Well, the Google March core update is almost over and my travel blog, which I have worked so hard on, has almost disappeared from search, says Samantha Oppenheimer.
Honestly, I’m devastated.
It feels very unfair, but hopefully I can keep inspiring you to travel through social media.
Take a look at a page such as Travel Tips for Visiting Amsterdam First Time and tell me you think the word ‘Amsterdam’ isn’t massively over-stuffed, says Ammon Johns.
Not that the one page there is the problem, but it’s surely pushing towards spam in the probability math.
Telling me how well you used to rank before the update is just like telling me how sunny it was yesterday.
If you tell me you got advised this was the way, that’s like telling me the weather forecaster on TV said it would be sunny.
It’s raining.
Adapt.
I just had a quick look at a top query you lost traffic for “free things to do NYC”, says James Norquay.
Your site has so many ads running in the background/ video ads/ some don’t even load for me, the experience was not great if I’m looking for things to do it’s a wall of ads.
I can see Time Out has taken some rankings for these kind of queries and has more CTAs / is a cleaner experience overall a very fast site.
Your site content and unique images are good overall.
I would make changes to the UX / ads you use/ website speed.
Your site matches a pattern that I’ve seen literally hundreds of times now where quality sites get slapped for a backlink profile they didn’t build, says Grind Stone.
Scraper sites publishing your images and content are the main culprit, although you look to have a taste of actual negative SEO with the dating anchors, probably an attempt to reclassify your site by a bad actor.
Most of the SEO industry refuses to believe it’s a factor, as they think Google properly handles low-quality links when ranking your site.
This has been happening to my site for the past two years, and my traffic has continued to drop during that time, says Samantha Oppenheimer.
On 3/1, I finally disavowed 35k (yes, 35 freaking k) of backlinks with this behavior – mostly from blogspot, netify, and a few custom domains – and turned off hotlinking.
It’s 4/1, and I’ve already had at least 2000 new ones crop up in 30 days (currently sitting at 1000ish + I had disavowed a few more batches the first week of March.)
WTF are these?
I originally thought this was a negative SEO attack from someone I know personally (sadly, this wouldn’t be surprising from them), but now I’m unsure what to think if this is impacting other sites.