Google Algorithm Updates - 2022 Ongoing Discussion

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smithy said:
Is anyone else seeing a change from this update?

I'm down another 10%. Now down 40% from my peak.
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White hat site, down 50-60% still, just going up +/-5% every week. Added 1M new words of US quality content, no change. Brand link campaign in the works, will see if anything changes. Beyond that, it's an issue with G.

Also the HCU is not entirely true. I won't publish here, but it has nothing to do with word count or even quality.
 
Reaching all time records this month. Seems like seasonality and content maturing but suspect I got a nice bump too on recent updates.
 
Websites are going back up again after the Dec 5th update. Didn't do much changes on the websites in terms of content quality.
 
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This client of mine has like an 80% drop in traffic across a few ccTLDs. This corresponds exactly to the October Spam Update. I looked into it and, guess what the cause is? duplicate content. The ccTLDs are exactly the same except for the telephone number and addresses. Google has been having issues with duplicate content ranking for years and now they finally figured out when poorly done localisations are duplicates.

The plan is to canonical the ccTLDs into the .com and make the .com a global site. We'll also merge the ccTLDs into the .com too and have the .com list all addresses and phone numbers.

Too easy.

And some of you were making it sound like these new Google updates cause instant death or something. Jesus Christ. Have some faith in yourself.
 
Link Spam Update / SpamBrain
December 14th, 2022

I hope you haven't been spamming and that they're not hiding other stuff in this update, because a new link spam update is rolling out across the next two weeks. Spam links will be neutralized, so some juice will stop flowing, according to Google. It's rolling out across all languages together.

Meanwhile, the Helpful Content System update is still rolling out. Time for some more obfuscation! Just remember, Google tries not to overlap updates!
 
Approx 10% down over the last 2 days on one site. Obviously too early to say but correlates with the link spam update.

I've been very strict with quality of links for this site, so I am not sure what the issue would be. I did stop disavowing the huge number of automated links over a year ago. Depending on how this plays out I may kick that off again.
 
I read somewhere on this forum that I can't find now that Google tends to let you punch above your weight and then brings you back down to where you belong.

Could a loss of traffic therefore just be an inevitable turn of events from these updates that you will eventually regain with time?

Additionally, the general advice I've seen on this forum is to cover a vertical instead of just a niche.

One observation I've made is that Google is now considering a site more relevant for a certain category/niche more than the others, despite a high level of topical authority if we think in the terms of the number of articles.

For example, if a site is about travel that covers topics including commercial air travel, aircraft, pilots, etc., more weight is given to one of the categories and where the bulk of the traffic goes to, even though all the other categories are also related to flying.
 
I think they’re just trying to keep people from leveraging signals in media niches to rank for spreads of money keywords where they are non value adding participants. Google makes way more $ by capturing that with internal products and serp features.

Remember how much money you could make with coupon pages back before they cracked down the first time.
 
We are fairly strict with our standards of which sites to get links from but this links update may have hit one of our sites, too early to tell for sure, but we're seeing a drop in impressions and clicks overall starting on 12.14
 
Today I got drop in one of my sites. Is this because of update or just because people don't shop that much as 1-2 weeks before. Curious what do you think? It will be around 30% drop, but it's also true why i had so much more visitors like a week ago is because people were ready to buy products before, now it's a bit late to get it on time for Christmas etc.

What do you think?
 
hard to say but -30% sounds like an update. Do you track keywords?
 
DarkRed said:
hard to say but -30% sounds like an update. Do you track keywords?
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I do track some (not all) I also checked in tool. No page difference maybe few drops, but that's it. Nothing big. Maybe i lost for a few keywords who knows which a bit of places. But hey that's life. I'm moving away from niche sites :smile:
 
For whatever reason I lost all featured snippets yesterday. From hundereds to 0, Google flipped the switch. Sometimes I still have the #1 position and the snippet disapeared and sometimes I rank #2 (below the snippet). I read about it online, but apparantly it's my turn now. Quite demotivating as you already see the impact on traffic.... I have no clue why. Worked all day to improve the website with the Kitchen Sink Method. Still enough work to do in order to check / fix everything.
 
Bob_the_Builder said:
For whatever reason I lost all featured snippets yesterday. From hundereds to 0, Google flipped the switch. Sometimes I still have the #1 position and the snippet disapeared and sometimes I rank #2 (below the snippet). I read about it online, but apparantly it's my turn now. Quite demotivating as you already see the impact on traffic.... I have no clue why. Worked all day to improve the website with the Kitchen Sink Method. Still enough work to do in order to check / fix everything.
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Snippets are incredibly fickle. If you are still #1 or #2, you will get them back, I'm sure. Could be days, week or months, but there will be another rotation.
 
Darth said:
Snippets are incredibly fickle. If you are still #1 or #2, you will get them back, I'm sure. Could be days, week or months, but there will be another rotation.
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I get that snippets get rotated. But losing all snippets across the whole website? Seems more like a snippet ban or something. More people are experiencing this as I Google it. When I’m #1 the snippet is gone, seems personal.

However, if I keep improving the website I’m sure it will come back stronger. Quality is good.
 
Bob_the_Builder said:
the snippet is gone
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It might actually be a good thing (if the snippet is gone and you are ranking #1 still) because the snippets kept the traffic on Google (since the users saw the summary/text on the snippet and usually wouldn't need to click through further), so hopefully this change will drive more traffic to your site.
 
wikibum said:
It might actually be a good thing (if the snippet is gone and you are ranking #1 still) because the snippets kept the traffic on Google (since the users saw the summary/text on the snippet and usually wouldn't need to click through further), so hopefully this change will drive more traffic to your site.
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Yeah I thought about it like that. It will be true in some cases.
In more cases the snippet gets replaced by a competitor, and I'm #2 or #3.
So far, traffic is down about 30%.

I'll be using the Kitchen Sink Method to bounce back harder then before. But it sucks you know.
 
Down another 6%, and another 15% today. Basically lost 75% of all traffic from these updates. What is going on!? :/
 
Is the link spam update done yet? If yes, time to figure out what happened
ItAWDKW.png
 

Semrush High range​

Position changes for numerous sites!​

5.2/10​


Seeing some big jumps from sites that were hit by October updates, also in SEO twitter after 3 months of no positive graphs from niche siters, I'm seeing people start bragging again hard with their upticks, went from 0 graphs to 5 positive graphs I have seen in 2 days. IMO something definitely happened.
 
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