Sudden Ranked Drop? Google Algo Update?

i experience the same issue 4 of my site loss 90% traffic and some page get deindexed. I tried to add in more content and change the site external links for google to reindex my site
 
Weird question, but is everyone here from outside the United States? It seems like almost everyone talking about this is European with the occasional Indian.

I'm outside of USA most of the time but site is hosted there and targets mostly Americans (English).

The funny thing is what is ranking instead. For some of my keywords there are 15 years old websites ranking, Spun text Web 2.0 Tier 1 backlinks I made 3 years ago and some social bookmarks from Scoop.it and Pinterest are also ranking. If Google was reevaluating the niche/keyword and found those social bookmarks and web 2.0 better than my unique and original content than the crawler/algo is broken.

My largest competitor is actually selling gambling links from his site (and anything else he can). But it has history and trust, so I guess Google prefers that right now.

\Pfff, for the first time in my SEO career, I have NO IDEA what to do. We tried to do the cleanest, best quality website, with high quality content, and yet, we get punched in the face. Seriously?

Same. I have some spam/bot links but have tried to do this site by the book. Be patient, I'm sure this will pay off in the long run.

Though only one of my sites got hit which I think is the most optimized for mobile..

I think this could be the case. My site loads in under 1.5 seconds. WEBP images, minified everything, as fast as possible. This still feels to be a loading and rendering issue - I think Googlebot-Mobile is having trouble crawling our "complex" sites and that old HTML Times New Roman site from the 2000's is very easy for it to render.
 
Lol....his answer really pisses me off. There is NO reason a "re-evaluation" of our websites would make them jump from page 1 to ABSOLUTELY nowhere. I've been hit by algo penalty over the years, and I've already seen position drops. I have never complained about them. I checked my website, fixed issues, and waited for rankings to come back. Yet, the rankings were down a few positions, or a few pages.

Here, it did not just drop, it DISAPPEARED. And, above all, GSC showing strange things for mobile and not being able to see that our website is perfectly mobile friendly and adapted to users on mobile.

Pfff, for the first time in my SEO career, I have NO IDEA what to do. We tried to do the cleanest, best quality website, with high quality content, and yet, we get punched in the face. Seriously?

I feel you man, I used to make blackhat sites and when they got penalized I understood why; of course I was sad about it, but they deserved it.

This time I wanted to build something quality and long term that provides value to my visitors and then this shit happens. It's just so fucking demotivating, I spent hundreds of hours working on this website and then it's just gone with no word from Google about what's going on.
 
"It's just so fucking demotivating, I spent hundreds of hours working on this website and then it's just gone with no word from Google about what's going on." yes....SO demotivating.
 
I don´t think it is a penalty. And "how we see the site now" is also BS. The site of ours that got hit has 2 other languages versions on different domains, HRFELang connected and for the user via a country picker. Those other two domains are doing the opposite = Sitemap gets crawled, mobile results and overall sites listed grow (same as traffic). And one of those is also the X-default. Everything is build on the same code, template etc. etc. only the language of the content is different per domain. Topic is same popularity in any of the 3 countries.
 
Are there any similarities on our sites? Everyone who has been hit by January 7, are these all Wordpress sites (mine is).
 
I don´t think it is a penalty. And "how we see the site now" is also BS. The site of ours that got hit has 2 other languages versions on different domains, HRFELang connected and for the user via a country picker. Those other two domains are doing the opposite = Sitemap gets crawled, mobile results and overall sites listed grow (same as traffic). And one of those is also the X-default. Everything is build on the same code, template etc. etc. only the language of the content is different per domain. Topic is same popularity in any of the 3 countries.

I have the same issue, my sites are similar but written in various languages. Only Spanish one didn't get hit and I don't have any clue why.

PS. And on this Spanish site, all pages are indexed, there are no errors.
 
A lot of sites with affiliate Links were killed. Mine too.
I think that is trully wanted by google. The bot probably looked for affiliate Links in pages and penalized the entire site even If links are nofollow.

The remaining question is : why websites without affiliation have been hit ? Is there any ?
 
A lot of sites with affiliate Links were killed. Mine too.
I think that is trully wanted by google. The bot probably looked for affiliate Links in pages and penalized the entire site even If links are nofollow.

The remaining question is : why websites without affiliation have been hit ? Is there any ?
Nope, I don't think. I have similar websites in different languages, two improved a lot their traffic, others got hit drstically and de-index. All with affiliate no follow link. It is all random, no common points!
 
Its really beyond how they can have no clue whats going on. He could just ask or check what happened on 17th December and on 7th January. Is it so difficult? He could just ask: Did we make any changes on these dates? Or how did the algo behave? How did the crawler behave?

They must have all the data....and Google keeps their mouth shut. So many of my websites lost their rankings and only 20% or less pages of them are in the index. No manual penalty! Why?
 
My sites are all on Wordpress, French.
They all have affiliation and nofollow, but it's discreet, not intrusive and it does not make the user's experience worse.
They are all white hat.
Some fell on 16th of Dec (5 of them)
One fell on 11th of January (not on 7th compared to most of you). Also, this last site is the youngest one, only 14 weeks old, high-quality unique content really written for the user.

Here are all the infos I can give you to help find similarities...
 
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