What was the November 2019 Local Update about?

It's been almost a month now since that update first went live. Has anyone figured out what it was about?

I am seeing quite mixed results on my portfolio on this update, some of my very "shady" websites are up while my actual "white" websites have been hit the hardest. It seems to be a common trend, Looking at some larger websites like reviews.com the hit is quite easily noticeable.


Currently, Ahref shows a drop of 1m traffic (almost half).
I have spent the last three weeks analyzing my websites to see what could have caused a drop or rise.

Currently, my only hypothesis on why a website dropped or rose is as following.
disclaimer: I know this sounds pretty silly but so far it's the only correlation I have found that seems to be quite consistent.

From what I am reading from what Google put out this update was about relevancy. If I as a human being scan the pages in the SERP that remain vs the ones that dropped. I am not seeing a huge information difference. I would even argue that the once that dropped down in this update are vastly superior.

But two things do stand out.

1. It seems to be that "longer" and more in-depth articles aren't ranking as high as they were before.
An example would be as following. If the keyword is to be"best pillow" articles that simply have a top 5 pillow with reviews are ranking above the ones that had the top 5 reviews and tips on how to find the best pillow.

I guess one could argue this has something to do with relevancy although it's a strange take on it. This would explain why a lot of "long-lasting" websites have been hit so hard.

2. Take this one with a grain of salt. But it is the one that seems to be the most consistent in results so far.
Another thing that I keep stumbling upon during my search for what the **** this update was about. It would be the way articles are setup. Most of the websites hit the hardest seem to be affiliate websites aiming at "best" keywords. Most of these websites have a similar format which I am sure most of you are familiar with.

A

• [intro/tables]
• [extra information]
• [reviews]
• [faq]

I am simplifying this a lot here but I think the general idea should be clear. Extra information could be anything that is needed for the consumer/user to understand how to choose the product or what to look for in that product.

But this isn't the only common style of these pages as the other who is slightly different is the following:

B

• [intro/tables]
• [reviews]
• [extra information]
• [faq]

The only difference being that this one has the affiliate deals straight from the get-go.
So far the general trend in my findings and just my own websites is that websites that did B, didn't get hurt by this update, and most rose in rankings. While A's got hit hard.

This seems way too common for me to just ignore, but I do feel like I am taking crazy pills because this has to be the dumbest thing I have seen Big G do in a long time.

This also seems to explain why certain people seem to be not hit by the update at all even though they aren't doing anything majorly different. It also explains why certain "legit" sites like reviews.com got hit very very hard while others like wirecutter barely got hit. As the latter uses B type articles while the other uses A type. I mean I guess you could argue that A is less relevant that B as the information the user is looking for is more showcased?

I am in no way stating any of this as truth and I would love to hear what anyone else has figured out about this update so far. I am currently trying to test this theory of mine out on a couple of my websites to see if points 1/2 indeed matter. But I figured I would share my findings and hopefully hear other people's idea's on this previous update.

My site got hit hardly as well, and my site is "best xx review" type site in tech niche, but not all of my pages got hit, some remain the original SERP, some pages rank drops badly.
The only difference between them from I can see is "brand awareness" from google's eyes, if your site/page is recognized as a brand in the niche/product you review, you survive, otherwise, you got hit..

Our site has nothing to do with best kind of reviews, Our site is focused in web development tutorials niche and we have reviews section also in our site but the majority of organic traffic comes to tutorials around 95%.

And after this update we saw a sudden drop of around 50% in organic traffic overnight. And did not seeing any improvement till now.

What can i do now. We recently made a page a couple of months back for "request a review" page so anyone can request a review for their product do you think it's harming our website.

We have removed all the external ******** backlinks and made them nofollow and removed all the paid post last week but still no improvement.

previously we are getting around 2.8k to 3k visitors per day and after this update we are getting around 1.6k visitors per day

Kindly suggest anything to solve this issue as soon as possible

I am the same guys, one of my sites went from 3k a day to 600 visitors yesterday, in fact, I have had a few sites that were hit the same way. I have looked at everything and I can't find anything that any of my 4 sites have in common. Sometimes I wonder if Google just puts a big net out and pulls in whoever it catches and they are dropped for a while then come back ( or at least that is how it feels sometimes) - I have some keywords unaffected and others were dropped down quite significantly. The sites above them are thin, not brand, just basic. So far I have done the following.

