What the hell happened..?

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Since the middle of December, my website has lost all its rankings and I still don't know what happened.
No messages about a penalty in search console, but almost all my pages are now deindexed and fetching as Google doesn't even index them anymore. I have quality content, good articles, and guest post links. I'm very upset as I worked months on this project and was my first mid-three-figure autopilot income per month.

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Did you change anything or do you have something in mind that could explain this drop?
 
Seems like your site got wrecked by the December Google update.

Start 3 new sites and hit them back harder.
 
I changed nothing, I was on a holiday for a month prior to this..
 
Stackz said:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/sudden-ranked-drop-google-algo-update.1186013/
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I know. I have been following people from Google on Twitter and nobody has come out with an explanation. They were investigating this 'issue' but to me, it's looking like something is wrong on their site. If you get slapped you receive a manual action message in GSC.
 
mrtruehybrid said:
I know. I have been following people from Google on Twitter and nobody has come out with an explanation. They were investigating this 'issue' but to me, it's looking like something is wrong on their site. If you get slapped you receive a manual action message in GSC.
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Yeah, but you won't get "slapped" with a message in GSC since it's not a penalty - Just an algo update. As far as I know, nobody knows that the algo update was about (My guess: they shuffle the SERPs to get more people over to their Adwords PPC platform so they can make more money)
 
Stackz said:
Yeah, but you won't get "slapped" with a message in GSC since it's not a penalty - Just an algo update. As far as I know, nobody knows that the algo update was about (My guess: they shuffle the SERPs to get more people over to their Adwords PPC platform so they can make more money)
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Lol if that is really the case.. never gonna do SEO again this shit took me like 500 hours of work
 
mrtruehybrid said:
Lol if that is really the case.. never gonna do SEO again this shit took me like 500 hours of work
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You're not alone, I got some sites wrecked several times going from $10k+/month to 0.

Again: Just start 3 new sites for every site that gets hit. :p SEO still has an insane ROI.

You can't put all your eggs in one basket (site) when you're playing with Google.
 
Stackz said:
Again: Just start 3 new sites for every site that gets hit. :p SEO still has an insane ROI.

You can't put all your eggs in one basket (site) when you're playing with Google.
Click to expand...

That's true but imagine this guy worked 500 hours on a project which vanished randomly without any explanation... and that happens to a lot of people including me.

Not everyone has the patience to start new projects again and again. It's not normal at all, I can't imagine that Google will not fix this bug in the coming days. They HAVE to do it.
 
1. Do you have an author bio? Do your posts have an author listed?
2. The niche as I know is YMYL. That could be an issue too.
3. Check SSL. Sometimes the certificates become invalid.
 
Wow. Feckin googl;e at it again. I feel for you. 500 hours f-cked by the bastids. Really not fair
 
Rafiki59 said:
That's true but imagine this guy worked 500 hours on a project which vanished randomly without any explanation... and that happens to a lot of people including me.

Not everyone has the patience to start new projects again and again. It's not normal at all, I can't imagine that Google will not fix this bug in the coming days. They HAVE to do it.
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Bug? It's an algo update.

And yes, like I said before, this has happened to me on more than one occasion.

Sure, go get some 9-5 job then. Not trying to sound rude, but what else is there then? :) Either get back up or give up.
 
If its a big site, then Google removes the pages from its search result slowly - may take few months, at end, when everything is removed, Google will gladly send a message to the web master about it. You may not find the message in web master tools right now, Google will send it to u when your site is entirely de-indexed.

However, there could also be issues with Google bot. Have u tried 'fetch as Google'? Everything fine there?
 
It’s an algo update mate, you can try and hit your site with strong pbns because only they can pass instant juice to yiur site, and along with add some fresh content and see if it works
 
Hey, this might be a dumb question, but are you using a CDN? I was using one in Oct and changed the Nameservers to run through their CDN (Stackpath). I didn't use their plugin.

My pages started getting deindexed...I moved NS back to my host and they eventually came back. I lost about 15-20 pages (out of 50). This was within a week.
 
It is not a penalty for sure, you just got caught in algo update but the question is, why? When you have not done anything suspicious. I also lost 50% traffic for one of my website but they are very much indexed. I am sure algo update is not related to indexation of your page. So you should check out if there is some other issues. I feel as if you will be back in ranking once your pages gets indexed. might be some deindexing bug again this time like last year
 
Man, that performance report is sad... it looks like ur website just went offline and died.

Are you sure this is not a technical problem? It could be something related to the domain or hosting.

If you use wordpress there is also a small chance that a malicious plugin just f*cked up ur site. Or maybe you got negd SEO and didnt notice?!

Its a mystery. Anyway i would just follow @Stackz advice, get 3 good expired domains and start over asap. You could transfer the content from the old to the new domain(s).

Yeah... SEO is unfair, but you gotta know how to play the game. Putting all efforts on just one site is never a clever way to play.

Now... if you havent done that while your site was getting traffic, think about doing it next time:

1. Build an email/contact list, so if your site dies you can still sell directly and it gives you time until you set up something new
2. Save money for hard times/investing. This is pure math, you win some and lose some... just win more than you lose and will be fine.

Hope this helps :)
 
It's not generally recommended to share the sites URL in this forum.

But this is a special case: since your site is defunct you can just share it and maybe we can see what's going on. You could learn from other views and we can find of what mistakes you did to build on a foundation (despite its most of the times biased)

I think the forum admit should open a section "the sites graveyard" to see if we can massively find patterns and correlate with algo updates. Most of the time, the (biased) experience is only found by those who own like 1K+ sites

By the way just some random ideas that pops me without knowing the situation of your site:
1. Is your site still indexing? I can see some clicks from GSE som I suppose it is
2. Can you tell what GoogleBot is reading from your site? If its based on Wordpress, some hacks just switch the view version of Google from your version, therefore you cannot spot what's going on (except that over the time, your rank will massively drop).
 
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