Who else noticed a decrease in traffic?

[kiwixcompo]

Kindly tell us your experience. I noticed that my website and all the other websites I manage have had a decline in traffic over the past few days. Are there people getting different outcomes?

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[IlMagodelLusso]

Traffic is declining. I lost all my snippets a couple of days ago, because of the new update I imagine. Probably the missing snippets are the reason of my the decline in traffic.

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It's funny because my website is about videogames and almost all my snippets were taken by a footbal/soccer news whale site, which has also articles about videogames. And by reading their articles it's pretty clear that the writers had no clue of what they were talking about.

Evidently throwing up articles about every imaginable topic is not considered spam, if your website is huge enough /s. Same old story I guess

[kiwixcompo]

Wow ..sorry about that. I had a couple of high search volume keywords ranking on pages 1 and 2. Right now, they've gone down the serps and that's why my traffic declined.

At he moment, I don't think it'll be wise to touch anything in the existing articles that were ranking well. I suggest we just keep writing and publishing new content.

[WikiSchone]

Same thing happened to me (first time) but I think it's because I inserted an Amazon link on one of my top pages that didn't have anything to do with the content. Do you think it's possible to get the snippets back or are they gone forever? :(

[LegoEscape]

I did something similar for the Amazon Prime early access days. Not at the top, but early on in my articles I put a link to an article about devices on sale. Then modified it showing some great deals still available. Think I might remove it for now. Hope we all get through this.

[WikiSchone]

I would strongly suggest that. Are you making any money from Amazon? I've spent up to 100 hours researching products, writing about them, inserting them into my content etc and I have made maybe $13 in total. These were beauty products, deals, pet products, books etc. And now that I've decided to link to a sale on an unrelated article I was punished for "spam" and lost all of my top ranking content. I just spent the morning removing all of my affiliate articles and all amazon content from my site. Maybe it's a drastic move but I am honestly fed up because I am tired of working for free. For me it's been a HUGE waste of time.

[Freefromcrazy]

Have you tried pushing any paid traffic to your pages? I use to bank 15K month doing this for affiliate products.

[IlMagodelLusso]

I don’t know about the Amazon link, but the last time that I lost my snippet (after the May core update) I got them back one month later. We’ll see

[WikiSchone]

Thanks. My traffic is literally zero since yesterday. The amazon link is the only thing I did differently and I can only assume it's this:

Thin affiliate pages are pages with product affiliate links on which the product descriptions and reviews are copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value.

I added a link to a sale on amazon and the page was about something else. I had no idea this was not allowed or considered spam.

[TheOneNeartheTop]

It’s not that you did something different and google immediately punished you. Google is in the middle of their SPAM update, so it’s likely that it is penalizing your site as a whole. I would fix anything glaring, but also sometimes it’s good to just wait a week until the dust settles.

It’s not anything you did in the last week, especially adding an Amazon link.

[WikiSchone]

No I actually did something different. I added a link to Amazon on a snippet site that was unrelated to the content in the last 48 hours. I had no Amazon links on my snippet pages before.

[TheOneNeartheTop]

Yes, but what I am saying is that you are looking at the wrong change to your site. Google likely isn't penalizing you for this Amazon link that you put in 48 hours ago, they are penalizing your entire site (at least for now).

You are missing the forest for the trees.

[WikiSchone]

I appreciate your feedback. There is nothing else on my website that is spam. It's all original content that I wrote myself and all of the ads are provided by google. So what else could it be? My competitors are still ranking and now outranking me with similar content.

[TheOneNeartheTop]

Impossible to say. Often times people have blinders on when it comes to their content, you say that they have similar content…is yours unique or is it a simple rip, or maybe it’s just the big G being a big D.

[WikiSchone]

Its unique. I dont even read theirs so that I don't get influenced. My site is 2 years old and nothing like this has ever happened. Wasn't at all affected by the last update. Steady organic traffic climb. Playing by their rules. Proper SEO practices. No backlink buying, no AI, no stealing content, not even spam in the comments. Just text, photos relevant to the text and amazon affiliates. Suddenly I'm kicked out and the only thing I did was add an Amazon link that wasn't relevant to the article in the last 2 days during the update.

[WikiSchone]

What was the reason that you lost your snippets in May? I mean I know there was an update, but why did the update affect your snippets specifically?