• Checked for over-optimization of words on a few pages and tidied them up
• Sorted errors in google webmaster for mobile as I had quite a few
• Added new extra content to some of the pages.
• 301 pages that were in the index that shouldn't have been ie attachment pages ( my own fault with this one because I didn't use Yoast settings properly with one of them)
• I have removed jetpack from one of them ( as all had jetpack as I like the stats page)
• Tweaked site speed and checked on the google page for website speed -
• Cancelled a disavow file I had uploaded ( not sure that was a good move) but I have had to check if it had something to do with it but I only had that on 1 site so it tells me it had nothing to do with it.

The only 1 thing all of my sites that were hit have in common is they were all on jetpack and Yoast I don't think that would be the issue but perhaps google could see they were all related?


I noticed the drop for me on all these sites as the 25th November. I have been over everything and read so much and cannot get to the route issue ( btw I am in adult) so I don't think it has anything to do with reviews, well not for me anyway, however, I do have a lot of pages with 10/20/30 reasons why, or ideas & techniques for certain keywords, I also changed title tags/descriptions on a lot of these pages on all 4 sites, I added new content using keywords I found in my google webmaster part and making new headings and content from them

This is what I have thought about, I am really just speaking out loud here to see if any of us can find a pattern & to brainstorm myself as sometimes writing things down can help trigger something for me.

1 - Was it content length? As my content on most of my pages is pretty long for my niche anyway ( google used to rank my site high for the last 6 years with no issues)
2 - Is it to do with Internal Linking - Or linking out
3- Too Many Affiliate Links
4- Was it to do with Images on a site?
5- Readability of site
6- Redirects going into the site ( which I have had for years) Is that now an Issue?
7 - Unnatural links I have a lot of sites ( my own linking int to these sites but again never had an issue in the past)
8 - Was it because I changed title tags and descriptions on them as when I look at all 4 I changed for a lot of them

When I check my site as site: domain.com I used to have 10 boxes under it I now have 3 small links under it, but my other ( penalized) sites still have the boxes under it.
Is it a temp thing and they will return? As still seems to be a lot of dancing and yesterday for a glimmer of a second I saw one of my keywords jump back up but when I refreshed it was back down again.

I don't know whether to just leave it and see what happens and move on with my other sites?

How long do we leave it?

The funny thing is some of my other sites have been taking the spots of the penalised ones, not all of the spots but some, and I have done exactly the same with them as I do all my sites that have been hit but yet they are shooting up the rankings - Hence why I wonder if its just a big net and bad luck, now I know how the fish feel

Also, my sites that are now moving up and taking the spots of the penalised sites are sites I have not updated for quite some time.

Hope this kind of helped some folks, perhaps we could share and keep this updated & help each other Have a good day guys, I hope we get some news soon

Google is just so dam slow -

Thanks guys there’s so many things that’s been posted here will be following it

tammyblogger said:

I am the same guys, one of my sites went from 3k a day to 600 visitors yesterday, in fact, I have had a few sites that were hit the same way. I have looked at everything and I can't find anything that any of my 4 sites have in common. Sometimes I wonder if Google just puts a big net out and pulls in whoever it catches and they are dropped for a while then come back ( or at least that is how it feels sometimes) - I have some keywords unaffected and others were dropped down quite significantly. The sites above them are thin, not brand, just basic. So far I have done the following.

• Checked for over-optimization of words on a few pages and tidied them up
• Sorted errors in google webmaster for mobile as I had quite a few
• Added new extra content to some of the pages.
• 301 pages that were in the index that shouldn't have been ie attachment pages ( my own fault with this one because I didn't use Yoast settings properly with one of them)
• I have removed jetpack from one of them ( as all had jetpack as I like the stats page)
• Tweaked site speed and checked on the google page for website speed -
• Cancelled a disavow file I had uploaded ( not sure that was a good move) but I have had to check if it had something to do with it but I only had that on 1 site so it tells me it had nothing to do with it.

