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

FollowTrain org said:

does buying SEO on here affect google rank? (in a bad way - i mean)

Click to expand...

fasttrak said:

Got to disagree from what I am seeing. I had a sudden drop from top 10 to 80-100 for a bunch of keywords across all my sites. I read this post 3 days ago, re-configured Yoast, re-submitted sitemap and fetch for each site, including links from home page. 3 days later and my SERPs are returning to nearly normal. Not quite as good as before but I expect that to change over the next 7 days.

So on the basis that I did nothing to each of these sites (10+ sites), I have to attribute this to thin content. This would effect other sites which are not using Yoast.

Click to expand...

fasttrak said:

Got to disagree from what I am seeing. I had a sudden drop from top 10 to 80-100 for a bunch of keywords across all my sites. I read this post 3 days ago, re-configured Yoast, re-submitted sitemap and fetch for each site, including links from home page. 3 days later and my SERPs are returning to nearly normal. Not quite as good as before but I expect that to change over the next 7 days.

So on the basis that I did nothing to each of these sites (10+ sites), I have to attribute this to thin content. This would effect other sites which are not using Yoast.

Click to expand...

Ozzyzig said:

The curious thing is that I was running on an older version of Yoast so I thought I wasn't affected by this. Anyway, I updated to the new version and resubmitted my sitemap and the rankings have started to come back up quite nicely.
Now I can't say for definite that this is the sole reason (especially since the images weren't being indexed before) for the return to rankings since I had made a few backlinks that have I am thinking are just kicking in.
However, I'd recommend that everyone does this regardless and resubmit their sitemap.

Click to expand...

fb3003 said:

i think everyone's ranking is improving, regardless of fixing yoast issue. because one of my sites, i did not fix the yoast issue, and it is improving as my other site. I think google undid their algorithm between may 17-20 and now it is slowly we are getting back to way things were 10 days ago.

would be interested for you guys to check your google search console and see if you notice this improvement between may 17-20th?

thanks

Click to expand...

fb3003 said:

i think everyone's ranking is improving, regardless of fixing yoast issue. because one of my sites, i did not fix the yoast issue, and it is improving as my other site. I think google undid their algorithm between may 17-20 and now it is slowly we are getting back to way things were 10 days ago.

would be interested for you guys to check your google search console and see if you notice this improvement between may 17-20th?

thanks

Click to expand...

zapgoose said:

Go to your Google search console and look at the index status. Mid March for some reason Yoast messed up and started to allow Google to index image posts. Since these image posts are only the image this is thin content which Google doesn't like. Combine that with older sites and it might trigger Panda or the version of Panda that lives now.

Edit: To give you an example, I had one site with a Google index of 100 that went to 900 within a week when looking at the Search Console. That is not natural and I don't have 900 posts. Those extra posts were Yoast allowing all the images on the site to get index. WordPress creates a post for all media such as images and since these posts are thin Yoast for years has been making them noindex but Mid-March something messed up and they got indexed. Another way to check is to go to Google and do the "site:YourDomain" search to see how many results you get. If the results you get are 1.5x more then the actual post you normally have then something is wrong. To fix it go into your WordPress, then to the Yoast Plugin, then "search appearance", and under the "media" tab make sure the button "Show Media in search results?" is set to "NO". This will keep Google from indexing your images.

Click to expand...

fb3003 said:

guys - exactly, how did you fix your yoast isse? is it what the above user has mentioned?\
please take a look at this https://kb.yoast.com/kb/redirect-image-attachment-urls/
if you put "redirect attachment urls to the attachment itself" to yes, then "show media in search result" option is gone.

so when you say you have fixed it, exactly what did you do?

now with that all said, apparently putting the attachment to URL does not work the way it is supposed to. take a look at this:
https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/9316
it provides a manual work-around

what is interesting is that yoast is silent on the fix
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/media-attachment-urls-settings/
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/attachment-page-indexing-disaster/

Click to expand...

fb3003 said:

guys - exactly, how did you fix your yoast isse? is it what the above user has mentioned?\
please take a look at this https://kb.yoast.com/kb/redirect-image-attachment-urls/
if you put "redirect attachment urls to the attachment itself" to yes, then "show media in search result" option is gone.

so when you say you have fixed it, exactly what did you do?

now with that all said, apparently putting the attachment to URL does not work the way it is supposed to. take a look at this:
https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/9316
it provides a manual work-around

what is interesting is that yoast is silent on the fix
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/media-attachment-urls-settings/
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/attachment-page-indexing-disaster/

Click to expand...

kasabian21 said:

Definitely some action over the last 12 hours. Some sites up a few pages, some down a few.

Click to expand...

thescrrr said:

yep, on one of my money article some kw went to page 3 while other in the same article went up to top 3.

Click to expand...

wawangjan said:

Same Here

Click to expand...

alexkevin said:

I don't know what's going on but my website doesn't get affected by this update yet and I hope it won't get affects!

Click to expand...

Zbigniew said:

Okey, then we can all stop holding our breath and thank you for this information!

Click to expand...

wawangjan said:

Same Here

Click to expand...