locobastard
Junior Member
- May 27, 2011
- 161
- 27
I have a 4-month-old site that suddenly just lost all its rankings about 3 weeks ago. According to GSC, the site doesn't have any manual actions or security issues.
I haven't made any changes to the site other than adding new posts, and I only add a new post every 3-4 weeks. It only has around 12 posts at the moment and I haven't done any link building yet.
The articles I post are high-quality, having been edited several times to check for grammar errors and information accuracy, and were written by humans, not AI.
Each article is well-optimized for the primary keyword it's targeting, including outbound links to related authority sites, internal contextual links to other posts, low keyword density, the keyword in the title and H1, the keyword in an H2, the keyword in the first 100 words, 2,000 or more words, etc.
I wasn't ranking in the top 10 for any of the keywords I was targeting, but all of them were in position 11-50 for months. Now, they're all either ranking in position 100+ or not at all.
Before the ranking drop, I'd submit new posts to GSC for indexing and they'd be indexed and ranked in the top 50 within 48-72 hours. Now, Google will still index new posts but they won't be added to the SERP for the targeted keyword.
Here's a screenshot showing the drop in impressions in GSC:
The ranking drop occurred around September 5th.
The niche is related to a YMYL niche but isn't YMYL. I'm wondering if Google sees the site's content as YMYL and hit the site.
To give an example of what I mean, imagine a site targeting "food weighing scales". It's not quite YMYL, but it's still related to the "nutrition" niche, which is YMYL.
Any ideas about what happened and/or what steps I should take to recover my rankings?
I haven't made any changes to the site other than adding new posts, and I only add a new post every 3-4 weeks. It only has around 12 posts at the moment and I haven't done any link building yet.
The articles I post are high-quality, having been edited several times to check for grammar errors and information accuracy, and were written by humans, not AI.
Each article is well-optimized for the primary keyword it's targeting, including outbound links to related authority sites, internal contextual links to other posts, low keyword density, the keyword in the title and H1, the keyword in an H2, the keyword in the first 100 words, 2,000 or more words, etc.
I wasn't ranking in the top 10 for any of the keywords I was targeting, but all of them were in position 11-50 for months. Now, they're all either ranking in position 100+ or not at all.
Before the ranking drop, I'd submit new posts to GSC for indexing and they'd be indexed and ranked in the top 50 within 48-72 hours. Now, Google will still index new posts but they won't be added to the SERP for the targeted keyword.
Here's a screenshot showing the drop in impressions in GSC:
The ranking drop occurred around September 5th.
The niche is related to a YMYL niche but isn't YMYL. I'm wondering if Google sees the site's content as YMYL and hit the site.
To give an example of what I mean, imagine a site targeting "food weighing scales". It's not quite YMYL, but it's still related to the "nutrition" niche, which is YMYL.
Any ideas about what happened and/or what steps I should take to recover my rankings?