The only 1 thing all of my sites that were hit have in common is they were all on jetpack and Yoast I don't think that would be the issue but perhaps google could see they were all related?


I noticed the drop for me on all these sites as the 25th November. I have been over everything and read so much and cannot get to the route issue ( btw I am in adult) so I don't think it has anything to do with reviews, well not for me anyway, however, I do have a lot of pages with 10/20/30 reasons why, or ideas & techniques for certain keywords, I also changed title tags/descriptions on a lot of these pages on all 4 sites, I added new content using keywords I found in my google webmaster part and making new headings and content from them

This is what I have thought about, I am really just speaking out loud here to see if any of us can find a pattern & to brainstorm myself as sometimes writing things down can help trigger something for me.

1 - Was it content length? As my content on most of my pages is pretty long for my niche anyway ( google used to rank my site high for the last 6 years with no issues)
2 - Is it to do with Internal Linking - Or linking out
3- Too Many Affiliate Links
4- Was it to do with Images on a site?
5- Readability of site
6- Redirects going into the site ( which I have had for years) Is that now an Issue?
7 - Unnatural links I have a lot of sites ( my own linking int to these sites but again never had an issue in the past)
8 - Was it because I changed title tags and descriptions on them as when I look at all 4 I changed for a lot of them

When I check my site as site: domain.com I used to have 10 boxes under it I now have 3 small links under it, but my other ( penalized) sites still have the boxes under it.
Is it a temp thing and they will return? As still seems to be a lot of dancing and yesterday for a glimmer of a second I saw one of my keywords jump back up but when I refreshed it was back down again.

I don't know whether to just leave it and see what happens and move on with my other sites?

How long do we leave it?

The funny thing is some of my other sites have been taking the spots of the penalized ones, not all of the spots but some, and I have done exactly the same with them as I do all my sites that have been hit but yet they are shooting up the rankings - Hence why I wonder if its just a big net and bad luck, now I know how the fish feel

Also, my sites that are now moving up and taking the spots of the penalized sites are sites I have not updated for quite some time.

Hope this kind of helped some folks, perhaps we could share and keep this updated & help each other Have a good day guys, I hope we get some news soon

Google is just so dam slow -

Click to expand...

I can share some things I am very sure are not a factor (unless google is specifically targeting me haha).

1 - Could be, because my articles are usually very thorough and it would yet again fit with what google themselves have said, that it's relevancy. Maybe they are ranking based on the density of information now? It sure feels like the sweet spot of articles has moved from 2.5k to around 1.5k. I want to mention, my individual reviews have not been hit ( 300-400 words). This is ironic because I literally outsourced those and I am 100% that info is worthless.

2/3/7 - Can't be this because the sites outranking me are way more... sale-ish and they have more then triple my affiliate links ( especially if I count the links they put in images).
I see some people saying this update was aimed at authority/brand but that is nonsense. Some very big names have been hit by this update, actual brands that test the product they have on their sites. In a couple of my niches I have seen several top 3 spots been overtaken by fresh websites with only one or two linking domains. How fresh? The homepage of these sites still had ipsum lorem. So we can throw the whole EAT/Authority nonsense out of the window. For those wondering this is in the Health niche.

4 - Haven't checked this

5 - Also I am 95% sure about is that this and speed have zero effect on this update. I would go as far as to say that it feels like they have devalued a fast website. My own websites load under 300ms and have a 99/100 mobile score vs a 100/100 score on google's own speed insights. Currently, the top 3 is hovering around 30-70/100. Readability is a hard one to measure but some of my articles are written by professionals, so that would be very strange.... and it doesn't add up to why certain articles didn't get hit vs the ones who did get hit.

6 - I don't have any.

