I Think I've Caught Google Cooties

Preon

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For some reason Google has taken a dislike to my website over the past few days.
  • It no longer shows the Favicon in serps.
  • My Pinterest pins are outranking my articles
  • A scraper site that produces a 502 error everytime I try and access is outranking some of my posts using my content.
  • My posts keep getting deindexed.
  • I lost ranking to a brand new blog thats about 2 months old for keywords I've held for months. The blog has taken all my keyword research and rewritten my content.
  • I've lost about 30% of my traffic over the past few weeks.
All I can think is that I've caught cooties and google no longer wants a relationship.
1.9 million words of content, 650 articles... I'm almost done with this shit show.
 
What's your backlink profile like?
It's OK. Some great links obtained from Haro, plenty of Guest posts. Tons of shit from image scrapers and coupon sites which I disavow periodically.
Screenshot_20200927-231239_Chrome.jpg
 
That's why I get the idea that it's better to be a service provider in this industry.

So sad for you, mate. I hope it works out in your favour eventually.
 
It's more painful than losing an 8/10 GF
It's more heartbreaking
I feel sorry for you
Keep fighting
Thanks mate.
That's why I get the idea that it's better to be a service provider in this industry.

So sad for you, mate. I hope it works out in your favour eventually.
Selling spades during a gold rush :)
 
Interesting. What about your anchor text?
Pretty standard. All Haro ones are branded, guest posts are a mixture. Nothing I would say was over optimize.

Tbh, November 2019 update knocked it out, but I published tons of new content and got to 350k page views a month during the summer peak. I never recovered the keywords I had before November.

It was looking great until a couple of weeks ago. And stuff just started dropping.
 
Mate, this exact shit has been going on since December 2019. Social shares like Pinterest or also spun content on parasite sites are totally overpowered. The crawler seems to have a problem. Keeps deindexing pages. Google act like this problem doesn't exist and blames webmasters. Check out all the threads on the Google support forum. Webmasters going mad, staff (mods etc.) are telling them its cuz their website is low quality.

Its a fucking shitshow and during December and January I told myself: "they are going to fix this. there is no way stuff like this is going to continue" but I was wrong. Till now, 10 months later, it is still the same old, broken shit. I have no idea what these guys did to the algorithm. What I noticed is it only happens in specific niches. Thats why some people don't have any problems and don't even know this problem exists and others (like me) are completely fucked and stressed because of this.
 
Google is broken for a while now. Get used to it. But (un)fortunately it affects only some niches.
 
  • It no longer shows the Favicon in serps.
  • My Pinterest pins are outranking my articles
  • A scraper site that produces a 502 error everytime I try and access is outranking some of my posts using my content.
  • My posts keep getting deindexed.
  • I lost ranking to a brand new blog thats about 2 months old for keywords I've held for months. The blog has taken all my keyword research and rewritten my content.
  • I've lost about 30% of my traffic over the past few weeks.

Well there's a lot of Google cooties going around right now. Let's see if you're in the wthishappeninggoogle illness camp.

- Favicon both desktop and mobile?
- Which OS are you testing on?
- Traffic loss - are you on AMP? If you are, has your AMP traffic decreased - despite same % of mobile users?
- Traffic loss - does your content appear in Google Discover? If so, has it declined?
- Can you narrow down past few days?
- What's your GSC report looking like? Inspect some URLS and check which canonical is being selected.

Pinterest pins problem is pretty standard these days. Ditto for scrapers and random new sites out ranking established ones. That's probs a thread all on its own.. but the above might narrow down some of the other issues.
 
Pretty standard. All Haro ones are branded, guest posts are a mixture. Nothing I would say was over optimize.

Tbh, November 2019 update knocked it out, but I published tons of new content and got to 350k page views a month during the summer peak. I never recovered the keywords I had before November.

It was looking great until a couple of weeks ago. And stuff just started dropping.
Well there's a lot of Google cooties going around right now. Let's see if you're in the wthishappeninggoogle illness camp.

- Favicon both desktop and mobile?
- Which OS are you testing on?
- Traffic loss - are you on AMP? If you are, has your AMP traffic decreased - despite same % of mobile users?
- Traffic loss - does your content appear in Google Discover? If so, has it declined?
- Can you narrow down past few days?
- What's your GSC report looking like? Inspect some URLS and check which canonical is being selected.

Pinterest pins problem is pretty standard these days. Ditto for scrapers and random new sites out ranking established ones. That's probs a thread all on its own.. but the above might narrow down some of the other issues.

What's the deal with favicon then? No favicon = no trust?
 
Well there's a lot of Google cooties going around right now. Let's see if you're in the wthishappeninggoogle illness camp.

- Favicon both desktop and mobile?
- Which OS are you testing on?
- Traffic loss - are you on AMP? If you are, has your AMP traffic decreased - despite same % of mobile users?
- Traffic loss - does your content appear in Google Discover? If so, has it declined?
- Can you narrow down past few days?
- What's your GSC report looking like? Inspect some URLS and check which canonical is being selected.

Pinterest pins problem is pretty standard these days. Ditto for scrapers and random new sites out ranking established ones. That's probs a thread all on its own.. but the above might narrow down some of the other issues.
Favicon appears to be only the serps on mobile.
I've tested on both Windows and android. It displays just fine on desktop when on the actual site.
Not on AMP.
Discover was lost in November, never got it back.
The deindexed URLs show as indexed in search console, but don't show in Serps. If I request indexing again they reappear.
The decline has been over the past 3 - 4 weeks. Small losses here and there, but it all counts.
 
Favicon appears to be only the serps on mobile.
I've tested on both Windows and android. It displays just fine on desktop when on the actual site.
Not on AMP.
Discover was lost in November, never got it back.
The deindexed URLs show as indexed in search console, but don't show in Serps. If I request indexing again they reappear.
The decline has been over the past 3 - 4 weeks. Small losses here and there, but it all counts.

Thanks. The Favicon is a weird problem that happens sometimes and sometimes not. Try using both the Google search widget on Android and Google Chrome for search and see if it's present on both.
There is a lot of weird stuff happening with GSC including some websites getting completely nuked because Google is picking the wrong canonical. Might be worth you sending the a message on twitter to JohnMu or opening a support ticket on the forums.
 
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