How to recover from recent Google update?

biccinnomanus said:

Ok thanks for suggestion. But, how you will determine low quality links? I mean what is the measurement criteria?

Previously, I was thinking to avoid blackhat like pbn but now thinking i should go for it. Google is a robot and they cannot determine honesty and dishonesty work. So, i should go for it.

Click to expand...

Links from low-quality directories, foreign language sites, links from irrelevant niche blogs, and links from low-quality blogs with spinned content will affect your site. Check out this link it will help you more https://ahrefs.com/blog/bad-links/.

asawako said:

Yeah, no kidding! How are people supposed to know what they did wrong if they are not told? How are we supposed to improve our sites if we aren't told? Even if you try to follow the "rules" you can still get burned.

Sometimes I wonder if this update contained an error in the algorithm....

Click to expand...

Google intentionally do this to confuse non-natural site. If Google shows their recipe, it's easier to manipulate.

What do you suggest as optimal for 7) ?

THUNDERELVI said:

Stop listening to all the crap being advised in this thread, no one knows how and most importantly why your site got hit. I've been hit in the past as well and 8 times out of 10, it had nothing to do with links. The problem for me (and most likely for you as well) was keyword density and anchor percentages. Audit each page on your site and answer the following questions:

1) How much is my keyword density for the targeted keyword(s)? Both the exact match keyword, word combos of the keyword and each word separately as well..
2) Am I putting the exact keyword in all of these highly optimized areas? Title, H1, URL, Description, Alt tag being the most important ones.
3) Are you using WP? If yes, is your template injecting your keywords in your pages without you realizing? You can discover this by implementing step 1.

4) How are you interlinking between your articles? With exact anchors? Or better say, what's the anchor % distribution in your internal links? Are you overdoing it?
5) Do you have cannibalizing pages on your site? If yes, identify them and remove them. They only cause issues and do no good at all.
6) Do you have any duplicate content in your site? Categories? Tags? You mentioned your tags are fine, what about categories, how are they set up? I recommend removing tags completely or at least noindex/follow them.
7) What's the anchor % distribution on your incoming links (backlinks) to the site?

After you fix your website internally, wait for Google to re-index your site. Then wait another week or so for it to refresh your rankings. If nothing happens, go back to fixing your site. If you are 100% sure your site is the best it can be, move on to troubleshooting your links.

Click to expand...

THUNDERELVI said:

Stop listening to all the crap being advised in this thread, no one knows how and most importantly why your site got hit. I've been hit in the past as well and 8 times out of 10, it had nothing to do with links. The problem for me (and most likely for you as well) was keyword density and anchor percentages. Audit each page on your site and answer the following questions:

1) How much is my keyword density for the targeted keyword(s)? Both the exact match keyword, word combos of the keyword and each word separately as well..
2) Am I putting the exact keyword in all of these highly optimized areas? Title, H1, URL, Description, Alt tag being the most important ones.
3) Are you using WP? If yes, is your template injecting your keywords in your pages without you realizing? You can discover this by implementing step 1.

4) How are you interlinking between your articles? With exact anchors? Or better say, what's the anchor % distribution in your internal links? Are you overdoing it?
5) Do you have cannibalizing pages on your site? If yes, identify them and remove them. They only cause issues and do no good at all.
6) Do you have any duplicate content in your site? Categories? Tags? You mentioned your tags are fine, what about categories, how are they set up? I recommend removing tags completely or at least noindex/follow them.
7) What's the anchor % distribution on your incoming links (backlinks) to the site?

After you fix your website internally, wait for Google to re-index your site. Then wait another week or so for it to refresh your rankings. If nothing happens, go back to fixing your site. If you are 100% sure your site is the best it can be, move on to troubleshooting your links.

Click to expand...

Thank you for your Great suggestion. Lots of people giving lots of suggestion but I think your suggestion is really logical.
I have more than 180 posts and most of the post 1200+ or 2400+ words. So, it is impossible to mass change in a week. But, I am thinking I will target 10 post each week and make massive change{Like keyword density(10 posts), backlinks(10 posts), overoptimize(10 posts), interlinking(10 posts) etc matter}. If any 10 posts back in action then i will apply that theory all of my other posts. It may take 1,2 even 3 month to figure out the problem but my brain doesn't responding without this solution. So, have you any other suggestion?