8 - When did you do this change? This one is interesting because we do generally update our tags on a time by time basis.

Seraphiel said:

I can share some things I am very sure are not a factor (unless google is specifically targeting me haha).

1 - Could be, because my articles are usually very thorough and it would yet again fit with what google themselves have said, that it's relevancy. Maybe they are ranking based on the density of information now? It sure feels like the sweet spot of articles has moved from 2.5k to around 1.5k. I want to mention, my individual reviews have not been hit ( 300-400 words). This is ironic because I literally outsourced those and I am 100% that info is worthless.

2/3/7 - Can't be this because the sites outranking me are way more... sale-ish and they have more then triple my affiliate links ( especially if I count the links they put in images).
I see some people saying this update was aimed at authority/brand but that is nonsense. Some very big names have been hit by this update, actual brands that test the product they have on their sites. In a couple of my niches I have seen several top 3 spots been overtaken by fresh websites with only one or two linking domains. How fresh? The homepage of these sites still had ipsum lorem. So we can throw the whole EAT/Authority nonsense out of the window. For those wondering this is in the Health niche.

4 - Haven't checked this

5 - Also I am 95% sure about is that this and speed have zero effect on this update. I would go as far as to say that it feels like they have devalued a fast website. My own websites load under 300ms and have a 99/100 mobile score vs a 100/100 score on google's own speed insights. Currently, the top 3 is hovering around 30-70/100. Readability is a hard one to measure but some of my articles are written by professionals, so that would be very strange.... and it doesn't add up to why certain articles didn't get hit vs the ones who did get hit.

6 - I don't have any.

8 - When did you do this change? This one is interesting because we do generally update our tags on a time by time basis.

Click to expand...

Hiya

Thanks for the reply and info, it helps to look at all of this.

I updated my title tags and description a few weeks before I was hit, after doing it I saw a great improvement and traffic was really good then came the hit 2 weeks later, I noticed my decline started on the 25th of November so I would say I changed the titles etc a couple of weeks before I was hit, the 4 sites have this in common for me.
I was also tinkering about with the 4 sites adding new content & updating them.

What I am noticing now though that is interesting, a whole lot of my other sites that I have not touched for months and months have shot up and seem to be getting more traffic than they ever have. It is really weird because I have literally not done a thing on them for months...

The strange thing is they are all similar to the ones that were hit so in theory they should be hit as well, the same type of layout, targeting the same keywords, I write all my own content, so same style and they roughly have the same amount of backlinks and age etc, so I'm baffled as to why google likes these but yet penalised the other ones that were actually much bigger in content. The ones that shot up had fewer pages.

This makes me think about that big net again and when you're caught in it that's you until google lets you out again, the random ranking factor ... Right before Xmas as well,

I actually think it's a mess, in some of my niches I have amazon books ranking and let's be honest when guys are looking for adult stuff they do not really want to read a book I don't think anyway lol!! It's a mess. I also have loads of google books ranking, Etsy, cosmopolitan magazine etc if it keeps this up guys will for sure move elsewhere

OP I am not sure why you are speaking about the local update while you are clearly talking about review sites. The majority of this sites has nothing to do with local. Google did few other updated in November not related to local, most likely your site was affect by one of those.

Anyways, judging the effect of the Nov. updates on the sites (non local) in one of the niches I’m in, I doubt that the arrangement of the article’s paragraphs is the culprit. And in general the position of each build blog of the article can't be the cause severe drops. I believe it can affect user signals tho. But I see site from both of your examples ranking well, across multiple niches.

tammyblogger said:

Sometimes I wonder if Google just puts a big net out and pulls in whoever it catches and they are dropped for a while then come back....

Click to expand...

The thing you call a ‘big net’ approach is real. I have heard a lot of experienced people in the industry talk about it. I’ve seen many sites that I have monitored through the years got hit for no obvious reason, although I don’t have the whole data for those sites (like full backlink profile, user metrics and such), but I am inclined to believe some of them got slapped on a random principle.


