Something is up with Google..

Over the past two years I've been using PBNs cleanly to rank many of my clients in the top 10 for competitive keywords.. really dominating local niches specifically..

Now I'm not sure what happened but in the past month I'm seeing a lot of my clients slip down position after position for every single keyword.. the same ones I had used highly secure footprint safe PBNs for..

They haven't completely gone off first page but it's going down to bottom of 1st - mid 2nd pages and my clients are starting to question what's going on.. I had a client with no over-optimized anchors or anything of that sort who has been #1 for 20 keywords for the past two years and he's now slipping to mid 1st page - bottom 1st page...

The past few weeks have been really bad, is anyone else experiencing this? I make sure to be very careful with my anchors and have good distribution, I also post articles monthly on my blogs to make sure I have other articles on there.. I also create other links like editorial power links / local citations / social bookmarks / 2.0's etc.

Definitely starting to get worried.. back in October that update was magic for me.. clients were moving up daily and positions were changing positively all the time.. I even had some clients recover from the old Google penguin update.. now it's all going downhill..

I created two new contextual links recently for a promotional product client on my relevant niche PBNs, back in October he would've been up there within a matter of days already getting traction.. now the keywords haven't even popped up on Google yet and we're 2 months in..

Have they all used your PBN?

RayBay said:

Have they all used your PBN?

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Yeah I have a vast network with many protected sites.. all of them are doing well for the most part but the past few weeks have been weird (and this is the first time any such thing has happened).. and I'm reading the forums and I see other people are saying there is something strange afoot..

It feels like things went back a bit in the sense that the links don't get picked up nearly as fast now.. those two PBN links I created have not yet been picked up for the 1-2 months period.. but I did similar links to these before when the update was happening daily and it was picking them up instantly..

just want to let you know that Google Big Holidays update is near so expect google dancing in coming weeks

seoz87 said:

just want to let you know that Google Big Holidays update is near so expect google dancing in coming weeks

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I hope so, Google hasn't been this cool on algoroo in a while..

Seen similar comments in groups where long standing rankings have dropped recently since start of December, without any obvious pattern or reason.

As google states they pause tweaking their algo during the holiday period and in Jan usually we see way more flux because more delayed tweaks are going live, I would wait a month or two till things settle down. When exactly the slippery started for your sites?

pandasfriend said:

As google states they pause tweaking their algo during the holiday period and in Jan usually we see way more flux because more delayed tweaks are going live, I would wait a month or two till things settle down. When exactly the slippery started for your sites?

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Probably around early - mid December, but now it's getting gradually worse.. that is interesting though and I'm crossing my fingers you're right!

Very strange. I haven't noticed anything unusual.

Do your PBNs receive traffic? Is the traffic to your PBNs fluctuating a lot?

Some say so, but looks doubtful. Maybe a niche specific adjustment done by Google's AI on the fly. That is my guess.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-algorithm-update-holidays-23208.html

-ThopHayt

Same is happening with me, I added a couple of PBNS last month but they haven't picked up in my money GWT yet, in the past it used be so much quicker.

I am curious how is the top 3 competitors?, did they move down as well or did they stayed at the top while your client sites moved down.

Right now SEO does feel fucked. We've been waiting for some sites to rank for SIX MONTHS, they keep dancing and it's enough to drive you nuts. Each domain has been carefully setup, has great onpage SEO, 2.0's, and a steady amount of PBN links all with decent metrics of course.

Something is definitely up right now, look around, I see the same threads over and over again. I think G are getting wise and clamping down by making us wait longer to put us off.

I know it sounds a little far fetched, but what else could be the cause that has taken such affect on so many of us. Perhaps I'm just being a paranoid Pete, who knows.

I don't know what is happening, but i got some strange filling, that they put this new algorithm in "wait" mode.. I think they want to catch us with simple method.. Just leave users on wait and let them be nervous and start building more and more backlinks thinking they will rank if they build more and more backlinks.. Then the algorithm switch from "wait" to "progress" and bammm penalize the most spammed websites ?

fan690 said:

Same is happening with me, I added a couple of PBNS last month but they haven't picked up in my money GWT yet, in the past it used be so much quicker.

I am curious how is the top 3 competitors?, did they move down as well or did they stayed at the top while your client sites moved down.

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That's the thing.. it's random. In some cases I saw some authority big sites take over the top positions and push all the local competitors down to the bottom 5, and then in other cases I saw most of the sites just stick where they are and only mine are moving down.. that is the part that makes me most worried.

However, looking at algoroo it does align with the theory that there might be an algorithmic break here, it's extremely low right now.

For those saying that it feels like they're specifically making us wait (as opposed to everyone else), I highly doubt it. Google indexes a gazillion websites daily, I doubt they only pinpointed people with PBN blog links coming in because there are non-pbn blog links being sent in all the time and if you have good protection they can't make that connection that it's a network.. so it looks like any other contextual blog link (for which thousands of fresh ones would be counted daily). They would have to halt all their link indexing for this to happen (or simply punish so many websites it would be unfathomable and we would hear a lot more about it), so it does seem to point in the direction of there being some update break.

To further elaborate on my point above, it also seems strange that the websites would only slip 1-2-3 positions overall. If it was really a penalty I think they would disappear completely..

I got exactly same slipping happening with sites that used to rank for great terms long time. It mostly have started already on Sep/October, when Penguin 4.0 came out. Since it sounds so similar to your problems, I'd suggest that you are victim of Penguin as well.

Just couple of examples how it looks like:



I would very much like to check your sites if I could find any similarities if you don't mind and/or have a chat about these issues. Please contact me via PM if interested.

domainmadness said:

I got exactly same slipping happening with sites that used to rank for great terms long time. It mostly have started already on Sep/October, when Penguin 4.0 came out. Since it sounds so similar to your problems, I'd suggest that you are victim of Penguin as well.

Just couple of examples how it looks like:
View attachment 85952
View attachment 85953

I would very much like to check your sites if I could find any similarities if you don't mind and/or have a chat about these issues. Please contact me via PM if interested.

Click to expand...

Nice graph, Can you please explain how you were able to recover?

moneyflower said:

Nice graph, Can you please explain how you were able to recover?

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I would be more than happy to share that, but I haven't recoverd, still slowly slipping.

same problem here.. ranking going down or dance every few hours and sites that were ranked and stable for 2 years started to drop not much but enough to not get good traffic. also pbn results are not like in past both from my own pbn and some that i tried to purchase here i feel like they not give results at all, positions not move up or it they do for 2 days then drop again.. and weird thing is that competition not drop at all even some of them are using so much of trash links, hacked links from homepage..

Seems Google does not "devalue" spam and instead is ranking it Happens in my niches too aswell.