Hope to recover from Google August Core Update

[egyfitness]

I run a fitness blog . I am a nutritionist and certified personal trainer . Not a doctor .

The point is , I wrote 190 articles myself in 4 years . Didnt hire freelancers , copy or translate .

In 1 August , I found my main competitor , a content farm , outrank me for many keywords . I lost 30% of traffic .

The content farm posts are thin . Written by housewives and unemployed youth . They didnt understand a word from what they are translating .

Can you imagine a 500 words post about certain supplement , written by a female freelancer , full of scientific and medical mistakes , outrank my 3000 words post , full of scientific research ?

It is crazy .

But What I think is , I will slowly recover my losses automatically . And google already said that.

People will simply click on the content farm link . Read the trash and bounce back to my throughout article . Like it and learn from it .

And google AI will detect that . Is it called Rankbrain or something ?

So if you write a very good content , unique and helpful . You may automatically recover your lost positions in few weaks.

Or may not ? Diversify your business , make a youtube channel , be active on social media . Don't fall in the mercy of Google stupidity..

[broccoli]

Hi there (I'm a new poster, lurker for a while). I have a nutrition related site that got a boost in the August core update. It's a very tiny niche site and doesn't make me any money. It was a passion project purely to give people information. It has one adsense unit, and one page of amazon affiliate links to relevant books. The page lengths vary from between a few hundred words up to 1000+ words. I didn't write them to a length for SEO, I wrote them to be as long as they needed to be.

I was surprised the site did well in the August update because I never bothered to do any classic E-A-T, it's virtually anonymous, has no author information, just a link to my personal website, and I forgot to put up a privacy policy, t&cs, etc (oops). Of course, now I've read the search quality guidelines, when I have the time I will add an extensive author profile!

Anyway, I couldn't understand why its rankings went up, then I went and re-read the pages. Pretty much every definitive statement I'd made in the text was linked via an anchor to a medical reference at the end of the page that linked to PubMed, as with proper citations. There are at least a dozen references on each page. I don't know if that's something you're doing already, but I really think it made the difference on my site.

[aristotle]

I have the time I will add an extensive author profile!

I don't have an author profile on any of my sites. All of them are anonymous. As far as I can tell, this has never mattered to google at all.

Perhaps google realizes that it would be easy for someone to simply make up a name and a profile. I've recently read about several politicians who made false claims about college degrees and military service, etc, and got away with it for years.

[broccoli]

My sites were anonymous until recently. My main site got hit very hard in the early March update, and I've been trying to improve EAT to get my rankings back ever since. I put up an about the authors page on my site in mid August and saw a small rankings increase almost immediately. I think they're testing out some kind of off-site authorship measurement, that is, you have to have a good reputation elsewhere for it to reflect well on your EAT. Fortunately my partner and I are known for other things on the internet, so we have some kind of authority. I was very unhappy about it though, as someone whose livelihood depends on the smooth running of their website, I feel it exposes me to all kinds of dangers.

I think I found egyfitness's site. It looks like it has some medical references, so I guess it can't be that after all. I've seen a lot of people complaining about longer length expert articles getting hit and replaced by thin content sites. Could it be people are just looking for shorter, easier to understand content?

I do have another theory about some of the recent changes. It almost feels like they have a site-wide panda algorithm in place and are looking for the most comprehensive site for the bigger/more generic keywords, almost regardless of the quality of the individual article. I could be wrong.

[aristotle]

almost feels like they have a site-wide panda algorithm in place

There's been some speculation here that the Aug1 update gave more weight to the Panda part of the algorithm. Apparently most fo the old sites that survived the original Panda rollout in 2011 weren't hurt this time either.

[Totalx]

190 articles is not a lot in 4 years. I think you expectation are too high. There are well ranked bloggers who write that number of articles in a year.

[jmorgan]

I personally find every time I improve a web page, the bounce rate actually gets WORSE (i.e. users bounce more), but the time on page improves and as more web pages are improved on the site, the sessions-per-user metric gradually gets better too (very, very incrementally). So I guess, that would kind of compensate for the higher bounce rate, since more users are returning to the site at some stage.

[isaacc]

190 articles is not a lot in 4 years. I think you expectation are too high. There are well ranked bloggers who write that number of articles in a year.

Most people I've worked with couldn't commit to this pace at a high standard.

[ichthyous]

This last update seems to be targeting link-builders (THIS IS MY OPINION DON'T TAKE IT TO THE BANK!)

I am wondering about this as well. My ranking hasn't taken a tumble like this in years, and was strongly increasing before it fell off a cliff on Sept 26th. Still down about 25% and no recovery.

I have been building links to content pages for two years now, directly linking from profile sites where I have accounts...mostly non-profit and arts related orgs. I strongly suspect that this update devalues links using keywords in the anchor text. I may want to update the links to naked links or edit them but I am worried it will only get worse.