Most importantly I have experienced it myself. Last December one of my sites got hit really hard. Of course I did thorough research of the winners and loser in the niche trying to identify similarities and all the mambo jumbo. Made a big list of stuff that I need to improve regarding my site. The thing is I never had the change to apply any of these because I was super busy with high priority projects. Exactly 3 months after the hit there was an update. Do you know what happened? The site started to recover, in the next several months the rankings improved way way better than before. The effect was as if I’ve done tremendous job on page wise and built like 10s of high quality links. In reality I did nothing.


I know that there was a lot of work that needed to be done for the site and at the end of the days this is was the reason for the hit. The thing is a I don’t believe any of the lacking aspects of the site was so prominent for the algo to butcher the rankings so hard and send it to oblivion, and start to loving the site 3 months later. The penalty was not proportional to the lacking aspects of the sites compared to the competitors. It was pure randomness.

tammyblogger said:

Sometimes I wonder if Google just puts a big net out and pulls in whoever it catches and they are dropped for a while then come back....


1 - Was it content length? As my content on most of my pages is pretty long for my niche anyway ( google used to rank my site high for the last 6 years with no issues)

2 - Is it to do with Internal Linking - Or linking out

3- Too Many Affiliate Links

4- Was it to do with Images on a site?

5- Readability of site

6- Redirects going into the site ( which I have had for years) Is that now an Issue?

7 - Unnatural links I have a lot of sites ( my own linking int to these sites but again never had an issue in the past)

8 - Was it because I changed title tags and descriptions on them as when I look at all 4 I changed for a lot of them

Click to expand...

When it come to the stuff you mentioned… titles: if you messed up those, that could be huge.

If I were you I would try to improve the site in all possible aspects without making some huge changes. I'd also take a very deep look at the backlinks, and if needed, I'd make a new off page plan and start executing. When it comes to on-site, don’t do any drastic changes unless you are very certain that ‘this’ thing should be changed (e.g. serious technical issues, major on-page problems etc.)

Seraphiel said:

From what I am reading from what Google put out this update was about relevancy. If I as a human being scan the pages in the SERP that remain vs the ones that dropped. I am not seeing a huge information difference. I would even argue that the once that dropped down in this update are vastly superior.

Click to expand...

My opinion is that it is about irrelevancy.

My suspiscion is Google has recently placed more weight on the topical relevancy of the whole website, and not just the topical relevancy of the page. In doing so, the importance of other ranking factors, mainly user interaction factors, has increased.

Long articles have been advocated not because long articles are easy to read, but because writing many words allows keywords and related keywords to be used more often without triggering over-optimisation filters.

Long articles have helped Google, not Google's customers.

That was fine when Google couldn't otherwise judge whether Page A was more or less relevant to a topic than Page B. It simply looked at single page factors.

What I think has changed is that Google now looks at the pages that are linked to within the body text. So it doesn't matter from a topical relevancy point of view if Page A on Website A has 500 words on it and Page B on Website B has 10,000 words on it, provided that Page A links to other pages (and those pages to others) that cover the whole subject more comprehensively than Website B does. You no longer need to write a single 100,000 word article on a subject to become the authority on it. You can split those 100,000 words across many interlinked pages. In doing so, you make them easier to read and easier for Google to determine which page best answers the search query intent.

As a reader, you'd prefer Google to give you a 300 word article that perfectly answers your query over a page with 10,000 words on it that answers your question half way down after you've scrolled for 30 seconds. This is especially the case for mobile users.

Bookmark for now, gonna share this with my mentor and hope to give you his feedback

Unreliable Witness said:

My opinion is that it is about irrelevancy.

My suspiscion is Google has recently placed more weight on the topical relevancy of the whole website, and not just the topical relevancy of the page. In doing so, the importance of other ranking factors, mainly user interaction factors, has increased.

Long articles have been advocated not because long articles are easy to read, but because writing many words allows keywords and related keywords to be used more often without triggering over-optimisation filters.

Long articles have helped Google, not Google's customers.

