Penalty or Dance? Sudden SERP drop!

umerjutt00 said:

The only thing which was common in all of sites were "affiliate links". So yeah, maybe that's the reason.

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Really?

Don't understand how that's possible though.

xxUnivaxx on his journey said he has 30-40+ links per post and when I asked him he said his traffic increased.

I have at most 30 links and that's stretching it, usually 20 per post with 1-1.5k words

spectrejoe said:

Really?

Don't understand how that's possible though.

xxUnivaxx on his journey said he has 30-40+ links per post and when I asked him he said his traffic increased.

I have at most 30 links and that's stretching it, usually 20 per post with 1-1.5k words

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It was just a wild guess.. To be honest, I also have no idea why this happened.

If the site I mentioned goes up in ranking again in a few days I will be pretty sure that is has something to do with advertising.

Feel free to read more from my thread here where I discussed similar issues to this thread: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/something-is-up-with-google.905384/

Here's where it's gotten weird for me as of late:

When I did my PBNs (all private belonging to me with safe foot prints / ip, everything) back in October, clients of mine within two weeks were already popping up on top 3 pages for my target anchors..

In the past month since early / mid December, it doesn't matter if I make targeted anchors on my niche-relevant PBNs, for some reason it's not being counted as quickly. I see the links picked up on ahrefs and GWT, but for some reason Google is just not showing the site showing up anywhere for these target anchors, this is a STARK contrast compared to when I was doing the exact same thing between September - October and Google updates were happening frequently with immediate positive rankings.

It's not that there is a negative ranking now, most of my clients SERP positions are maintining / moving up a few / moving down a few, but for new clients whom I'm making targeted anchors I'm seeing ZERO movement up or down, none of the keywords are being picked up, and I have no idea why. So I wonder if they are purposely on a hiatus, so they see SEOs panic and start building links like crazy and they catch them...

is anyone else experiencing any of their new PBN contextual anchors not making a dent compared to before?

Anatomize said:

is anyone else experiencing any of their new PBN contextual anchors not making a dent compared to before?

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I'm not getting much any effect from PBN links at the moment or the effect is very much delayed and then it's really hard to pinpoint. Other link types are not giving much results either.

I don't have affiliate links on most of the sites so I wouldn't say it's that.

It shouldn't be over optimization, since the sites had ranked already 1-3 year.

So the only question in my mind is why now?

^ Yeah It's weird.. I'm not seeing any changes at all on the SERP for new keywords I'm targeting, this has never happened to me since I've started PBN.. so I really think they are pausing right now and purposely not moving anything - no dance.. but that's just based on what I'm seeing for several sites. My PBNs are expensive and highly niche relevant with good DA / PA, I control them fully and only my links go on them... they've always made a strong impact in terms of SERP positioning, so I'm not sure what's going on the past few weeks. I'm just hoping the storm passes and my clients start moving for these new keywords because it sucks on these new accounts where I can't show them progress because nothing is moving. Why the hell does Google always have to do this to people? Stop punishing people for things which your search engine is built upon, you're screwing up your own results and fucking over the little guy.

Anatomize said:

^ Yeah It's weird.. I'm not seeing any changes at all on the SERP for new keywords I'm targeting, this has never happened to me since I've started PBN.. so I really think they are pausing right now and purposely not moving anything - no dance.. but that's just based on what I'm seeing for several sites. My PBNs are expensive and highly niche relevant with good DA / PA, I control them fully and only my links go on them... they've always made a strong impact in terms of SERP positioning, so I'm not sure what's going on the past few weeks. I'm just hoping the storm passes and my clients start moving for these new keywords because it sucks on these new accounts where I can't show them progress because nothing is moving. Why the hell does Google always have to do this to people? Stop punishing people for things which your search engine is built upon, you're screwing up your own results and fucking over the little guy.

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Noo I am about to start building PBNs. I hope that they are not devalued by Google.

How about actual content relevance to keyword? My affiliate review pages aren't ranking well for X anymore (even de-indexing) but are for x reviews and permutations of that.

mechleader said:

How about actual content relevance to keyword? My affiliate review pages aren't ranking well for X anymore (even de-indexing) but are for x reviews and permutations of that.

