Google update again?!

mtj85 said:
Yeah. I'll give you my example.

There's 3 keywords.

1) Blood pressure A B
2) Blood pressure A B C
3) A blood pressure B C

keyword 1 prior to update: 5, then moved to 10, then to 80, then to 100+ (disappearing), as of today it is still out of top100.
keyword 2 prior to update: 3, then 10, then 16, now recovering and climbing to rank 3 again.
keyword 3 prior to update: 2, then 15, then 40, now recovering to top10.

The thing that haunts me here is what the heck is wrong with keyword 1? It is closely related to keyword 2 and 3. Why removing this one from serps and leaving 2 other very similar keywords? I checked, and I am not even on page 18 (results end there). And I don't need to tell you what kind of results are there from page 10 - 17. If those sites are deemed more suitable for Keyword1 than my website (which is in fact directly related to main keyword and has some nice links), then google is broken. Of course my content is well written and in fact it is also fact-checked (I do have morals and I don't want to give out bad advice).
Sure, I accept that algorithm is prone to error and anomalies can happen. But going from 3 to 199 position? To be that much way off? How wrong could the algo be before the update then that it misfired so much?

The only difference is that keyword 1 has 10,000 monthly searches, keyword 2 has 600 and keyword 3 has 300. It's similar with other keywords. So what I believe it might happen is the following. Google took a closer look at health (and other niche) related keywords with noticeable traffic per month and sort of rearranged them in a way that only high authority websites can be displayed in top 10 (and top 100, too). And here's your EAT thing right there. Nicely masked. But the authority of those sites is still determined by links, mostly. Its either that, or they're manually setting the SERPs for high traffic, profitable keywords. These are keywords that, if wrong advice is given, can cause harm to people, and I understand that the results must be filtered well. But then again how can google distinguished that the given advice from a site that sits, lets say, on position 8, is still not giving wrong advice? Only by manual review.
If they really care about people, that is. Probably they're more concerned with people suing them after "reading ILL advice on google".

These fluxes doesn't make sense to me otherwise, and being in SEO for almost 10 years I've seen some serious updates and fluxes. But never that severe and I never saw a site only be "partially hit" in a sense that long tail keywords of a main keyword still rank, while their high traffic main keywords drop out of top 100?!!
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I have the exact same experience in regards to keywords. Only difference is that some that got boosted are high volume money keywords and some that tanked are low volume ones. It just seems... random.

My main general site writes about health and fashion. The thing is that most of the fashion keywords tanked as well. The site leans more towards health, but still has a lot of fashion content. So I can only think that whole sites gets "marked" or "hit", not just keywords or certain articles. Perhaps they see that I write more about health, so they put me in the health category and decide to tank my non-health keywords as well.

It's all very strange and so are the results I get in Google. If I am searching for financial stuff on Google in my country, the top results are from computer forums. It's random threads where someone asked "is this bank good?" and a few short posts saying "yes, it's pretty good". At the bottom of the first page and second page you have websites dedicated to finance and they have great information on them. Yet they are getting beat by a computer forum..


Aaaanyway, enough with my whining. I am seeing a liiiiittle bit more traffic in the last couple of days. I have built more links and I have fixed so that each post shows date published, nothing else.
 
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All Google is doing is trying to understand what is relevant to what, this is why even strong and powerful websites are moving all over the place, I just reach first page for a 50k term with a 3 month old website because my links are more relevant than the competition: https://i.imgur.com/a3hXq1f.jpg

Anyone can buy a package in the marketplace from homepage links but they won't be relevant, this is why Google is moving towards relevance more and more since it is harder to manipulate "for most people", simple as that.
 
From first position to 5th page. Welcome to new google shitty era. If my website was meant for 5th page why did it even ranked on first page 5 months earlier. Totally frustrated with this update.
 
There is a change, but it is not significant compared to the same time. Update 28/9/18!
 

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I have a KW that dropped over 40 places out of the blue yesterday. There's also talk of an on-going update as we speak.
 
I have literally hundreds of changes everytime I am updating Serpbook. From #40 to #2 from 3# to 15# etc. it is constantly changing. I am really wondering when things are going to settle down. This is only for a specific niche tho. Some other niches ranking are steady af.
 
Anyone seeing massive flux today as well? Health niche.
Another keyword that was #1 on 1st of august took a dive to page2 today. Additional 9 tracked keywords today dropped out of top100 completely. Some other keywords are still "holding on to" the first page so not all is lost...
If this trends continue it's going to be a disaster.
Fluxing from page 1 to page 10? Dropping keywords out of top 100? It seems like a penalty, not a rank change. How wrong can the algo be to have the site in page 1 for 1 year and then drop it out of top100 (seems like a permanent deranking too, as the keywords did not reappear in top100 ever since)?? We all know what kind of sites sit on page 10. So it is a penalty, it seems, and I don't take google statement "it's not a penalty, it's that now we rank sites that were under-ranked before better". Really, results on page 10 are better? What a joke.
 
Also there is a drop in image search. Autogenerated sites that take my images (with watermark) and now ranking better than my site for those given keywords.

And again - regarding the "relevancy" of main content to the keyword. Here's one example. I have approximately around 15 articles on blood pressure (all related info, covering many aspects of this topic) and I got deranked for keywords related to blood pressure. On the other hand, I have only 1 article on liposuction and my rank for a liposuction-related keyword is climbing ever since August 1. The last topic i would say my site is all about is liposuction - yet rankings for those keywords are increasing for my site and ranks for blood pressure are decreasing constantly.

