Traffic down from December 2020 update?

SEO
#1

Many medium site lost their traffic in this december 2020 update.

If your content was ranking well before this update and your article was helpful to the reader’s (good quality) then this might be the reason for your rank drop…

** Spammy backlinks.

You might not build them…but if you have low quality backlinks or a spammy site linking you a lot then you should disavow them in Google search console.

What I have known so far about this update -

  1. Your overall site backlink profile should be clean.

  2. Content must be complete.

  3. Good user experience. Don’t ruin the user experience for revenue or leads.

  4. Content stracture.

  5. Overall site content. Relevancy. ( It would be wired reading about beauty tips on a marketing blog. Stick to your niche)

Things to work on.

Delete & redirect or redo low quality pages ( zombie pages).

Do a complete audit of your backlinks. Disavow them. To recover early.

Create more content covering around a topic you already rank.

*** Cover an entire topic. Example - how to make bread at home?

Related Posts:

  1. Things you need to prepare bread at home

  2. How to make your bread taste amazing

  3. How to make + soft / (variations…) Bread At home

  4. How much time it takes to prepare bread at home

  5. How long it will take a beginner to learn making bread at home.

  6. Many more if it makes sense and have minimum traffic you would like to write a post for.

( My site never affected this much before. Checked new links in search console. Bam.

My compititors build shady links for my site. Disavowed them in 20-30 minutes. Confirmed 1 site that did them to rank for their low quality content. Now I will compete them head to head for their money pages. Not with shady tactics but with great content.)

Lesson learned : review your backlinks in search console time to time. I’ll make a habit to check after 45-60 days.

I’ll share more after 2-3 Weeks.

#2

It doesn’t matter much. Google can differentiate between spammy link and orignal link. So, focus on content and don’t worry much about those links.

Unless you used some balck hat tactics to make Spammy links in the past.

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#3

My new site was hit as it was about to hit 10k pv. But it quickly recovered within a week after losing 70% traffic.

So don’t worry about backlinks. Just work on the content and all should be fine!

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#4

All this is common knowledge. Nothing new!

And you should share some poof as well before claiming that spammy links are the reason of your drop.

Those who don’t know can follow this advice and disavow links unnecessarily which can also cause a traffic drop.

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#5

I feel this is an old method which is not working anymore.

Google is expecting unique content, fast loading theme and authority backlinks. They are also more focused on core web vitals. So, the theme, content, and images we are using plays a major role in ranking.

#6

I never cared about spammy backlinks nor I build many ( except 10-15 from niche directory submission, social sites and from medium (.com).

But this time i got backlinks ( 300 approx) to my top ranking posts (5-7 posts) covering a xyz topic. And many of those sites are exactly match domains.

So Google might think that i build those… So I got little worried for a moment.

My other posts didn’t lost their ranking. Only 5-7 post got impacted from it.

And those posts generated 40% of my traffic.

Checked today… those pages are ranking now at 5-8 position. Before the update they are in 1-3.

#7

I know. But their importance can change with new updates.

#8

I dont think there is anything like this in one of my site in last few months lots of spammy backlink are being automatic. Then i twitted this to John muller he said google can take care these things and it can differentiate also.

My site has not lost any traffic on the update.

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