Indexing and Google's Core Updates, Product Review, Helpful Content, & Spam Updates

[Zoro]

After months since my traffic dropped for approximate 60%. For some reason I just can't get it back up. Main problem i see is indexation prob lems and weird search results. (articles don't get indexed in 5-10 minutes like they used to)

Results for some keywords are now like huge coroporations and i also see sometimes tiktok shit on first page which is absurd!

Did anyone get back traffic back up? What to do?

I have the same experience.
Doesnt mather how much I publish or doing nothing happeneds.

Even old posts that had like loads of impressions each day got nerfed 50% and never got back up no mather what I do so I lost a lot of ranking keywords aswell.

 

[MinstrelJunkie]

What I'm also seeing is that no amount of EEAT seems to be satisfactory unless it's astronomical amounts or you're a local brick and mortar style service company or whatever. Like DR80+ sites might skate by. Big legacy sites with huge brand names. Everyone else, no matter how good their EEAT is, is getting hit and being replaced by "local sites" that aren't necessarily local to you even on the same continent. Nobody else is escaping.

Really feeling this.

I think that the # of reviews on Google may even be a strong ranking factor right now. As in find a query where lots of brick and mortar businesses rank, then compare their GMB profiles.

In the ones I've looked at, more customer reviews often get a higher rank - even if the site and content sucks. Even if the reviews are bad - I'm being outranked by a home warranty site with 2.7 stars on Google... but they have 1,500 reviews.

Crazy having great content we've edited in collaboration with real experts being outranked by below average content mill articles + stock photos. Just because they're on a local business' website.

I guess it could be Google's answer to AI content: trust only massive brands, or sites connected to verified businesses.

 

[makoloko]

I have the same experience.
Doesnt mather how much I publish or doing nothing happeneds.

Even old posts that had like loads of impressions each day got nerfed 50% and never got back up no mather what I do so I lost a lot of ranking keywords aswell.

Same here. I lost 60% of traffic (from 170k peak). I hit bottom in January and have been sideways all year.

The same thing happened with my competitors, big and small. But my biggest competitors bounced back after the March core update. I saw a 25% jump after that, but it only lasted a few weeks. I'm thinking I would've recovered then just like my competitors if I had done nothing and just kept publishing.

With all the tinkering I did (which I think was necessary for the long run), it will probably take me longer to recover. Who knows? I'm just going to keep publishing and wait it out.

 

[Politico]

Is anyone noticing a difference in indexing this week?

For the first time in forever, I posted a new article and it was indexed and ranking Top 50 within a day.

This hasn't happened to any of the other articles I've posted all year. Maybe it was a super low-comp keyword, I don't know. But the search volume was a metric ton higher than another article's keyword that wasn't ranking for about 6 months after posting.

 

[bernard]

Is anyone noticing a difference in indexing this week?

For the first time in forever, I posted a new article and it was indexed and ranking Top 50 within a day.

This hasn't happened to any of the other articles I've posted all year. Maybe it was a super low-comp keyword, I don't know. But the search volume was a metric ton higher than another article's keyword that wasn't ranking for about 6 months after posting.

I did notice almost instantaneous indexing, but like you it was a lower comp article, but even so, it hasn't happened in a while. I do usually get indexed within a day or two though.

 

[Éowyn]

Indexing used to take 3-4 days for me. Now it takes under 15 hours. This was a recent change.

 

[Zoro]

Same here. I lost 60% of traffic (from 170k peak). I hit bottom in January and have been sideways all year.

The same thing happened with my competitors, big and small. But my biggest competitors bounced back after the March core update. I saw a 25% jump after that, but it only lasted a few weeks. I'm thinking I would've recovered then just like my competitors if I had done nothing and just kept publishing.

With all the tinkering I did (which I think was necessary for the long run), it will probably take me longer to recover. Who knows? I'm just going to keep publishing and wait it out.

Nice to see i'm not the only one having problems.
Doesnt mather how much I publish, impressions and clicks seems to go sideways so something is strange.

Maybe Google is trying to keep things cool until they can figure AI out and how to deal with it.
I guess the internet is getting flooded with new sites and information from AI.

 

[Politico]

I did notice almost instantaneous indexing, but like you it was a lower comp article, but even so, it hasn't happened in a while. I do usually get indexed within a day or two though.

Indexing used to take 3-4 days for me. Now it takes under 15 hours. This was a recent change.

Yea it was really nice to see. Basically instantaneous for my article as well. Something must be brewing. Maybe this means they're done with whatever experimenting/testing/tweaking they've been doing for the past several months, and we're moving back to a more stable also implementation. At least on the indexation side of things

Also, this wasn't just indexing. The indexing of my articles has remained pretty quick, throughout. But the immediate ranking is new for me at least. Was pleasantly shocked.

 

[bernard]

I just read through this entire thread, trying to figure out why some of my best performing pages were out just as Black Friday really would have made them worth it.

Here's a story to look at:

As you can see, some posts were gone, and then they came back, strong as ever.

And now I have some posts that keep being in limbo.

Judging from what I'm reading and my gut feeling and what @Ryuzaki has written, I'm partial to think that this is indeed some kind of rollout of a new index, a migration of a sort, probably to do with EEAT and content relevance.

I always thought it was weird for a page that ranked 1st to drop out completely. That would mean Google had made some fundamental massive change.

What makes more sense is a migration, on a page by page level, perhaps that's why most of the pages dropping out are ranked 1st. They're spending their processing power going through pages that have the most impressions. Would explain why the pages dropping out are coming back as strong as ever.

Ryus idea about going sector by sector also seems to make sense. A lot of competitors seem to be going through the same.

 

[bernard]

In strange new developments in this saga, I am now seeing some of my other pages rank first page for the keywords where the much better page has been out for 2 months.

What does this mean?

Clearly it's not a site wide penalty of sorts, so it must be strictly down to the individual page, but what about it? It isn't clear at all.

Some other pages have bounced back but only for some of their keywords, think now ranking for "best widget" but not "widget reviews". Very, very strange.

I'm partial to thinking Google is broken. Some kind of weird machine learning thing going on.

 

[bernard]

Ok, another weird update here.

I've managed to get a few pages semi-back.

With semi-back I mean that they're ranking for some keywords but not for others.

In the case of affilate reviews, they might rank for "best widgets" but not "widgets test" or "widget reviews".

The interesting part is that it seems to be the same qualifier that it's not ranking for on the entire site, meaning none of the deranked pages won't rank for "review", but might rank for "best".

What I've done is to rewrite the Titles and H1/H2.

The fact that it still won't rank for specific keyword qualifiers tells me that this is indeed some kind of penalty to do with the HCU. Which means it probably is considered overoptimized, too AI (even if no AI used). A full rewrite and redo of the pages are in order.