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I'm seeing the same thing. I wonder if we can "trick" the algo. to rank us for what we want?

I think, it's somehow related to "Mobile optimization"... may be partially. I've updated my mobile presence (in G pagespeed it's now 92) and a few of the main KWs started improving... within 2 days. Though it's little early to have final comment.

Anyone noticed same?

newon said:

I think, it's somehow related to "Mobile optimization"... may be partially. I've updated my mobile presence (in G pagespeed it's now 92) and a few of the main KWs started improving... within 2 days. Though it's little early to have final comment.

Anyone noticed same?

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As long as you have a responsive theme and page load speed it shouldn't matter, I always optimize my sites like that so I'm sure that's not the reason why we lost the traffic

spectrejoe said:

As long as you have a responsive theme and page load speed it shouldn't matter, I always optimize my sites like that so I'm sure that's not the reason why we lost the traffic

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yeh.. I also have a responsive theme and page load speed is never an issue... but G Pagespeed was showing 75+. Now it's 90+... and the SERP seems to start regaining. It may be coincident or luck but it can be a point to take care of. What do you think?

I optimized page speed, affiliate stuff, mobile, errors like broken images, redirects and 404. Also built some trustful, low authority backlinks and the "penalty" is half as worse as it was at the moment. Maybe it's just an overall thing in quality, will report when it's gone.

newon said:

yeh.. I also have a responsive theme and page load speed is never an issue... but G Pagespeed was showing 75+. Now it's 90+... and the SERP seems to start regaining. It may be coincident or luck but it can be a point to take care of. What do you think?

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Google does not care about it's own "speedtest" if you mean google insights. What they care about is REAL speed and mobile friendliness.
Try to get good results at this tools and you are save. You must be under 2 seconds loading time, this should be considered as above average. I think for low size pages the best you can get are 500ms. Time to first byte is also important.
https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly
https://tools.pingdom.com/
https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx
https://www.webpagetest.org/

newon said:

yeh.. I also have a responsive theme and page load speed is never an issue... but G Pagespeed was showing 75+. Now it's 90+... and the SERP seems to start regaining. It may be coincident or luck but it can be a point to take care of. What do you think?

Click to expand...

Nah, my pagespeed insights are always 97-99 in every single website I have and I was still hit

Interested to know what's happening, I have same issues for my main keywords, but some are instead going up...

No one else has any input on this?

Still struggling with this as well. Some stuff is hanging on, some stuff is de-indexing. Not sure what to do at this point. Can't seem to find any correlation whatsoever in the sites that are ranking well now for where I was.

Removing all of my amazon affiliate links
Have no effect after a week or so

Waste of time. Can't win anymore. did perfect SEO on my site, high quality guest posts on high quality websites, all indexed, anchors well done, great website speed and after months it just drops for many keywords. Yet on 1st page, piece of shit websites with low quality links that never go down. No doubt you can still rank, but you need a lot of luck today.

Everyone ,

i wonder if the new https theory have tacken off ,where https websites get indexed heigher as prority
Anyone using https ssl Protocal?

The new wordpress update might be at fault as loads are saying that with old wordpress it all ok ...
I just wonder?

Some of you with the new wordpress update are saying thaf alt might do it ?
I dont think so....

This is a fact ,that google will punish any website with any popups and any popunders anythink related to popups....

Google dance maybe?
Think possable usally 2 to 3 months when happens...

Didffrent hosting?
No dont beleve that to many websites....

Aflicate links
Might be if there popups to the afflicate page maybe.....

Mobile afflicate
Usally they use popunders so might be punished not allowed anymore that a fact...

301
Naaaaa

Broken links
No dont think so.

Content?
Na most got good content.

Links to other related pages ?
Na loads do this and works good.

Pbn
Change in pbn all finish
Na never happen

Other websites that are spammy reported as increase in serp...

Spitting thousands of spammy links to a domain ?
Very weired that will be back to seo , but tier 3 increase in rank , very strange...


Wonder what it is?

At the monent shitty spammy websites are going up ranks.
Low crap spammed backlinks via the thousand and shitty content

Looks like a huge google dance going by the theory of spam websites increasing in serps....