Google update again?!

kasabian21 · Feb 3, 2019

stevejones003 said:
Did you do any changes?

Nope, I've not done anything for at least 7/8 months. No link building or content updates. I think Google likes stability. Therefore, doing nothing and allowing your domain and site to age is the way forward.

Expired domains are perfect for this. No need to do a thing but add content.

mtj85 · Mar 10, 2019

mtj85 said:
Picture says it all. Heading towards 0 traffic, each week less and less traffic with drastic drops on each update.
Haven't seen anything like this before. After years of good ranking and converting traffic now since august and september google consider this website worthless.
It's really interesting to see that each week has about 5-10% less traffic.

I'm trying the disavow tool now (found about 5000 domains with generic links to my site - most of them were some "wallpaper" sites, linking heavily.). Let's see if getting rid of these 10,000 backlinks will do some change. Maybe I was target of negative seo?

Here's me, reporting back after some time. Disavow tool didn't help either (been almost 3 months since submission of file). Traffic on the decline, going toward zero.

https://snag.gy/v7zA9y.jpg

Average daily clicks from SERP before August18 - 2000. Average clicks from SERP yesterday - 60. This means 97% drop overall.
However the traffic has stabilized it seems (I mean, they can't take much more traffic anyway).

However it's been 6 months since I last worked on the site.
I will give a last shot and point some strong diversified links towards some of the articles that ranked strongly before August 2018 to see if there's any impact at all. If that doesn't work either I'm done with that site. Its pointless to beat a dead horse anyway.

Will report in few weeks again.

Anyone else had any success in recovery? Are links still working?
Any idea what the update actually hit? I still think it was links mostly.

darkhorse1 · Mar 10, 2019

What niche are you in? That's a big old traffic loss.
I have had big drops on a YMYL site and so far it has proved unrecoverable.

I refuse to use the disavow tool and your findings re enforce my belief that its pointless! Probably worth running some Google ads and see if that helps organic. G seems to favour sites that are paying them from my own recent experience...

Can you pinpoint any changes made in July 18?

mtj85 · Mar 10, 2019

Its health niche. Definitely YMYL. The drop was gigantic, pretty sad.

No changes were made from my site in July, just the regular - adding content.

Yes, disavow tool seems worthless. However I had found out some time ago that I had thousands of low quality links pointed toward my site (some scrappers etc) which were abusing anchor text (repeatedly same anchor text with targetted keywords) so I thought I will give it a shot with the tool. Can't hurt, right? Well it doesn't help either it seems.

MoneyValue · Mar 10, 2019

mtj85 said:
Its health niche. Definitely YMYL. The drop was gigantic, pretty sad.

No changes were made from my site in July, just the regular - adding content.

Yes, disavow tool seems worthless. However I had found out some time ago that I had thousands of low quality links pointed toward my site (some scrappers etc) which were abusing anchor text (repeatedly same anchor text with targetted keywords) so I thought I will give it a shot with the tool. Can't hurt, right? Well it doesn't help either it seems.

Did you attempt to increase the credibility of your authors? Etc, you have John Smith as the author on a bunch of articles, did you try to get John Smith from your site mentioned on authority websites?

cozziola · Mar 10, 2019

My most important site has taken a hit over the last 10 days. I made some changes to the pages interlinking around 2 weeks ago so I'm not sure if it's the interlinking changes or algo update.

It's a EMD domain.

I've just changed the site back to how it was before the changes. I'll know soon enough if it was the algo update or not.

I feel pretty gutted about it. Makes me think what is the point of SEO.

lifehero · Mar 10, 2019

mtj85 said:
disavow tool seems worthless

i used to think the same thing. as that is what everyone else says. But after the past 2 days i cant disagree enough

I submitted a disavow tool about 2 weeks. my site has been tanking for the past month. i haven't done a damn thing since disavowing and yesterday and today, my site has went from 0 on a few keywords to 2 and 3rd page and a bunch of others (over 20 money keywords) have all jumped 20-30 some even 60 spots.
some hitting the front page. and still climbing.

its a huge relief for me as i was losing hope. dont underestimate the tool. most people on here talking about it probably have never used it or used it incorrectly.
I submitted disavow for all shit links and even some hardcore nice ass pbns

mtj85 · Mar 10, 2019

I disavowed almost 5,000 domains, 3 months ago. Had 0 effect.
But then again - maybe those links were picked up by google as artificial anyway and I didn't have to upload the disavow file anyway. I'm not saying it doesn't work for sure, but in my case it didn't had any effect.

@MoneyValue - no I haven't boosted my authors. I still believe that EAT can't be calculated based on "someone" having mentions on other sites. I've been explaining this some time ago in this thread. Basically ranking authors for the purpose of this being a signal for ranking a website is redundant. It would require a whole another database of "author rankings" only to be merged with "websites rankings" at the end of the day.