That was fine when Google couldn't otherwise judge whether Page A was more or less relevant to a topic than Page B. It simply looked at single page factors.

What I think has changed is that Google now looks at the pages that are linked to within the body text. So it doesn't matter from a topical relevancy point of view if Page A on Website A has 500 words on it and Page B on Website B has 10,000 words on it, provided that Page A links to other pages (and those pages to others) that cover the whole subject more comprehensively than Website B does. You no longer need to write a single 100,000 word article on a subject to become the authority on it. You can split those 100,000 words across many interlinked pages. In doing so, you make them easier to read and easier for Google to determine which page best answers the search query intent.

As a reader, you'd prefer Google to give you a 300 word article that perfectly answers your query over a page with 10,000 words on it that answers your question half way down after you've scrolled for 30 seconds. This is especially the case for mobile users.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the insights, that seems to explain what happened to one of my pages with 10k words

Quite frankly, I have read so many articles/posts about what happened and they all came up with a theory or another and none of them really convinced me.

actually, I don't think google did something big here, which is what they keep on saying. They probably just changed a couple of minor weightings among the different ranking factors and didn't forsee such huge differences in the combination with bert *shrug*

Scraper9 said:

OP I am not sure why you are speaking about the local update while you are clearly talking about review sites. The majority of this sites has nothing to do with local. Google did few other updated in November not related to local, most likely your site was affect by one of those.

Anyways, judging the effect of the Nov. updates on the sites (non local) in one of the niches I’m in, I doubt that the arrangement of the article’s paragraphs is the culprit. And in general the position of each build blog of the article can't be the cause severe drops. I believe it can affect user signals tho. But I see site from both of your examples ranking well, across multiple niches.





The thing you call a ‘big net’ approach is real. I have heard a lot of experienced people in the industry talk about it. I’ve seen many sites that I have monitored through the years got hit for no obvious reason, although I don’t have the whole data for those sites (like full backlink profile, user metrics and such), but I am inclined to believe some of them got slapped on a random principle.


Most importantly I have experienced it myself. Last December one of my sites got hit really hard. Of course I did thorough research of the winners and loser in the niche trying to identify similarities and all the mambo jumbo. Made a big list of stuff that I need to improve regarding my site. The thing is I never had the change to apply any of these because I was super busy with high priority projects. Exactly 3 months after the hit there was an update. Do you know what happened? The site started to recover, in the next several months the rankings improved way way better than before. The effect was as if I’ve done tremendous job on page wise and built like 10s of high quality links. In reality I did nothing.


I know that there was a lot of work that needed to be done for the site and at the end of the days this is was the reason for the hit. The thing is a I don’t believe any of the lacking aspects of the site was so prominent for the algo to butcher the rankings so hard and send it to oblivion, and start to loving the site 3 months later. The penalty was not proportional to the lacking aspects of the sites compared to the competitors. It was pure randomness.






When it come to the stuff you mentioned… titles: if you messed up those, that could be huge.

If I were you I would try to improve the site in all possible aspects without making some huge changes. I'd also take a very deep look at the backlinks, and if needed, I'd make a new off page plan and start executing. When it comes to on-site, don’t do any drastic changes unless you are very certain that ‘this’ thing should be changed (e.g. serious technical issues, major on-page problems etc.)

Click to expand...

This is sadly not what the data shows. If I look at my network November update is pretty easily disguised. The other smaller updates are always visible too but none come close to the effect the November update has had. And the effects are also clearly visible if you look it up online, a lot of reviews/affiliate sites have been hit the hardest.

It has very little to do with BERT as google as said themselves, and it's not something I can see in the SERPs either.
The problem with the things you mentioned are that we can look at the SERPS and these are not the case. If it was links I wouldn't be seeing websites with 3 pages of which 2 pages have no content outrank websites with thousands of links. Google has also stated the November update was about relevance and not local ( don't ask me why they call it that).

It seems to me to be clearly something to do with the way content is written or formatted.

My hypothesis to this is that google put on more weight in rank brain. While relevance occurs in this update, we've outlooked the fact that they also value (or even consider this more) about how the viewers will last and exit and where they would exit.

