Recent Google Update: What's Your Opinion On This?

I let my websites expire few days back so I do not care for now.

Every single one of my sites has suffered a huge drop in traffic. This algo update has been brutal so far.

krishnaverma said:

I let my websites expire few days back so I do not care for now.

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Oh, that was very informative, thank you for replying here .

Intense ranking changes for 3 weeks now and RIDICULOUS loss of rankings and traffic the past days.
Had stable top-5 rankings for months and now almost ALL my keywords have been knocked into nowhere on most sites.

Just my low quality testing sites with thin content and spammy links are doing just fine and climb up the rankings.

Bullshit. That must be a test for the reaction of us SEO's, hopefully google gets sane again within the next few weeks.

Something similar happened to my sites over the weekend. Sites were ranking on page-1 for main and supporting keywords for over a year and had steady traffic and conversion, suddenly they just dropped to page 2 & 3 on Saturday and moved down to page 4 & 5 on Sunday.

Not sure what's happening :/

I am also facing the same issue. my sites Alexa ranks became ups and downs

I'm getting pumbled too. Same feelings as you guys. First thinking it was a penalty, but cant figure out what for. Honestly as messed up as it sounds, it makes me feel better to hear that I'm not the only one going through this too.

So here are what i consider the risky issues with my site:
100+ links from PBNs (good ones I trust though)
probably a little bit too much use of exact anchor text
hardly any links from relevant sources. my whole backlink profile is diversity from everywhere, and then pbns.

Do you guys have similar "risky" characteristics for your sites?

I have a intense and rediculous dropping of ranking the pass days. The ranking kocked into nowhere, so bad thing, i hope it will recover.

KennyH said:

I'm getting pumbled too. Same feelings as you guys. First thinking it was a penalty, but cant figure out what for. Honestly as messed up as it sounds, it makes me feel better to hear that I'm not the only one going through this too.

So here are what i consider the risky issues with my site:
100+ links from PBNs (good ones I trust though)
probably a little bit too much use of exact anchor text
hardly any links from relevant sources. my whole backlink profile is diversity from everywhere, and then pbns.

Do you guys have similar "risky" characteristics for your sites?

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I hope it is not a penalty. I don't have similar riskly characteristics as my backlinks are almost comments

Nothing here

KennyH said:

I'm getting pumbled too. Same feelings as you guys. First thinking it was a penalty, but cant figure out what for. Honestly as messed up as it sounds, it makes me feel better to hear that I'm not the only one going through this too.

So here are what i consider the risky issues with my site:
100+ links from PBNs (good ones I trust though)
probably a little bit too much use of exact anchor text
hardly any links from relevant sources. my whole backlink profile is diversity from everywhere, and then pbns.

Do you guys have similar "risky" characteristics for your sites?

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I don't think this update is tied to backlinks honestly. After speaking to many people, a ton of folks with completely whitehat sites are suffering just as much as people with grey and black hat sites. In my opinion, this has more to do with content, page layout, or something else.

I think the new update has to do with mobile first ranking.

I have seen drop in traffic, trying to figure out still what may have actually been targeted.

KennyH said:

I'm getting pumbled too. Same feelings as you guys. First thinking it was a penalty, but cant figure out what for. Honestly as messed up as it sounds, it makes me feel better to hear that I'm not the only one going through this too.

So here are what i consider the risky issues with my site:
100+ links from PBNs (good ones I trust though)
probably a little bit too much use of exact anchor text
hardly any links from relevant sources. my whole backlink profile is diversity from everywhere, and then pbns.

Do you guys have similar "risky" characteristics for your sites?

Click to expand...

Exactly the same situation here with same risks .

The past weeks 8/10 Sites dropped from Page 1 to 4,5,6,7 ...continuously falling.
Today the falling stopped on almost ALL sites and keywords went up for most sites. I mean the rankings are still horrible, but most keywords went up a bit. Might be a sign of recovering from the havoc, hopefully.

I have some WAY more spammy and low quality sites that are doing just fine and aren't affected, so I don't think links/anchors should be the issue.

Let's keep updating guys, may the spook come to an end soon.

So what are your plans to recover? Personally, I'm in the process of building more PBN links, all LSI keywords to help even out anchor text. I don't really have any links from facebook, so I might try that too. Not sure yet.

