I own a large network of niche dating websites. Some of those are adult niche dating, so think things like fetish, sexual orientation, etc. on the adult side, we have had a really solid strategy for many years on SEO that has resulted in massive amounts of top SERPs, both in high volume keywords and way down the line in longtail. A big part of that strategy involves leveraging the profile text that users (real users, we do nothing shady like fake or AI profiles, unlike most of our competitors in adult) add to their profiles to get good search listings on crawlable pages. This year has only see our organic traffic grow, and we were up about 20% on where we started the year until recently.
From December 5 to December 6, our organic traffic was decimated. We are down over 50% in total. On sites that have been affected, its been near total destruction, and that happened on most of our bigger sites. On other sites, theres been no change. Traffic is the same. But in the aggregate, its a massive blow to the tune of a 6 figure loss per month in organic traffic.
Our search console shows these losses clearly on the affected sites. But there are no notes detailing manual penalties in there to be found - it looks like Google just decided the sites and pages they have liked for so long (because they are such good landing spots for what these searchers are looking for) are no longer good at all.
To me, this has to be a huge penalty for our network of sites particularly. I am only seeing small rumblings online about updates from Google affecting rankings since the weekend.
Has anyone seen anything like this before? We have been working all day to make sure nothing is broken that would have caused Google to penalize us, and it looks like that is the case. And the fact that a good amount of sites were not affected at all, and are doing the same thing, makes it all the more confusing. But it could be that those are coming soon of course - it would just be kinda strange, because all the sites that were hit were hit at the exact same time. And I should add that we have 2 different networks of sites, on completely different infrastructures and codebases, with different strategies, and both were hit. Im just...dumbfounded.
I know before asking that we likely have no real recourse in terms of actually getting an answer from Google, so I figured I would see if anyone else here might have seen something similar, either recently or anytime in the past. Thanks in advance for any input you might have.
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/Dbyu6Mt
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