Penalty or Dance? Sudden SERP drop!

romeoesteban said:
WordPress 4.7 made I lose almost all alt tags on around 500 posts. I lost 2/3 of my traffic between dec 8 and today (34k a day to 12 k).

Previous versions of WordPress worked this way: the filename of the media would become the TITLE of the image, and the TITLE would also be the ALT, unless you specified an ALT manually. WordPress would use all media TITLE as ALT on all your posts. This changed in version 4.7. My site is image heavy and the ALT are very important for my rankings. I AM currently manually editing all of them.
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Good info. Sucks bad for you though. Thanks for sharing that.

Images isn't a problem for me. I get basically no image searches. I just put a pic up here and there so that I don't have to stare at thousands of uninterrupted words.

The more I look into this the more this is pissing me off.
 
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uesat said:
Same here. But I lost rankings for about 15 websites today. No idea why. None of them are even close to being over-optimized back-links wise. And stuck on page 2 for months for a bunch of them too.
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Are all 15 sites on the same hosting plan?
 
romeoesteban said:
WordPress 4.7 made I lose almost all alt tags on around 500 posts. I lost 2/3 of my traffic between dec 8 and today (34k a day to 12 k).

Previous versions of WordPress worked this way: the filename of the media would become the TITLE of the image, and the TITLE would also be the ALT, unless you specified an ALT manually. WordPress would use all media TITLE as ALT on all your posts. This changed in version 4.7. My site is image heavy and the ALT are very important for my rankings. I AM currently manually editing all of them.
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I doubt alt tags even matter that much honestly.
 
Same here for a few of my sites.. I have lost around 50% of the traffic ... Strange thing is all of the keywords moved from page 1 to other pages but whats different with this and other penalties is that not all KW dropped to pages 5 and 6... I have few keywords on page 2 and 3 and some just went straight out of top 100...Whats funny is that most of those pages where ranked without any links to them so im not sure what should be a problem with those...

I have read that it could be sidebar links which are do follow..I have tried changing those to nofollow so im waiting to see if there are any positive movements ...Would love to hear if anyone has a same issue and has successfully recovered his site..
 
spectrejoe said:
I doubt alt tags even matter that much honestly.
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maybe not, but it would be an odd coincidence that i started losing my rankings two days after ALT tags from around 6000 images disappeared after I upgraded to wordpress 4.7. if my site recover after i fix all, this will be confirmed.
 
pike222 said:
Same here for a few of my sites.. I have lost around 50% of the traffic ... Strange thing is all of the keywords moved from page 1 to other pages but whats different with this and other penalties is that not all KW dropped to pages 5 and 6... I have few keywords on page 2 and 3 and some just went straight out of top 100...Whats funny is that most of those pages where ranked without any links to them so im not sure what should be a problem with those...

I have read that it could be sidebar links which are do follow..I have tried changing those to nofollow so im waiting to see if there are any positive movements ...Would love to hear if anyone has a same issue and has successfully recovered his site..
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Same here. On some sites I have kw's on page 1 that are in the same position that they have been in forever, while others kw's for the same site went from page 1 to page 3/4. Just seems very random.

I would get it if I had sitewide huge drop in rankings, but it just looks so scattered and chaotic right now.

I just looked at one page on a site. The primary kw went from #3 to #22. For the very same page a related kw that was at #8 is still at #8.

I need to spend the weekend sorting this out. I wish one of you smart people would get to the bottom of this.
 
I've also noticed it but I'm seeing a massive increase in traffic instead. First I just thought it was a new semrush update but I guess not.

HQ94r4k
 
uesat said:
they're on 2 hosting plans
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All of my sites (6 or so?) for my offline business are on the same hosting plan. I was thinking that may be an issue.

So you have 15 sites spread on 2 hosting plans that were all hit about the same?
 
gtull2 said:
All of my sites (6 or so?) for my offline business are on the same hosting plan. I was thinking that may be an issue.

So you have 15 sites spread on 2 hosting plans that were all hit about the same?
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I have 2 new sites on the same hosting and they are normal, but that's maybe because they're new
 
I have 1 site that's been hit pretty hard a few days after updating to wordpress 4.7.

Sites I have running 4.6 are pretty stable.

Anyone else notice the rank loss after updating wp or had a big hit in the last few weeks while still on 4.6?
 
pawly said:
I have 1 site that's been hit pretty hard a few days after updating to wordpress 4.7.

Sites I have running 4.6 are pretty stable.

Anyone else notice the rank loss after updating wp or had a big hit in the last few weeks while still on 4.6?
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Interesting.

But how can alt tags be that important for actually ranking on google? Doesn't make sense to me. And I never wrote Alt tags anyways so...
 
spectrejoe said:
Interesting.

But how can alt tags be that important for actually ranking on google? Doesn't make sense to me. And I never wrote Alt tags anyways so...
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I don't have a problem with alt tags, that was another poster. I have a problem with ranking drops and it could still have something to do with WP 4.7.
 
Same here, many my manual HQ sites got hit too. But you know what? My super fkin spamming automatic sites got a fkin a lot traffic than before. I am really pissed off man... dont know why,
 
gtull2 said:
All of my sites (6 or so?) for my offline business are on the same hosting plan. I was thinking that may be an issue.

So you have 15 sites spread on 2 hosting plans that were all hit about the same?
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Yes. Though it doesn't make sense to me that Google would hit a hosting server since hundreds of websites would be affected by it.
 
pakissa said:
Same here, many my manual HQ sites got hit too. But you know what? My super fkin spamming automatic sites got a fkin a lot traffic than before. I am really pissed off man... dont know why,
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I'm seeing something similar. One crap site I have that is old garbage got a boost. It's so bad too. ?????
 
pakissa said:
Same here, many my manual HQ sites got hit too. But you know what? My super fkin spamming automatic sites got a fkin a lot traffic than before. I am really pissed off man... dont know why,
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Yes, I checked some spam forums with junk backlink profiles got huge rank-up... link-spamming back again?!?
 
This is happening from the start of December for some weird reason. I have also lost 50% of my traffic, without making anything wrong to get a penalty. What a period of time for this to happen....
 
Anyone had any luck in figuring out wtf is wrong and how to fix this...i almost wish i got a manual penalty so i would know to start a new site :)
 
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