Penalty or Dance? Sudden SERP drop!

moneyflower said:
I have a 301 Redirect on my affected blog, but recently, I did a 301 to one of my competitors (Forgive me Oh Lord) and I was tracking his rankings on Serplab, the page I did the 301 soared higher on Google, the 301 stayed only for about two Weeks, before I removed it, so I dont think its a 301 thing, btw, the backlinks from the 301 are complete Spam, about 6,000 of them. LOL
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Based on what you just wrote, I wouldn't rule it out though.
 
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domainmadness said:
3. User signals
Bounce rate, page views, time on site and dwell time (pogo sticking) are clearly something that Google's AI is analysing, but it's very hard to analyze since we only get data from our own sites, not from the competition. Anyway, this could be a reason for some sites slowly dropping. How is your site design compared to your competitors - would you honestly say that you should have better user engagement stats than them?

Any thoughts?
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My user signals aren't that bad so this is not the cause
 
spectrejoe said:
My highest anchor text is brand and it's only 10% lol.

5-6 word 1-1.5% max
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moneyflower said:
Thanks for this Nice Tool bro, one of my page that was hit has a kw density of 3.93 for my main keyword, its a one word keyword, all other long tails that are affected have a Keyword density higher than 3, I personally think that is very high, Nevertheless, I will wait for others that are affected too to check their density too before reducing it
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From my experiments the keyword density is way too high if it's over 1.4% for a 3 word keyword (going by that tool). So having that for a 5-6 word keyword must be triggering overoptimization. Maybe big G made overoptimization hit even harder recently.

For a 2 word keyword over 1.7% is too high in my experience. For a 1 word keyword I haven't experimented, but i'd guess around 2.5% if there is a limit.

Could try reducing and see what happens after a recrawl.

1 word - > 0.7% < 2.5%
2 word - > 0.7% < 1.7%
3 word - > 0.7% < 1.4%

Thats what I personally go for after getting hit with optimization for ages and experimenting down bit by bit. There's a guide here I think by PHPbuilt that outlines the importance of low KW density on the page as a whole.
 
spectrejoe said:
My user signals aren't that bad so this is not the cause
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Do you know your competitors bounce rate, page views, time on site, dwell time & "pogo sticking stats" and SERP ctr? Without that information, how you can judge that your signals aren't that bad?
 
zacatictac said:
Same here. Searching for any answers. Google changed something and we need to find the common denominator. It seems like everyone affected was doing very well before and then just got shit on to nothing?
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Did you use disavow tool?
 
There could be an affiliate and maybe popunder penalty. A site dropped on page 5-10 so I deactivated all affiliate sutt. I added content, fixed 404/soft 404 errors and the ranking was restored so I activated my popup and affiliate links again. Aaaand here we go again - drop.

Also, after doing some research I found some information about the popup penalty. Seems to be true now in 2017. You can try to work around it somehow with cookie and referrer tricks.
It should be only for mobile and only on popups but I think google can not filter properly and punishes other sites who might have something similar.
 
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intenso09 said:
There could be an affiliate and maybe popunder penalty. A site dropped on page 5-10 so I deactivated all affiliate sutt. I added content, fixed 404/soft 404 errors and the ranking was restored so I activated my popup and affiliate links again. Aaaand here we go again - drop.
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My monetization model is basically adsense, though I have one stupid sticky Notification Bar dangling on my Pages!
 
CarlSagan said:
From my experiments the keyword density is way too high if it's over 1.4% for a 3 word keyword (going by that tool). So having that for a 5-6 word keyword must be triggering overoptimization. Maybe big G made overoptimization hit even harder recently.

For a 2 word keyword over 1.7% is too high in my experience. For a 1 word keyword I haven't experimented, but i'd guess around 2.5% if there is a limit.

Could try reducing and see what happens after a recrawl.

1 word - > 0.7% < 2.5%
2 word - > 0.7% < 1.7%
3 word - > 0.7% < 1.4%

Thats what I personally go for after getting hit with optimization for ages and experimenting down bit by bit. There's a guide here I think by PHPbuilt that outlines the importance of low KW density on the page as a whole.
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I think Over optimization might probably be the reason though, a certain Page is still up on the first page for a certain keyword whereas that same page is off the Planet for another keyword that use to be on the first page too.

P.S: Two Youtube Videos just came out of no where and pushed me further downwards
 
I was just working for my clients site and I had loosed the ranking in the December and I think PBN's and others will not work in future.
Google now don't care about quantity, they care about quality.
 
I experience this on early December too
Mt site is Amazon affiliate site

Will try to remove all affiliate link
And see if it's good, like others mentioned
 
intenso09 said:
There could be an affiliate and maybe popunder penalty. A site dropped on page 5-10 so I deactivated all affiliate sutt. I added content, fixed 404/soft 404 errors and the ranking was restored so I activated my popup and affiliate links again. Aaaand here we go again - drop.

Also, after doing some research I found some information about the popup penalty. Seems to be true now in 2017. You can try to work around it somehow with cookie and referrer tricks.
It should be only for mobile and only on popups but I think google can not filter properly and punishes other sites who might have something similar.
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Had no popup, no 404 errors.

Still got hit
 
Boxonsure said:
I was just working for my clients site and I had loosed the ranking in the December and I think PBN's and others will not work in future.
Google now don't care about quantity, they care about quality.
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Of course Google cares about quality, not quantity. Been that way for a while. But you can have quality from PBNs - just make quality PBNs. Just because your crappy PBN didn't work, doesn't mean PBNs are dead for everyone.
 
Some nice tips from all of you..We have to work toghether and try to find an issue that caused this problem..As you can read above what i did to restore one KW that went from top 5 to page 2 and back to top 5..But its just one keyword..Thing is on my site i just had few pages where my affiliate links are , and i have never used them on other pages that were in top 20 as i always look to rank at least top 5 before putting affiliate links, and that pages too went from top 20 to oblivion..So only thing i have to check is the over optimization and see if that will be of any help...Ill post my results if i see positive movement.
 
Peter opened a similar thread back in december. At that time, it was only me and him. Looks like everyone lost traffic.

I have also lost 50% of my traffic across 12 sites.
 
Yup my main sites got hit too around mid December, don't know why. Earnings cut in half!
 
umerjutt00 said:
Peter opened a similar thread back in december. At that time, it was only me and him. Looks like everyone lost traffic.

I have also lost 50% of my traffic across 12 sites.
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Any idea what may have been the cause? You have a lot more data than we do since you were hit on 12 sites
 
From what i can tell links are not the issue on two sites i had totally different linkbuilding approach and also 90% of the pages that got hit didnt even have 1 link pointed to them..Would love to hear Umertts thoughts since he had so many sites hit..
 
spectrejoe said:
Any idea what may have been the cause? You have a lot more data than we do since you were hit on 12 sites
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The only thing which was common in all of sites were "affiliate links". So yeah, maybe that's the reason.
 
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