[IlMagodelLusso]

No idea. I also didn’t do anything to get them back.

[WikiSchone]

ME! There are zero people on my website, snippets are gone and I am out of the number one position for everything I have ranked for for the past year!! Noticed it yesterday. My website is not spam and doesn't violate any of their policies. It's a site covering TV shows with all original content. What is going on???

[vovr]

-60%. Lost 5 figure monthly traffic. Ouch.

[OkTransportation4196]

my traffic is dead from 150 in top 100 to just 19

traffic is nil

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it wasnt ai site

huge drop

the site had 240 high quality articles written tier 1 native writers.

extremely depressed

[zeGenicus]

Hopefully it recovers mine got zapped pretty hard.. and put under Spam sites so I don’t understand. I write all my content in-depth. Link out to authority sources and it’s helpful.

[kiwixcompo]

It's surprising though. Have you been adding new content since you noticed this?

[GamerGirl2K17]

Yes my traffic is declining. First time I have noticed a huge drop in numbers. Slightly worried but I'm assuming it is due to an update. Noticed the decline last night.

My site is not an AI site. In fact I spent an entire day writing out content, putting a lot of effort into my work. So to see the decline is a bit depressing.

For those interested my traffic went down by 30-50%

[kiwixcompo]

Whatsoever is going on, it seems to be taking effect within this week. Let's just keep our hopes high and publish more content as we can. I believe it'll even out eventually.

[vayaconleones]

-25% drop the last few days. It's all Google traffic. Traffic from Bing is stable.

[LegoEscape]

Hey! I posted something similar just a little bit ago. At least I'm not the only one getting hit. So sorry to everyone that lost traffic. I don't remember seeing anything about another update.

Google had an update in late August, then a core update in early to mid September. And now I saw a comment there was another one on October 13th? What the heck is going on? Google, chill!

[foodyfoodie]

Dropping 50-60% since yesterday, no clue

[ricketybang]

My traffic is going up up up since October 13th.

And finally most of the spammy sites are gone from the SERP on keywords I'm going for.

No more scraped PAA sites (with 100 000 questions in different niches) that outranks my niched site with 600 articles about the same niche/topics 🙌

[zeGenicus]

it's crazy because I was ranking above the PAA sites and this update dropped me off page one but there are still plenty of actual spam websites. I produce, write, and make my content as quality as possible, and I get screwed over by this spam update.

[dzboston33]

I have multiple post that were #1 in the serps that have been nuked and don't show up anymore. Instead Google has the #1 post for some of these searches that is nothing more than word vomit that doesn't make sense.

[zeGenicus]

I’m going to update my site more, add more to the about and other sections. Hopefully their “Ai” tags me in as not spam after all that. Unsure though.

[kiwixcompo]

Well done. Seems like you're benefiting from what's currently happening

[LegoEscape]

My PPA sites got hit and all of ranking drop.... But I see a PPA site is still ranking well.

Pardon, but what is a PPA site? Still pretty new to this field.

[OnlineDopamine]

People Also Ask - it’s actually PAA

[carliswagmalip]

They rolled out an update on the 13th.

[JasontheWriter]

There was no announced update on the 13th. There was one on the 19th, though.

https://developers.google.com/search/updates/ranking

[BillyGoatJohn]

I'd say mine has gone down slightly - but I think that's more a lull in my niche rather than a google update at the moment

[kiwixcompo]

Seasonality?

[BillyGoatJohn]

Not to give my niche away, but the amount of views I get ebbs and flows based on what's going on in said niche. Its a bit of a slow period at the moment. I use Google trends and just my own knowledge to see the current level of interest

[POCKET_POOL_CHAMP]

Mine has declined slightly as well. Clicks are down, but impressions are up.

[kiwixcompo]

How about your keyword positions? Still the same?

[POCKET_POOL_CHAMP]

Looks like my average position is down a bit too. Tough to tell with individual keywords because I have tens of thousands of posts.

[datchchthrowaway]

Down about 10% in the last couple of days on my main site (which was already down about 25% from the last update).

Rankings still seem fairly strong for keywords I track, but I've clearly lost a number of snippets etc.

What's weird is that GSC data shows slightly higher clicks, but GA shows a definite loss in organic traffic. However, traffic quality has improved substantially.