Google update again?!

PassiveJ said:

My traffic has gone through the floor today, it's now a quarter of what it was at the start of the month and dropped by half in past 24 hours, all white hat site apart from some manually built blog and forum comments. Thanks again Google.

SEO is looking pretty pointless at this stage, might as well focus on the social media side of things.

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fb3003 said:

'
what region / country are you in?

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Just to update, it turns out my traffic isn't as affected as I thought. Turns out there was a problem with my statistics plugin.

For anyone using WP Statistics plugin there is a problem currently where it doesn't show the correct visitors count, only visits. It was saying I was getting about 20 visitors a day, I nearly cried lol.

PassiveJ said:

Just to update, it turns out my traffic isn't as affected as I thought. Turns out there was a problem with my statistics plugin.

For anyone using WP Statistics plugin there is a problem currently where it doesn't show the correct visitors count, only visits. It was saying I was getting about 20 visitors a day, I nearly cried lol.

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LOL. I can totally relate to that.

One of my sites got hit. From #2 to #7 for some high traffic keywords. My site lost half its traffic as a result.

A fairly new website with EMD took over my previous position.

My site was hit first on Apr 4th-6th and then again on Apr 18th- till today. I went from 75 keywords in top 3 out of 109 tracked to 11 keywords in top 3 spots now. Really, really bad. Cant find the cause of all this. Perhaps the redirection I wrote in the other thread, but not sure about that.

did you notice a shift in your mobile ranking as well? my mobile ranking did not change, but desktop did.

For me both the desktop and mobile rankings changed, although the change comes mostly at one type of device first and then the second follows shortly.

my site does not seem to recover, it is in a fall scenario.

We had one of our large and well established website got hit last week. Unable to find the reason.

Traffic dropped almost 40% overnight and doesnt seem to be getting better

guzm - same here as I wrote above. The big drop in rankings came around approx 18-21th April (for some keywords it started around 5-7th April). I checked everything and I cant find any cause to this. No manual penalty, my PBN are ranking well and are indexed. Actually for some important keywords I still have like 15 PBN websites in top #1-100 spots linking to my main money site which ranked on #1 for years. Now it fell of a cliff to places like #8-11. As if the links had no value?

Here are some important keywords across different pages on my domain. The drop happened regardless of the page.









Only thing that was really bad is one non relevant 301 redirected domain, which had really great backlinks. Perhaps thats the cause? Not really sure about this though, because I created it in the middle of December. And I deleted it like 2 weeks ago.

Any ideas? Perhaps just some Google dance or something?

Your issue does not seem to be related ours then.

While we did use PBN post, our link profile was very well diversified and I don't think we had more than 5-10 links from PBNs. Still trying to figure this out. I will share more once I have some theories to get y'alls opinion

asker1 said:

guzm - same here as I wrote above. The big drop in rankings came around approx 18-21th April (for some keywords it started around 5-7th April). I checked everything and I cant find any cause to this. No manual penalty, my PBN are ranking well and are indexed. Actually for some important keywords I still have like 15 PBN websites in top #1-100 spots linking to my main money site which ranked on #1 for years. Now it fell of a cliff to places like #8-11. As if the links had no value?

Here are some important keywords across different pages on my domain. The drop happened regardless of the page.

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View attachment 115161

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View attachment 115163



Only thing that was really bad is one non relevant 301 redirected domain, which had really great backlinks. Perhaps thats the cause? Not really sure about this though, because I created it in the middle of December. And I deleted it like 2 weeks ago.

Any ideas? Perhaps just some Google dance or something?

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why you removed 301 redirect? You do 301 redirect to main domain or internal page?

Also noticed that 20-25% of traffic does not reach

yep, health niche, got a huge. drop for many keywords today

Got one of the small sites hit with manual penalty because of PBNs from a provider here. This is a different website though. The one I was talking about earlier is still a mystery because there were very few if any PBN links done on that and it still dropped 40%+ across the board and continues to get worse rather than stabilize

I have spent days investigating this update and I have found some really interesting stuff. Looking at results its very clear what is going on. I have observed one very important synonym of my main keyword. On 4 April i was in #4, the next day I wasnt in the serps at all and its still like this. So what is the interesting part? Google previously knew that it is clearly a synonym to the main keyword. After the update on 5 April all except one website vanished from the serps completely. The only site that was left was the one that targeted only the synonym and also used this term in the URL etc.. Now all 10 out of 10 spots in the serps are filled with sites dedicated just to the synonym. This happened in a single day overnight.

