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The December Helpful Content Update and December Link Spam Update are now both done rolling out.
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I would love it if this were true!And that this isn’t a permanent reaction and an adjustment is near?
So this thread was posted by Grindstone in 2019 on Twitter:My hypothesis: This brings me to a theory… perhaps google could be destroying links that provide exact match anchors in hopes to observe the reaction from the mass in some way? And that this isn’t a permanent reaction and an adjustment is near? Just a theory… i got destroyed and certainly got my links naturally in this case - it just happened they were exact matches by coincidence
Haven't been following specifically what is being discussed, but anecdotally, I went viral last year and picked up a TON of ultra HQ links that I would have never usually got. However, once the initial rush was over, traffic actually went down for a period. Now it is back up and higher than ever before.This is kind of the big reason people tell you not to "over-react" when you see down-trends after receiving a link, ie. not removing them.
I got hit hard in October's update but have just noticed an uptick in traffic from around the end of the first week in January. I think i've increased traffic around 10-15% but across some very random keywords. So, something has definitely been cooking in the serps.
I'm yet to see the complete return of all of my rankings.
Is this a move being made out of frustration and/or impatience? Is there any other option than utilizing AI content? We still don't know what Google's long-term plan will be in this area - I'd hate to see you take a website with high-quality content and potentially sabotage it based on a short-term decision driven by frustration.Venturing on the dark side? Using AI content now and going to see what happens. Using it as a means to HELP the user and add beneficial content to each page. If G penalizes for that, then the who thing is broken and the future is going to be so stupid.
Curiosity really. The algo update was a pushing point. I'm turning a HQ content site into a higher quality site so at the end of the day, so it's a risk I'm willing to take.Is this a move being made out of frustration and/or impatience? Is there any other option than utilizing AI content? We still don't know what Google's long-term plan will be in this area - I'd hate to see you take a website with high-quality content and potentially sabotage it based on a short-term decision driven by frustration.
I'm sure you've asked yourself this already, but I thought I'd chime in.
Were you hit in the October Spam (around the 19-21st in particular) update?Still down MAJORLY.
Added 1,000,000 US, college educated, quality content. No change, kept dropping, and still am. Literally nothing happened.
Venturing on the dark side? Using AI content now and going to see what happens. Using it as a means to HELP the user and add beneficial content to each page. If G penalizes for that, then the who thing is broken and the future is going to be so stupid.
Still down MAJORLY.
Added 1,000,000 US, college educated, quality content. No change, kept dropping, and still am. Literally nothing happened.
Venturing on the dark side? Using AI content now and going to see what happens.
Were you hit in the October Spam (around the 19-21st in particular) update?
I'm tracking a lot of sites that got hit around these dates as that's when mine got hit, and there are no signs of recovery whatsoever for anyone who got hit around this time it seems.
I don't plan to recover with content.If you couldn't recover with human written content what makes you think ai content will be any different? Not worth it IMO.
btw, i see many people stressing over getting negatively affected by last year's updates. I understand how it feels but i don't think you're doing a lot wrong. I've seen enough to think that 2022 updates was just googling running tests on the live algorithm.
By all means improve your sites but don't think you were hit because you're doing something wrong.
I'm going to guess this is an MC4 type issue. You're likely being caught as over optimized for a set of factors while ignoring another, likely backlinks it seems.Yes, no linkbuilding efforts. 1-2K articles? All English writers, BB theme, etc.. It's going to take a long time for recovery for anyone hit. Nothing we do right now is going to change that.
I wonder if thats because of google speed issues or element problems.I don't plan to recover with content.
These updates weren't content focused at all; though, they say they were.
Simply putting that content belief to rest here.
This has been my sentiment all along. They slung out a LOT of stuff "all at once":I've seen enough to think that 2022 updates was just googling running tests on the live algorithm.
By all means improve your sites but don't think you were hit because you're doing something wrong.
(Yes, I know the site, contract is a long-time friend). I think you were hit by the Helpful Content Update based on the exact timeline the tanking occurred. You can reference the list of updates here to see it line up perfectly. And it's not that your content is unhelpful, but if you think about what you were posting compared to how a robot would be forced to interpret it, it's not surprising that they'd not understand it. Adding the text content SHOULD help but I don't think you'll recover until they update the helpful content classifier again, and that's if you get the work done before hand.Yes, no linkbuilding efforts. 1-2K articles? All English writers, BB theme, etc.. It's going to take a long time for recovery for anyone hit.
What I'm seeing is a ton of parasite spam and huge generic sites. Feels like they turned up the site wide authority knob to 11 and turned down the url level links algorithm.The most obvious thing to me is that Google can't tweak the knob towards link authority because AI spammers are buying aged domains. So they tweaked it towards EEAT, and so heavily in fact that all I see ranking these days is local business sites that aren't local to me. And what do local businesses have that everyone else doesn't in regards to EEAT? That's one way to think about and tackle these updates, specifically the recent core update.
I mean that on typical, non-local informational queries I’m seeing “local” (but not local to anyone in particular) business sites with blog sections ranking. So small brick and mortar businesses are having their info blog posts surfacing, as opposed to their location or product pages.If you're seeing local sites like that, I have to imagine you're targeting informational local queries and getting weird business results instead of informational content answer pages?