Was There A Large Update or Refresh in Mid April?

Has anyone else seen major fluctuations in rankings since Mid april?


I was doing great for several websites (PBN posts, real social media posts, and guest posts) and then from about April 11th - April 17th all of my websites crashed to pages 6-8.


My top 2 anchors for each website are always the natural link, with www. and with http://www. as well as brand name. So anchor diversity is there with only about 5% keyword anchors.


The links are distributed throughout the website such as home, contact us, services, category pages etc.


Anyone else see similar things happen to their sites last month?

Same here, but my website was just one month old, new domain and the crash happened last week.

Hard to tell on a new website, that could just be the usual fluctuations in the early days of indexing

yes there was. even my site got ditched!

I've seen these fluctuations with some other more established websites lately. Did you manage to find any statement from Google about it?

Not from Google but I did find an article talking about refreshes, you can read the comments and see how alot of people did notice changes mid April

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-soft-update-18408.html

Thing is, I want to also find out what was targeted. Was it On-page SEO, too much anchor text density, too many PBN's etc?