are up. 2 of them were down due to hosting issue. brought them backup.

can I say any of the above 10 items was the key for helping me to get back to first place. Absolutely not. But I can say that the above have not had a negative impact on my site. so maybe few of them did the trick and gave me the top ranking back.

Zbigniew said:

The ranking boosts I received in the March update keeps on disappearing slowly.

Anyone else experiencing the same?

Click to expand...

Same happened to me. The first 2 weeks after the Florida 2 update rankings improved greatly, traffic was up by 100%. As of March 20, traffic dropped again, by around 20%. Ranking of keywords is very volatile.

CaveCanem said:

Same happened to me. The first 2 weeks after the Florida 2 update rankings improved greatly, traffic was up by 100%. As of March 20, traffic dropped again, by around 20%. Ranking of keywords is very volatile.

Click to expand...

Do i think your competitors have done something or do you think They have rolled back Florida update?

Backlinked said:

Hola,

My advice to recover is the following:

If you built any dirty backlinks lately, Delete them + disavow.

My site went from position 18 to 50 March 14th (Started march 14th then kept getting worse), and now its back at the second page.

All I did was: Deleted all dirty links I did recently + submitted a Disavow.

This update has a lot to do with quality of your backlinks. I'm running the test on 3 different sites, and this is what's showing up.

Cheerios,

Click to expand...

Quality of backlinks, like I told you folks long back.

Cshark said:

Quality of backlinks, like I told you folks long back.

Click to expand...

So you say that the quality of backlinks affects SEO!?

Groundbreaking!

Quick, we gotta tell the rest of the community!



P.S The medic update was, obviously, not about the quality of backlinks.

So i have seen my keywords go up in the SERPS, but from the 23rd, the traffic is down, but the keywords are still up, very weird.

NO-CLUE-SEO said:

So i have seen my keywords go up in the SERPS, but from the 23rd, the traffic is down, but the keywords are still up, very weird.

Click to expand...

That's cause you rank for a lot of other kws apart from the ones you track.

A guy on another forum had a theory that these last updates could have been made to "dumb down" Google. Mobile search is popular, and far from everyone writes whole sentences on the phone.

So instead of writing "How to fit a family in a small 4-seat car", a lot of people write "Fit family small car". So just the main keywords. When he was searching for long tails, the SERP is not filled with direct answers/articles for the longtail, but articles for the main keyword. So they have made the search more simple and general and less precise with longtails.

An interesting theory and I haven't put much research into it. But it doesn't seem like it's too far left to be honest.

WIZDAHL said:

That's cause you rank for a lot of other kws apart from the ones you track.

Click to expand...

I could believe that except,

1,Ahrefs says I do not rank for other keywords.

2,Google console shows an upward trend of clicks for the website for the same days 23rd - 28th, no tailoff, but the wordpress stats say there was a dramatic drop in clicks.

The 2 totally contradict each other. Very strange.
Also on the 28th march, google changed the submit to indexing page, it closed the old one, and forced users to use the new page. wonder if it has anything to do with it.