I've ordered a fresh batch of diversified links to test on one keyword that ranked highly before August 2018 and is not so competitive (so links should be effective). I've ordered hundred of links, and the keyword will only be used 10% of time, all other links will be website's url or some generic ones. This way I will check if links do bump the rankings. If not the I guess it's game over.

basyh · Mar 11, 2019

Any recovery at all guys. What about new blogs on ymyl what will happen to them

Samurai-champloo · Mar 11, 2019

do you publish new con

mtj85 said:
I disavowed almost 5,000 domains, 3 months ago. Had 0 effect.
But then again - maybe those links were picked up by google as artificial anyway and I didn't have to upload the disavow file anyway. I'm not saying it doesn't work for sure, but in my case it didn't had any effect.

@MoneyValue - no I haven't boosted my authors. I still believe that EAT can't be calculated based on "someone" having mentions on other sites. I've been explaining this some time ago in this thread. Basically ranking authors for the purpose of this being a signal for ranking a website is redundant. It would require a whole another database of "author rankings" only to be merged with "websites rankings" at the end of the day.

I've ordered a fresh batch of diversified links to test on one keyword that ranked highly before August 2018 and is not so competitive (so links should be effective). I've ordered hundred of links, and the keyword will only be used 10% of time, all other links will be website's url or some generic ones. This way I will check if links do bump the rankings. If not the I guess it's game over.

do you publish new content regularly?

mtj85 · Mar 11, 2019

Yes, daily / weekly.
Will now wait for the effect of links...

cedomir87 · Mar 11, 2019

mtj85 said:
Here's me, reporting back after some time. Disavow tool didn't help either (been almost 3 months since submission of file). Traffic on the decline, going toward zero.

https://snag.gy/v7zA9y.jpg

Average daily clicks from SERP before August18 - 2000. Average clicks from SERP yesterday - 60. This means 97% drop overall.
However the traffic has stabilized it seems (I mean, they can't take much more traffic anyway).

However it's been 6 months since I last worked on the site.
I will give a last shot and point some strong diversified links towards some of the articles that ranked strongly before August 2018 to see if there's any impact at all. If that doesn't work either I'm done with that site. Its pointless to beat a dead horse anyway.

Will report in few weeks again.

Anyone else had any success in recovery? Are links still working?
Any idea what the update actually hit? I still think it was links mostly.

I feel your pain...

It's interesting how the graphs are almost completely the same. This screenshot makes me sad...

mtj85 · Mar 11, 2019

They are in fact almost the same. Fascinating.
Which niche are you in?
Did you try any fresh links to the articles that took hit?

cedomir87 · Mar 11, 2019

Health niche, of course... I didn't build any new links; I pretty much didn't build any links, the articles were ranking on their own based on on-page and low competition. Besides, most articles were monetized with adsense and were earning a couple bucks a month so a serious backlink campaign would seem like an overkill ...

Out of the 62 keywords I am monitoring, only one remained on the first page, of course, dropped to the bottom. And about half of the kw's went straight to 300+ from the FIRST page (some from the first place)... I find this rather absurd.

At first, I wanted to believe my biggest problem was lack of proper site architecture as I was writing about any health topic, as long as the competition was weak. But seeing you suffered the same fate, I'm not sure what to think anymore.

mtj85 · Mar 11, 2019

Yes, the drops were huge and unbelievable. Were you by any chance selling guest posts on this site?
Any other obvious footprints?

My site was about "general" health as well. There were some suggestions that the relevancy of the whole site could be a factor, which, in one way makes sense. But the again "healhline" is also a general website, covering each aspect of health and is not focused in one particular area of health, yet it ranks highest for almost any health related keyword.

cedomir87 · Mar 11, 2019

Yes, healthline and medical news today are topping the charts.

Actually I never accepted a single gues post, paid or otherwise, as I thought they'd mess up the quality of my articles .. go figure...

I'm also a physical therapist by profession, but I guess that doesn't seem to matter. And I would aleays steer clear of serious, life threatening conditions, such as cancer.

pumping · Mar 11, 2019

I saw a huge drop in my website ranking.

Cshark · Mar 11, 2019

This is just the effect of unnatural/forced link building that are now getting reviewed through AI framework of google, and while some of you may have seen huge dip in the ranking due to manual action related to unnatural/forced link building, most of you would not know what caused such upheaval. ( Short note: Stay the hell away from PBN. Just my 2 cents)

starki · Mar 11, 2019

My analytics looks the same, after the initial drop it only became worse. YMYL health, too and it's still the same shallow mainstream press articles (often with a bunch of factual errors) ranking now, plus revived expireds pretending to be the old site with unrelated but well ranking new articles.

The Curator · Mar 11, 2019

Cshark said:
This is just the effect of unnatural/forced link building that are now getting reviewed through AI framework of google, and while some of you may have seen huge dip in the ranking due to manual action related to unnatural/forced link building, most of you would not know what caused such upheaval. ( Short note: Stay the hell away from PBN. Just my 2 cents)

Wrong assumption - seen white hat sites (no pbns or linkbuilding) get hit...

Google update again?!

Power Member

Regular Member

Junior Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Senior Member

Supreme Member

Regular Member

Junior Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Newbie

Account banned-non delivery of marketplace orders

Senior Member

Elite Member

Main Menu

Marketplace

Making Money

BlackHat World