I have been looking into this more today and I think its more of an onpage thing based around how aggressive your ads are or how much they effect user experience.
If that's so, i'm unlucky because before the update I literally just added adsense to my site in every post. fuck.
If that's right do you think removing the ads would help out?
I'm thinking they also hit backlinks, such a simple thing staring me in the face.
I believe that the amount of backlinks VS referring domains, if higher than X amount then it's more than likely spam.
Like 100 backlinks from 8 domains.
One of my niches is still #3 it has 500+ backlinks from nearly 300 domains.
Whereas in the same website, a niche had 2k backlinks from 200+ domains and another with 6k backlinks and 200+ domains and these got de-ranked page 4-5+.
I believe the best way for me to rank is building 1 backlink per domain and not reposting within it.
I make seperate projects for each niche on my website and those projects don't know where others have posted to. So then on my main domain it could be like 36k backlinks from 4k domains.
I'm gonna aim for more a long the lines of 1k backlinks from 800 domains or 900 domains, or even 1 for 1.
When I worked out how many times it meant I'd posted to a referring domain, it was 25 times. For 1 niche.
So the only thing that could do that across 200 domains is automation.
idk, any ideas?
For 6 days in a row, they could of got everything out the way update-wise. Like backlinks, ads, user experience, content, pbns and so on.
I have one adsense site that has stayed steady, its ad placement is less aggressive though. The one that was hit has an display box in the header as well as float left on the content so two ads are visible instantly the one that was not hit only has one floating left, no idea if that's relevant though.
That's not a bad idea actually, I will check my sites later.
There's very little chance that Google will penalize the use of Adsense ... We can see Google's policy at this level. No spam for the user experience as they say, on the other hand it does not bother them to put a max of ad on the search pages.
I hate their hypocrisy.
It just needs to stay in the same theme in my opinion and "think of the user" as they say.
The best way would be a link that does not seem to be one for google...
This is the site I mentioned a few days ago, it is in the finance industry, one of the most difficult. If I could rank for any of those keywords I'd be raking in stupid money. Here's some of the backlinks it's got:
I actually have Adsense on there too, so I'll remove that and see if it makes any difference. Sounds nuts but conversions take time and Adsense clicks are silly money so I thought why not. I kinda welcome G to this site as it's as WH as I'll ever be....well.....it's had some fun stuff going on but G would never ever be able to figure it out.
I think it's over-optimised so that says to me it's a refresh in this particular instance, but I reckon the PBN thing was just a scare-tactic or just P(ublic)BNs same way as they got ALN/BMR a few years back. Easy to find and devalue, which is fair enough. My own PBNs seem to have been found in an indexer, which I haven't done at least I don't think I have, so I'm worried about them. If I Disavow those domains of indexers to the root under a different site, do you think it would make any difference. I don't want to add any PBNs to GWMT but have a list of the offending indexer type domains.
My clients sites are all cool, some drops but traffic increases which doesn't make sense unless rank trackers can't keep up with whatever Google is doing - they're probably building their own rank tracker and stopping all others from working so they can have even more eyes on us....or roll it out in their new UI of Analytics which is coming soon.
Weird. All I'm doing right now is building LSI only keywords, removed the main keyword just to branch out on diversification of my anchors and percentages.
@Anth20 - at this point I'm only using naked urls and generic keywords on SER links that I build direct to a moneysite. I save the exact match keywords for links that I'm reasonably certain will index and won't be taken down. My thinking is that indexing issues + link loss makes it way too difficult to control your anchor text otherwise. Your strategy may very well work too, I just haven't tested it personally.
I'm still seeing ranking and metric drops but traffic is up. Using G as a normal searcher this morning was bringing up USA results, so it's still backwards and shuffling and not finished being fucked about with - as this happens all of the time during an update. Usually I get Australian results as there are cities with the same name in Oz as where I live.
@redrays thanks bro, that's my twitter btw. Randomly surfing this thread and saw you linked to it.
I have several sites that dropped from the March 8th update, and others that didn't drop and/or dropped and then recovered.
I really don't see any pattern. One of my sites that had the biggest drop had a lot of lower quality GSA links, however, the sites that remained also had GSA links.
I do think Google is going after PBNs (at least in the traditional sense) though, as I notice when analyzing some of my old convo / partial anchors that used to easily rank, no longer rank. This makes me think Google is de-valuing PBN domains instead of de-indexing them. Hence why there hasn't been a mass-deindexing in a very long time.
Admittedly I'm a bit stuck on where to go from here. This algorithm is by far the most random thing they've ever rolled out, so it's hard to say how we should execute in the future to avoid it.
I have some ideas but it requires me basically re-vamping much of my PBN, and setting up a lot of new, more relevant PBNs which will be insanely time-consuming but may be required to rank new sites in the current climate.
Does anyone else have any data into the March 8th P4 refresh / "Fred" update? I was analyzing some people that dropped from SERPwoo and surprisingly, some of them had excellent content, and high-quality backlinks from legitimate sites... this was most surprising to me, this algorithm is extremely random.
@seoaddict - my pleasure. You share good information, and your politics are solid too. Think I originally found you through Aaron Wall.