This update is either about backlinks again, or there's some manual intervention / focus on profitable health-related keywords from google. Relevancy, EAT and other snake oil is just to distract and let people wander in dark in my opinion. Haven't seen such mess from google up to date. Not saying that my site deserves rank#1 for all keywords there are, but it certainly doesn't deserves rank 100+.
 
mtj85 said:
Not saying that my site deserves rank#1 for all keywords there are, but it certainly doesn't deserves rank 100+.
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Yep, it's pretty strange that something Google qualified as "great #1-3 site" for years suddenly is qualified as "page 10+ crap". I't's hard to understand this "Your site is fine, you just aren't relevant any more, things changed." explanation if the new sites ranking high seriously lack content quality, get facts wrong, don't reveal any sources for claims made. Strong authority domains, loads of content, but all shallow and generic.
 
One of my main money sites, which lost about 50% traffic with the Aug 1 update, got a nice bump yesterday and today. Let´s see, how it pans out...
 
A little movement in serps here. Nothing too serious.

Can anybody confirm that the 2018 it's been the dancer year in 10 years?

Update after updates my website s dances and end up more or less in the same position.
 
I honestly think google have well and truly screwed this up. Maybe they are trying to repair the code. If this is meant to give better results with eBay always in the top 3 and one website taking the top 2 positions, 1 homepage and 1 innerpage, how can that be good search results.
 
markb9876 said:
I honestly think google have well and truly screwed this up. Maybe they are trying to repair the code. If this is meant to give better results with eBay always in the top 3 and one website taking the top 2 positions, 1 homepage and 1 innerpage, how can that be good search results.
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This! If I compare the Google results from 2010 to 2014 to 2018 I can clearly see there is a huge drop in quality websites, which are showing up on the first page. When I search for my niche I see so many parasites sites, which are spammed to death.
 
my site ranking is stable at page 1 no dance
 
Just to add another data point:
Site related to dating (not YMYL afaik).

August 1, site demolished. Lost 80% of traffic across almost all keywords (from 500 a day to 100 a day, roughly). Also bad, 87% of remaining traffic was on one article that for some reason google still loved.
Other rankings went from number 1-3 to not being in the top 100 at all. Some of those bounced around all kinds of numbers, sometimes every couple days.

Sep 28, traffic roughly doubled and many keywords were at, or close to, previous ranks. Hopefully will continue.

Been working on the site a lot so recovery might have been partially about that. But the actual keywords and posts that recovered...and the articles that were worked on don't seem to have a correlation, unless the site as a while crossed a 'EAT' threshold of some kind.

The "We didn't penalize anyone, we just rewarded a few better sites" seems like the complete opposite of the truth, given the huge, huge swings in rankings I experienced.
 
Carpacchio said:
Just to add another data point:
Site related to dating (not YMYL afaik).

August 1, site demolished. Lost 80% of traffic across almost all keywords (from 500 a day to 100 a day, roughly). Also bad, 87% of remaining traffic was on one article that for some reason google still loved.
Other rankings went from number 1-3 to not being in the top 100 at all. Some of those bounced around all kinds of numbers, sometimes every couple days.

Sep 28, traffic roughly doubled and many keywords were at, or close to, previous ranks. Hopefully will continue.

Been working on the site a lot so recovery might have been partially about that. But the actual keywords and posts that recovered...and the articles that were worked on don't seem to have a correlation, unless the site as a while crossed a 'EAT' threshold of some kind.

The "We didn't penalize anyone, we just rewarded a few better sites" seems like the complete opposite of the truth, given the huge, huge swings in rankings I experienced.
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Yeah, same here, except that I did not do moderate changes to the site as I wanted to see if it will recover on its own (seen some dancing in the past). It's now almost 2 months and traffic is continuing to decline. Would you mind sharing what you did to "recover"?
All I did was I put an authorship to all articles and added a GDPR notice, as well as some privacy pages. No effect. Health niche. Of course it would be too easy to fix it this way.
 
mtj85 said:
Yeah, same here, except that I did not do moderate changes to the site as I wanted to see if it will recover on its own (seen some dancing in the past). It's now almost 2 months and traffic is continuing to decline. Would you mind sharing what you did to "recover"?
All I did was I put an authorship to all articles and added a GDPR notice, as well as some privacy pages. No effect. Health niche. Of course it would be too easy to fix it this way.
Click to expand...

I don't mind sharing at all. But...I don't think it will help. I am not sure anything I did helped. I mean, I have been working on the site since August 2nd and nothing improved until two days ago when it shot up. And the pages I worked on the hardest aren't even the pages that shot up. So I really think it's just the whims of the google algorithms. They are starting to make Facebook look like the paragon of stability.

But just for the sake of sharing...
I added a lot of new content (probably like 30-40k words worth), both new articles and doubling the size of some previous small articles. Good content. Well written, well edited, heaps of good images (but the best article, a 6k-word monster, isn't ranking for anything yet lol).
I added a real business address for the contact-us, instead of just a form.
I updated meta descriptions and SEO titles to half the articles.
I increased the amount of internal and external outbound links.
I changed the front page to be more mobile friendly.

Notable things I did not do:
Still don't have an 'author' or credentials or anything E.A.T. related. Because I don't have any and kind of scared of getting caught if I fake it lol Going to try to get someone with credentials on board when I have time but that's a long term project.
Gained no significant new backlinks (couple odds and ends but nothing noticable).
 
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