1) I am following Yoast plugin suggestion. Most of the post keywords density over 0.50. A few posts have more than that but my all post loosing ranking thus I was not thinking so much about it. But,now I should go 0.30 keyword density for test purpose.
Here is the keyword density:
"Best + keyword" = 0.5%-0.7%
"keyword" = 1.7-3.0%
What your comment about this keword density?

2) Title, H1, URL, Description all area have my main keyword ("Best + keyword").
Am i doing anything wrong?

3) I am using newspaper theme check here demo: https://demo.tagdiv.com/newspaper/ . I am exactly following the same design that demo have.
Are you finding any keyword injection here? I am not finding!

4) I think, I am overdoing it. I was interlinking 3-5 posts for each article. But probably, worst thing I was doing that i didn't interlinking inside the article. I was interlinking this way:
Content......
Related: Best Blackhat World review buying guide 2017
Content.......
Related: Best google review - High quality google 2017
Content.......
Related: Best link building review - What is the quality link building 2017?
Content.......
Related: Best seo service review - Why our seo service is the best 2017?
Content.......

My bad! I was using full heading like above not inside the article.
I should change it and try to use inside the article and do not use keyword much as anchor text. Right?

5) My all post heading common words are: best and review. But, keywords are different. For example: check related post heading(Number 4).
Do i need to do any variation? If so What kind variation you will suggest? Best & review are buying words. So, I don't target any other type keywords(Like informational keywords).

6) No. I am using yoast seo plugin and do not index tags or categories. Although, last months I tried to index categories. But, later i found that it also indexing pagination like
website.com/page/3/, website.com/page/1/. Only 5 those type link were indexed. I didn't take headache for those type pagination 5 link. But, after this update hitting I removed those link using google search console "Remove URLs" option. I have done this 2 days ago and still not seeing any positive improvement.

7) According to ahrefs 9% naked url, partial domain anchor text 6% and exact domain anchor text 4% and other specific post base anchor keywords(all are not exact same keywords and have variation) which i was targeting to rank.
Anchor phrases: naked url- 26%, partial - 18%, exact- 13%.


Would you like to comment for each point please!

THUNDERELVI said:

Stop listening to all the crap being advised in this thread, no one knows how and most importantly why your site got hit. I've been hit in the past as well and 8 times out of 10, it had nothing to do with links. The problem for me (and most likely for you as well) was keyword density and anchor percentages. Audit each page on your site and answer the following questions:

1) How much is my keyword density for the targeted keyword(s)? Both the exact match keyword, word combos of the keyword and each word separately as well..
2) Am I putting the exact keyword in all of these highly optimized areas? Title, H1, URL, Description, Alt tag being the most important ones.
3) Are you using WP? If yes, is your template injecting your keywords in your pages without you realizing? You can discover this by implementing step 1.

4) How are you interlinking between your articles? With exact anchors? Or better say, what's the anchor % distribution in your internal links? Are you overdoing it?
5) Do you have cannibalizing pages on your site? If yes, identify them and remove them. They only cause issues and do no good at all.
6) Do you have any duplicate content in your site? Categories? Tags? You mentioned your tags are fine, what about categories, how are they set up? I recommend removing tags completely or at least noindex/follow them.
7) What's the anchor % distribution on your incoming links (backlinks) to the site?

After you fix your website internally, wait for Google to re-index your site. Then wait another week or so for it to refresh your rankings. If nothing happens, go back to fixing your site. If you are 100% sure your site is the best it can be, move on to troubleshooting your links.

Click to expand...

This sounds like solid advice. One thing seems clear, many people have been hit for different reasons and are seeing results fixing their sites in different ways.

I have one question. For numbers 1-3 above, what do you recommend as a good keyword density? Are you saying to check if your density is too high or too low?

I have a site that goes from 3rd position to nowhere haha.

A day before google update my site receive ~8,000 visitors.

And now my site only receive around 1,000-2,000 visitors per day.

So sad cause my target for that site cannot be achieve

Best strategy to recover from Fred so far : do nothing. Fred's Rank Brain is confused.

Have you posts without aff links?
Have you external links to fresh contents of authority websites (statistics, trends, etc.)?
Is your content is trustworthy and authentic?
Do you make useful, informative content, or do you want just to convert your users to profit?
I think this post is very useful about the content and usability minimum NOW:
https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5536/...cal-authority-content-update-2014-case-study/

And: Aff links are no problems:

biccinnomanus said:

1) I am following Yoast plugin suggestion. Most of the post keywords density over 0.50. A few posts have more than that but my all post loosing ranking thus I was not thinking so much about it. But,now I should go 0.30 keyword density for test purpose.
Here is the keyword density:
"Best + keyword" = 0.5%-0.7%
"keyword" = 1.7-3.0%
What your comment about this keword density?

