Sudden Ranked Drop? Google Algo Update?

aw5 said:
I am not convinced that there is no issue at all - there's still some weird stuff going on with the index. Maybe it's just to mess with us. For me mobile friendly issues persist even when every other tool/bot finds my site fine. If it's not a "bug" then it may be reduced crawl budget due to algorithmic penalty?
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Yeah this is the weird thing for me; the mobile usability, speed and sitelinks searchbox tabs all show 1 url - the homepage. Also the the fact that we all have the issue that our URLs are "indexed, not submitted in sitemap" is strange. On top of that we all seem to have the issue that when we search for our website with the site:mysite.com parameter only a few pages appear while they're still indexed when we search for site:mysite.com/exacturl. All of these "bugs" occured right when our rankings went to shit. It just doesn't seem right.

This is making me think that there's something wrong at Google. If things weren't like this in GSC I'd be more likely to believe that there was something wrong with our sites and that we've received an algorithmic penalty rather than there being an error at Google. We've all seen that Google has been full of errors the past year - numerous indexing bugs, issues with Google Analytics, etc. Unfortunately this bug (if it is one) only seems to affect a relatively small amount of people and therefore Google will most likely not address it.
 
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fheaky said:
Yeah this is the weird thing for me; the mobile usability, speed and sitelinks searchbox tabs all show 1 url - the homepage. Also the the fact that we all have the issue that our URLs are "indexed, not submitted in sitemap" is strange. On top of that we all seem to have the issue that when we search for our website with the site:mysite.com parameter only a few pages appear while they're still indexed when we search for site:mysite.com/exacturl. All of these "bugs" occured right when our rankings went to shit. It just doesn't seem right.

This is making me think that there's something wrong at Google. If things weren't like this in GSC I'd be more likely to believe that there was something wrong with our sites and that we've received an algorithmic penalty rather than there being an error at Google. We've all seen that Google has been full of errors the past year - numerous indexing bugs, issues with Google Analytics, etc. Unfortunately this bug (if it is one) only seems to affect a relatively small amount of people and therefore Google will most likely not address it.
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Some websites got hit and some not. So, as test, we can try to switch the hitted websites in another Google account; I mean, remove website from GSC and add it in another. Can it works? Who know..
 
jyciap11 said:
Some websites got hit and some not. So, as test, we can try to switch the hitted websites in another Google account; I mean, remove website from GSC and add it in another. Can it works? Who know..
Click to expand...

Can't hurt to try - anyone wanna give it a shot?
 
How to increase organic traffic? I been monitor my organic traffic been stuck again always around the same range.
 
I got hit by this facking update too, all you need is try to push more traffic to your website and wait.
 
Jeronimo034 said:
Anyone try to change hosting?
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Don't bother with it, it'll cost you time and money, the update has nothing to do with hosting unless your website is 50% of the time offline which I don't think is the case for most people posting here.
 
And honestly this is why I would never purchase any SEO package anywhere and stick to social media marketing and not relying on organic traffic for growth.
 
One of my site that got hitted, got back on the track since 2 days ago. traffic went up and back to normal... BUT if I check the site command in google, the index is at the lowest point (not like before get hitted), but the organic traffic is back.. so obviously.. there is something wrong with Google.

And, yeah probably there is something wrong also with our sites.. let's try to fix em and cooperate with Big G.
I'm still confused about the indexing problems :\

anyway, do you think domain has something to do with the indexing and ranks ?

Fresh domains, expired domains, aged domains ?
 
fheaky said:
Yeah this is the weird thing for me; the mobile usability, speed and sitelinks searchbox tabs all show 1 url - the homepage. Also the the fact that we all have the issue that our URLs are "indexed, not submitted in sitemap" is strange. On top of that we all seem to have the issue that when we search for our website with the site:mysite.com parameter only a few pages appear while they're still indexed when we search for site:mysite.com/exacturl. All of these "bugs" occured right when our rankings went to shit. It just doesn't seem right.

This is making me think that there's something wrong at Google. If things weren't like this in GSC I'd be more likely to believe that there was something wrong with our sites and that we've received an algorithmic penalty rather than there being an error at Google. We've all seen that Google has been full of errors the past year - numerous indexing bugs, issues with Google Analytics, etc. Unfortunately this bug (if it is one) only seems to affect a relatively small amount of people and therefore Google will most likely not address it.
Click to expand...

It could still be an algorithmic penalty. Mueller said something like "if pages don't get a decent amount of traffic we will remove them from GSC reports". So it's possible the algo has said "these pages are too keyword dense" or whatever reason and devalued them, and then GSC has some trigger that says "low value page" and removes them from certain reports.

I do agree with you, but I'm trying to be critical of my site to see how I can improve.

Jeronimo034 said:
Anyone try to change hosting?
Click to expand...