So long story short - Google somehow disabled or turned down the ability to couple synonyms or basically words that have the same search intent. I am seeing lots of new websites in the top spots for the synonym to the main keyword that are clearly tailored more to the synonym. Also for long tail like "best x" "cheapest y" "buy online z" - there are now sites dedicated just to those terms at the top. Previously this wasnt the case. Of course its not 100% like this for every keyword, because some websites have powerful backlinks with the synonym as anchor text so that can overturn it a bit.

Actually reading this thread I found the same conclusion from another user:

KHer0 said:

Which is the same of what I suggested before, google dropped the weight of their rankbrain .. its like going back in time where you need to build many pages for same keyword + exexa backlinks

My only problem is, how long will google hold this update .. first page reaults are a mess and full of spam! I get same websites ranking for same keyword in top 3 position with 3 different pages!!!! I am afraid to edit my websites according to new update, google activates rankbrain again, and Boom!

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Here is the graph of the keyword - I am currently out of the serps completely! From #4 to 0. Yeah.

btw. my website is not in English, but it should be the same elsewhere I think

For me both the desktop and mobile rankings changed

Possible solution - at least for me.

Situation

March 12th update decimated my traffic and rankings fell from top 10 to mostly page 6-15.

Potential Solution

I was told by @Geasy that the update had potentially targeted site speed, so I might want to look at that.

Site Review

Yeah, my site speed was getting worse with namecheap, it definitely could be improved. The theme, plugins and youtube embeds were not helping!

Actions

Purchased a service from the marketplace to speed up the site.

Result

Rankings have jumped back to pre March 12th positions within a few days of fixing the speed.

Alternative Position?

@bartosimpsonio reported of increased site crawling and potential algo correction/change in his thread here, so it could be down to that.

Thoughts

Anyone else tried improving site speed, had the same success?

VERY interested to know if this helps anyone else.

fasttrak said:

Possible solution - at least for me.

Situation

March 12th update decimated my traffic and rankings fell from top 10 to mostly page 6-15.

Potential Solution

I was told by @Geasy that the update had potentially targeted site speed, so I might want to look at that.

Site Review

Yeah, my site speed was getting worse with namecheap, it definitely could be improved. The theme, plugins and youtube embeds were not helping!

Actions

Purchased a service from the marketplace to speed up the site.

Result

Rankings have jumped back to pre March 12th positions within a few days of fixing the speed.

Alternative Position?

@bartosimpsonio reported of increased site crawling and potential algo correction/change in his thread here, so it could be down to that.

Thoughts

Anyone else tried improving site speed, had the same success?

VERY interested to know if this helps anyone else.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I cant confirm that. I improved my pagespeed to 400ms since nov 2018 (made wordpress to static html). I returned to the php-based wordpress 8 weeks ago and now i got 2000ms as before. I didnt saw a change in serps neither after the speed-improvement nor after the return to the slower version.

fasttrak said:

Possible solution - at least for me.

Situation

March 12th update decimated my traffic and rankings fell from top 10 to mostly page 6-15.

Potential Solution

I was told by @Geasy that the update had potentially targeted site speed, so I might want to look at that.

Site Review

Yeah, my site speed was getting worse with namecheap, it definitely could be improved. The theme, plugins and youtube embeds were not helping!

Actions

Purchased a service from the marketplace to speed up the site.

Result

Rankings have jumped back to pre March 12th positions within a few days of fixing the speed.

Alternative Position?

@bartosimpsonio reported of increased site crawling and potential algo correction/change in his thread here, so it could be down to that.

Thoughts

Anyone else tried improving site speed, had the same success?

VERY interested to know if this helps anyone else.

Click to expand...

Sorry to tell you, but the March 12 update had zero to do about site speed. It was about links.

Your site recovered because they recently, within the past week rolled back at least 50% of the March 12 update. You just happened to be one of the SERPs that got rolled back.

blinggam said:

Sorry to tell you, but the March 12 update had zero to do about site speed. It was about links.

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What, specifically, about links? Penguin like?