One of my burner sites got absolutely rocked by "Fred". Pretty confident it's due to anchor text. I've shared a bit of information in this thread, and if you want more detail drop me a pm. There may also have been a mini update at the end of February targeting mass page style sites, although those are more difficult to disentagle.
Yea I haven't seen anything positive on the site I removed the ads on. It was a potential quick fix to try but it doesnt seem to be panning out.
A friend has linked me to a of his sites that have had a fair few of their pages drop while some held steady so just going over what is different about the pages. Going to put more time into it this weekend. From what we have checked so far we have only seen a disparity in the number of T1s indexed.
For example, 1000 T1 SER links to two pages, the one that was hit has 100 of the links indexed while the one that was not hit has 700 of the links indexed. I have checked the anchor texts of the pages and both were over optimized while only some of them were hit.
@shaun that is very interesting. Was this an issue on your friend's side where he did not create that number of T1's for indexing? Or is this an issue where G may have removed certain types of T1 links from the index?
No idea mate, I havent had much time to look into it but he is putting most of his time into trying to work it out. The shit thing is I can't think of a way to see the index history of the links to workout if those links all dropped during Fred or before.
The links are direct from his T1 project that we checked out so he intentionally built them.
i suspect its the on site metric. try using pandabot to improve your metric (bounce, time on site etc) to improve things.
this update didnt hit me at all and i have g codes in my money sites in tough niches, perhaps pandabot is helping me? haha
never give this a tot till i read this thread.
PS: not affiliated to pandabot but i use them to increase ctr from serp, give my competitors bounce and use their instant traffic for visiting the MS's backlinks to make google think the backlinks are good. :P
btw, dont overeact and make changes to your content or link building, could be one of google's trick to see which sites are doing "seo".
if u do natural link building, your backlink profile shouldnt change drastically after ranking drops. sit back and relax and see how things go for another week or 2.
The site of mine that was hit has the highest on page time of every site I currently have getting traffic other than my personal blog so I don't think that is a major factor.
Also you can change your content as you please, google even provide guidelines to help you optimise your sites for SEO.
@hardcorenuker on a different thread I brought up PandaBot. Works like a champ. But my issue with them was that their installed user base was a bit small, making my ability to scale or sustain traffic risky. Absolutely, it improved my onsite in GA while I had it installed. Interestingly, I stopped using it in January, so perhaps this may have played a part in my decline from Fred. I am wits end trying to sort this out. But PandaBot slipped my mind. Going to re-activate it today and crank it up again. See if that does the trick. I lost a sweet kw that I had top ten that I never SEO'd so they hit me for something other than my seo.
On a side note. After deleting GA from my MS, I received a cryptic email from G about how I was losing out on a bunch of benefits. That email pre-dated Fred. Interesting timing I must say.
I am holding steady on no GA script, but if I can't sort out anything else, then I may have no choice but to reinstall and see if the big G will forgive me.
@viking i dun usually do this but i have a network of blogs with GA installed (100 blogs) and i send no follow links out. they work
i think its fishy for a modern site NOT to have GA. GA is like so basic.
also, for panda, honestly dun overdo it, i did and it affected ranking negatively.
what works for me is around 5 searches per day (serp) + bounce to competitors
i also do a lot of brand searches in panda
more importantly is the instant traffic from backlinks.
btw i noticed in panda while the pool isnt big, the number changes quite a bit, i guess its becos different people in diff timezone run for certain timing and not 24 hrs. so the actual number is probably bigger (just a guess)
btw personally i feel u should use panda to do branded searches (yourdomain.com) at this point,
Just wanted to share a bit more on this whole Fred thing. Maybe it syncs up to someone else and we can get more clues as to what is happening. I decided to give in and put GA back onsite as I spoke with someone who ran me through the pros/cons decision matrix. Bottom line better to have it than not. So keeping in mind it has been off for over a month. I was shocked when I started digging into the data.
After linking GA to WM accounts.
I went to WM>Search Traffic>Links to your site. 99% of my links are wiped. For example, I had hundreds of WP 2.0's built and aimed at the site. It is showing 15. Same all the way down the 2.0 platform list. Moving across the column to the right for most linked content, pages that are never seo'd are listed, indicating that all of my seo efforts for the last few years have been removed from this MS. Interestingly my PBN links are there, so G sees them as legit, for now.
No manual actions. # of indexed pages is the proper number. So nothing obvious for any wrong doing.
So the conclusion I am drawing right now is that Fred is aimed at 2.0's+Content on some level.
In ahrefs, my metrics continue to climb.
Given that my PBN's stayed active in WM, I am going to add a few per week going forward and see if this works for me.
Anyone else experiencing anything similar or I am the only lucky one?
@viking are the web 2.0s still alive and indexed or have they been deleted by the web 2 site?
The guy I was on about earlyer in the thread doesnt have WMT installed for the site so we can't check what Google are showing as pointing to his site but the majority of the T1 links on his hit pages are not indexed by Google where as the ones that were not hit have a large amount of the T1s indexed.
We might be onto something here. I have a few hours set aside over the weekend to try pick the site appart.
My own personal site that was hit has been recached by Google for a few days now with zero affiliate links and there has been no possitive movement in the SERPs for it. Come next month when I pick up a VPS again I am considering just throwing a few hundred links to it.
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