Good thread.

The case for me:
Site A: Traffic got cut in half
Site B: Traffic got tripled

- Both sites have the same article author.
- Both sites have their articles structured the same way (similar to option B in the first post above)
- Both sites have articles in the 3000-6000 word length
- Both sites use the same themes and plugins
- Both sites have the same link building strategy
- Both sites are about the same age (~2 years)
- Both sites have great site speed both for mobile and desktop

The only difference is the niches (A is an adult site and B is a men's fashion site) and the number of articles (A has 60 articles and I keep adding at least once per week, B has only about 10 and I haven't added any new content for at least 6 months)

I am confused to say the least :/

I dont know what is it about but all of my blog were dropped 50-60% since december 3rd and until now its not recovering (well at least its not dropping), some of them are increasing 5-10% than last week. Hopefully they will recover soon.

AndyTraveler said:

Good thread.

The case for me:
Site A: Traffic got cut in half
Site B: Traffic got tripled

- Both sites have the same article author.
- Both sites have their articles structured the same way (similar to option B in the first post above)
- Both sites have articles in the 3000-6000 word length
- Both sites use the same themes and plugins
- Both sites have the same link building strategy
- Both sites are about the same age (~2 years)
- Both sites have great site speed both for mobile and desktop

The only difference is the niches (A is an adult site and B is a men's fashion site) and the number of articles (A has 60 articles and I keep adding at least once per week, B has only about 10 and I haven't added any new content for at least 6 months)

I am confused to say the least :/

Click to expand...

blogging hurts your site ranking!!!! you keep creating competing pages and google does not like that. check out all the top pages in different niches. you will notice that they do not have many blog posts or pages about the same keywords

fb3003 said:

blogging hurts your site ranking!!!! you keep creating competing pages and google does not like that. check out all the top pages in different niches. you will notice that they do not have many blog posts or pages about the same keywords

Click to expand...

I don't know man. The articles I add are all different topics/keywords. In addition I have another site where I add content and it's not been affected at all.

attacheds said:

I dont know what is it about but all of my blog were dropped 50-60% since december 3rd and until now its not recovering (well at least its not dropping), some of them are increasing 5-10% than last week. Hopefully they will recover soon.

Click to expand...

My blog is also dropped by 40% in the beginning and continuously dropping right now it's around 60% dropped.I am still figuring out what's main cause. I even removed all the paid post with external ******** backlink but still no improvement.

My website niche is based on Coding Tutorials

If there is any suggestion kindly tell me

Hi guys, sorry for the late response.

So results are in. And yeah I was clearly on to something.

I tested my hypothesis on 40 pages (spread out through multiple websites). These are my high or mid-level traffic pages that got hit the hardest. 21 of these actually had they're layout adjusted from A to B.
The rest (19) were simply cleaned up and updated, nothing was changed in terms of the layout of the article.

Time-line is a little fuzzy here as they weren't all adjusted at the same time but results so far have been clearly promising.
All 21 articles that had their layout changed from A->B went up in traffic or remained in the same location in the ranking.
While the remaining 19 either slightly dropped or remained in place as well.

Point of note is that none of the 21 have recovered to pre-November positions but it seems to still be going up (very slowly).

THIS IS NOT A FIX ALL OR A 100% solution, but it's still better than anything else anyone else has been saying online.
This also clearly explains why certain similar sites didn't get hurt at all while others got destroyed. I think that the algorithm update looked at the layout and distribution of an article to determine how relevant it was to the user. But simply decided to ignore common CTA tricks websites use on the top of the page( tables/quick guides etc).

This solution won't be a copy-paste for everyone but it's a solution that you can easily use for now to get closer to where you were. Look up at the way articles are formatted in the top 3 right now and simply adjust articles to get the same layout.

PS: I suggest that you keep a copy of the older article incase the algorithm moves back to where it was because truth be told. This is an idiotic thing to measure and I highly doubt analytics shows that this is what the users want.