2) Title, H1, URL, Description all area have my main keyword ("Best + keyword").
Am i doing anything wrong?

Click to expand...

Have you run your page(s) through http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

If not, check a page and you may find that your WP theme is injecting additional keywords into your page which Yoast does not account for. Then adjust your page text to lower your density if too high.

I relied on Yoast until this week and someone on the forum mentioned this to me, I was surprised what I found and regardless of Fred, the changes I have made will definitely help my rankings.

The first thing to look for is content optimization ( how useful it is for your readers. Is it leading to higher dwell time). Second, on-page SEO. Third, your links structure and what percentage of it is your niche relevant. Fourth, how much spam links your site has. Fifth, how much of your links are coming from authority sites with low-spam index, Sixth, did you get rid of unnatural links, seventh, keyword density. There are some others as well but this is the packing order.

THUNDERELVI said:

Stop listening to all the crap being advised in this thread, no one knows how and most importantly why your site got hit. I've been hit in the past as well and 8 times out of 10, it had nothing to do with links. The problem for me (and most likely for you as well) was keyword density and anchor percentages. Audit each page on your site and answer the following questions:

1) How much is my keyword density for the targeted keyword(s)? Both the exact match keyword, word combos of the keyword and each word separately as well..
2) Am I putting the exact keyword in all of these highly optimized areas? Title, H1, URL, Description, Alt tag being the most important ones.
3) Are you using WP? If yes, is your template injecting your keywords in your pages without you realizing? You can discover this by implementing step 1.

4) How are you interlinking between your articles? With exact anchors? Or better say, what's the anchor % distribution in your internal links? Are you overdoing it?
5) Do you have cannibalizing pages on your site? If yes, identify them and remove them. They only cause issues and do no good at all.
6) Do you have any duplicate content in your site? Categories? Tags? You mentioned your tags are fine, what about categories, how are they set up? I recommend removing tags completely or at least noindex/follow them.
7) What's the anchor % distribution on your incoming links (backlinks) to the site?

After you fix your website internally, wait for Google to re-index your site. Then wait another week or so for it to refresh your rankings. If nothing happens, go back to fixing your site. If you are 100% sure your site is the best it can be, move on to troubleshooting your links.

Click to expand...

so you call it crap advice but else yourself just post some lists without any clear form of advice there?


I should really consider a gurublogger career after that may 8th update.

To be fair, that's actually a good post and looks to be based on actual experience rather than just echoing some gurutard.

Just because Yoast gives you a green for your density, doesn't mean it's right. It gives you a green for 2.5% lol

ZuppaSoup said:

Google intentionally do this to confuse non-natural site. If Google shows their recipe, it's easier to manipulate.

Click to expand...

I am not asking for their recipe. But at least a "we did this because...and we are trying to encourage..." People will always try to manipulate things, but there's a difference between smacking a kid and not telling them why and smacking them and explaining why so they can learn and improve, rather than randomly guess what they did wrong and try to fix anything they can think of blindly.

asawako said:

I am not asking for their recipe. But at least a "we did this because...and we are trying to encourage..." People will always try to manipulate things, but there's a difference between smacking a kid and not telling them why and smacking them and explaining why so they can learn and improve, rather than randomly guess what they did wrong and try to fix anything they can think of blindly.

Click to expand...

Check on old Matt Cutts video and blog, and Google Webmaster Blogspot, and also follow the Twitter people who works for Google Search if you want to know what Google want. They often won't say about what's updated, but they often say how to create website as they wanted. Of course you can artificially add backlink to boost your site or something else, but this is not natural, so how good you're doing it without getting caught on Google radar and not going overboard.

Overall, I don't think I've read so much crap in a single thread for quite some time.

I recently suffered a drop in rankings, but it just so happens that in Google Webmaster Tools I had a warning of 'soft-404' errors. For some reason, the Google spider was looking at my search box on my site and finding 404 errors. I've now blocked the spider from doing that in my robots.txt

So one thing you can do is look for any 301/404 errors in GWT.

any luck yet?

Anything new? Anyone have any recovery successes?