I wrote a post about this around late April. For me this is when the changes happened. Right away I lost about 20% of my traffic from search after being at an all time high. A variety of links, aged property, etc... SO now I am recovering, and about back to where I was 8 weeks ago. Let's home this trend keeps going.

headphonesguy said:

I wrote a post about this around late April. For me this is when the changes happened. Right away I lost about 20% of my traffic from search after being at an all time high. A variety of links, aged property, etc... SO now I am recovering, and about back to where I was 8 weeks ago. Let's home this trend keeps going.

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Did you adjust your strategy at all? Did make any proactive changes to recover?

On thing that is worth mentioning from my site is that I have 4 money pages. One page is about 2 years old. It dropped but not terribly. My other three pages are newer, less than 6 months old. They were crushed. All 4 pages had similar backlink profiles. Good diversity, plenty of referring domains, and then a recent trickle of PBNs. Age is the only real variable that I can think of that's different between pages that got hit hard and those that didnt get hit so bad.

KennyH said:

Did you adjust your strategy at all? Did make any proactive changes to recover?

On thing that is worth mentioning from my site is that I have 4 money pages. One page is about 2 years old. It dropped but not terribly. My other three pages are newer, less than 6 months old. They were crushed. All 4 pages had similar backlink profiles. Good diversity, plenty of referring domains, and then a recent trickle of PBNs. Age is the only real variable that I can think of that's different between pages that got hit hard and those that didnt get hit so bad.

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No changes are being made until this settles out. These pages are old, well ranked, proper structure, and money funnel from 3 different areas (ebook, ecommerce, and affiliate). From what I can tell so far, affiliate income is way up, ebook sales are torched to zero, and ecom sales are up. These ebooks are not seasonal, and messaging was not changed in any way during this time. It was selling about $500/mo in ebooks that literally went to zero within a week, so I know it's Google.

Now looking 4 weeks back it's actually a net positive for me revenue wise, which is telling me that although search traffic went DOWN, a different mix of people are now being served my money pages that prior. So it seems to be a really deep change to the way Google works right now.

Just have to keep watching.

Whether this also affects Google's index ?? Because there are some my blog is hard index

KennyH said:

I'm getting pumbled too. Same feelings as you guys. First thinking it was a penalty, but cant figure out what for. Honestly as messed up as it sounds, it makes me feel better to hear that I'm not the only one going through this too.

So here are what i consider the risky issues with my site:
100+ links from PBNs (good ones I trust though)
probably a little bit too much use of exact anchor text
hardly any links from relevant sources. my whole backlink profile is diversity from everywhere, and then pbns.

Do you guys have similar "risky" characteristics for your sites?

Click to expand...

Hey, I am glad that I'm not the only one also... I guess. As far as site characteristics, two of my three affiliate sites were slammed while the third has not moved at all. My ecomm site has also not budged. The two that were hit are on different hosts, different WMT accounts, completely isolated from each other.

One of them is a really aged domain with some awesome backlinks (freakonomics, thewirecutter, thesweethome, refinery29, etc). These all point to an inner informational. In the past 2 months I've been building high quality (DA 30+, niche relevant) backlinks with exact match anchor text to buying guides I've written. All of these buying guides have disappeared almost completely, even the ones that hadn't had any links built to them yet. The informational page with awesome links is still mostly #1 or #2 for related terms, but it has slipped slightly (traffic off maybe 15-20%). The reason I'm thinking this is anchor text related is that as of today if you search "best widget X" my page on widget Y comes up at #94 while my page on widget X is nowhere. It's a good page... 2000 words, used to rank #12 or so for "best widget X." The thing is I built PBN link to the widget X page with the anchor "best widget X" and have built no links to the widget Y page. I don't know... maybe it's something. I'm new here and don't know if sharing sites is a thing that's done... I don't mind sharing the URL of this one if that's allowed/reasonable.

The other is maybe 4 years old and has about 12 money pages. All of them used to rank in top 5 for their main keywords and #1 or #2 for "best" and "review" variations. They have completely disappeared for the main keywords and have dropped to #4-#10 for "best." Some of them have held on to page 1-2 for "reviews" but others have disappeared completely for those types of queries.

All of this happened to both sites at exactly the same time on Saturday afternoon.

The affiliate site that didn't get hit is crap and I've been building the exact same sorts of PBN links to that site. Maybe the only difference is that the money page there is the homepage and all the PBN links have been doing to that instead of to inner pages.

Definitely seems like a penalty (no notice in WMT so presumably algorithmic). Particularly irrelevant pages on the site ranking for a keyword while the page specifically about that keyword product is nowhere.