My host have great uptime but have done some things lately that have really pissed me off (weird stuff like 301 redirect robots.txt to index.php?robots=1) Google was still loading this file correctly but who knows, maybe it was causing an issue.

For anyone else having this issue, do you have any domains 301 redirected at your site?
 
pecas said:
Hi guys,
in this thread I read there is quite some consensus around "high DA sites" and "spammy sites - parasites" that are ranking well now.



Here is my take for the Amazon affiliate sector, which I belong to. I don't have other things around at the moment, so I can't speak for the other niches.

If you searched for any product on sale on Amazon, until some months ago, you saw a lot of affiliate websites, content rich, and almost no shop, apart for Amazon, which was often outranked by the best affiliates.
Now, instead, you see manufacturer's website (in the home niche where I belong: big brands like iRobot, Philips, Dyson etc) that often have their own official shop, plus Amazon, other online shops and, maybe, one or two affiliate websites.

So yes, at first sight, DA wins over content, it seems. Because online shops won't tell you much about the product, apart for the specifications, but they have a big DA because of backlinks.



I'm not sure, though, if this is due to high DA or if it's coincidental, and the real reason is the fact most of the product reviews on affiliate websites are fake. I mean, not all the affiliate websites are like Thewirecutter. They don't actually buy and test items. They take data from the web: from manufacturer's website, and from other review websites like Thewirecutter, they shuffle things around and create their own review. The typical affiliate website owner will outsource content or write himself, and in both cases who writes will do what I described, exactly, without mentioning sources.

The result is many similar reviews describing the same product, all "stealing" content from each other, although each of them is "original" if you check it against a plagiarism tool like Copyscape.

Seems like Google spotted this and decided to return more varied results: yes, one review or two (the best ones, according to Google), and then shops, price comparators and manufacturer's websites.

If you look at Thewirecutter.com (US) and which.co.uk (UK), that are probably the best in their respective markets, you will notice that they didn't lose any traffic in the recent updates. They are the ones still showing up on page 1.

At the same time: I cannot see any parasites ranking in this sector. If they did, this would confirm I'm wrong, and DA theory is right. I have seen many posts in this thread saying some parasites now rank well, but no real example of this - that would be useful. I haven't seen any myself, not in the Amazon affiliate niche.



So I'm asking you (Amazon affiliates) if, honestly: could it be that Google is right, there is no bug, and we are complaining just because our "method" isn't working anymore?

Like many others here, I didn't build links, but my site lost about 2/3 of the traffic from November, being hit by all of the recent updates (November and January in particular). Is it maybe because our copywriters just copy stuff around and we offer no value, having just put together things that others had already written?
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You have got to be kidding me. Well, I will try and give you a real life example: search on google.com 'chromecast vs fire stick' and you will see at the top someone who clearly hasn't tested any of the two devices outranking all the big websites (digitaltrends, tomsguide and on) and this is just one of the many examples.
 
Anyone had sites negatively affected by the March '19 update that were lifted on this January '20 update?
 
The real problem I see is Google being not transparent at all. Somehow our sites got hit on 17th December and beginning of January, but no one has a clue what is actually going on and if its a penalty or not or if the crawler is broken. Even IF our sites got hit with an algo penalty, we have no clue why and if it actually got hit, because Google Webmaster Tools doesn't really give any information. No messages or such.

Its a huge shitshow. Everyone knows something is going on and something is wrong, but they just keep silence and act like nothing happened. What a joke of a company. Look kids, this is how you destroy yourself.
 
nakamura said:
Its a huge shitshow. Everyone knows something is going on and something is wrong, but they just keep silence and act like nothing happened.
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I don't think that something must be 'wrong', don't forget that there are winners too, you just don't see them complaining here as frequently. There are sites that got lifted on this update, sites that were not affected too.

The question of course is what caused some sites to win and others to lose.
 
aw5 said:
It could still be an algorithmic penalty. Mueller said something like "if pages don't get a decent amount of traffic we will remove them from GSC reports". So it's possible the algo has said "these pages are too keyword dense" or whatever reason and devalued them, and then GSC has some trigger that says "low value page" and removes them from certain reports.

I do agree with you, but I'm trying to be critical of my site to see how I can improve.



My host have great uptime but have done some things lately that have really pissed me off (weird stuff like 301 redirect robots.txt to index.php?robots=1) Google was still loading this file correctly but who knows, maybe it was causing an issue.

For anyone else having this issue, do you have any domains 301 redirected at your site?
Click to expand...

No, what John Mueller said about that is honestly bullshit. For instance, my website is still getting hundreds of organic visitors a day but the mobile usability, site speed (experimental), sitelinks searchbox all still show 1 valid page - the homepage. While a new site I created shows every page as valid even though it hasn't even gotten any traffic yet.

Also the new site without any traffic is not having the "indexed, not submitted in sitemap" issue while my site that got hit in December (and again in January) does have this issue. It has nothing to do with traffic.
 
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