Penalty or Dance? Sudden SERP drop!

On 17th December 2016, SERP for few of my main keywords dropped drastically.

I checked WMT, no manual action.
No recent backlinking
No major change in the posts... except few YT videos removed from posts (1 per post).
Changed color combination & logo for the site during start of December.

Can't understand what might have went wrong... any idea?

Same thing happened to one my sites. I'll recommend looking into CTR rates in GSC. During high traffic season a drop in CTR for ranking links might be one of the reasons behind drop in ranking. I also compared a competitors performance for the same keywords with mine. They had the exact opposite. I know my site has some UX issues. Finally check your bounce rate. It's not always content quality or backlinks, sometimes it's just visitors not sticking around and bouncing back to SERPs.
 
Same thing happened to one my sites. I'll recommend looking into CTR rates in GSC. During high traffic season a drop in CTR for ranking links might be one of the reasons behind drop in ranking. I also compared a competitors performance for the same keywords with mine. They had the exact opposite. I know my site has some UX issues. Finally check your bounce rate. It's not always content quality or backlinks, sometimes it's just visitors not sticking around and bouncing back to SERPs.

There is not much drop in CTR... it's around -1%. Bounce rate: around 50%, earlier 45%... there is not so much difference.
 
It's just the Google dance. I think Google may be testing something new in their ranking Algorithm. That's why we are seeing the dances.
 
How many of you who lost rankings are using PBN?

I doubt that it's a PBN. I have a small pbn pointing to the site, but I also have a lot of relevant niche backlinks from various websites. (There's just no way more whitehat than that and if google doesn't like that, then I don't know what's considered natural link building...)
 
Same problem here, My website 80% Traffic and ranking has dropped since 02 December 2017, I haven been using quality content. I was at a constant 5K-4k daily, right now , I'm at 1k-2k Daily and it keeps decreasing.
All major keywords were drop from 03 potion to 15, 20, 25 position. Even I didn't use PBN links.
Could someone help me that issue what is going on?
 
According to some french SEO gurus, it could be related to the 301. No more juice for the crappy use of the 301s.
 
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.

Very bad version
 
According to some french SEO gurus, it could be related to the 301. No more juice for the crappy use of the 301s.
Didn't have 301's. Only relevant 301's is the ones in my website to 301 broken links towards homepage
 
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.

How to fix that?
 
I checked not all of my KWs gone down in 1 day... it's almost 1-2 KWs everyday dipped suddenly. Again, some non-focused and low volume KWs shown good rise in SERP. .. it's frustrating, really!!!

Anyone found any solution to this?
 
It might be that google update its algorithm or you've been outranked by your competitors. Also check if you're losing links. Update your site, add some fresh content and continue optimizing your site.
 
Anyone seen their keyword drop ten places, then after two days complete go? Happened in the past 10 days to 3 sties.
 
Anyone seen their keyword drop ten places, then after two days complete go? Happened in the past 10 days to 3 sties.

3 of my keywords completely dissapeared from top 100 but they were shitty keywords anyways
 
3 of my keywords completely dissapeared from top 100 but they were shitty keywords anyways
Any correlation in your link building?

Mine were my sites main keyword, and a few other partials. Still ranks for long tail.
 
Any correlation in your link building?

Mine were my sites main keyword, and a few other partials. Still ranks for long tail.
Just keywords of some posts I forgot about long ago that I never really tried to rank
 
Same here, lost 60% traffic on 6th dec 2016. i have updated the wordpress but i just checked all my alt tags are still there...
let me know if you anyone downgrade to wordpress old version and noticed increase in SERP or traffic back????
also i have noticed the drop is in desktop traffic, mobile traffic is kinda same. i am using WP Mobile Touch plugin for mobile site... so i think drop in desktop traffic and SERP may be due to wordpress 4.7..
what you say???
 
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