Google Florida Update 2 March 12, 2019

[BushyTop]

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System: The following 23 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4937425.htm [webmasterworld.com] by brett_tabke - 8:43 am on Mar 13, 2019 (cst -6)

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Seeing some changes this morning. Anyone else. UK.

[Selen]

What I notice that top search results don't have Adsense or 'banner advertising' (they may only have very simple text ads). Could it be a confirmation that ad-heavy sites cannot rank high on competitive terms?

[nomis5]

I have an "evergreen" informational UK website with about 900+ pages in the recreation niche. It seems to have been unaffected by any update and continues to moderately improve (page views wise) year on year. Over the past three years all but one of my independent competitors have been decimated to the point that they either no longer exist or are are no longer updated.

I have several corporate competitors and they seem to be on an even keel. However, the corporate competitors who combine evergreen content (on which they hugely rely to attract visitors) and commercial sales pages seem to be a mixed picture. Some have taken a huge dive and some are simply maintaining the status quo. None (one excluded) seem to be improving. Those very large corporate sites which stick to mainly evergreen content are doing better, but they are very few in number.

My take on this is that if you are selling stuff then G wants to sell it and will not let you sell it. The SERPS are angled that way. Don't look at the impact of individual updates, including this March one, accept the fact that unless you are selling a very unusual product, the long term prognosis is that you are probably onto a loser.

If you are an evergreen site, think of something which will make it unique and difficult to replicate. Depth of knowledge, a unique feature etc. If you don't have something like that, the corporates will also swallow you up in the long term because they acquire customers through their evergreen content which then leads onto their commercial pages.

[robzilla]

A disproportionate amount of academic and scientific sites, along with a bunch of non-profits, have made their way into the SERPs I'm tracking; both high-profile organizations, like major universities, and surprisingly small ones. They don't always have much content, and much of it seems quite old and perhaps not even particularly useful to a lot of searchers, but they are now apparently considered more relevant than the many commercial, ad-supported sites that have been pushed down. It's a very diverse bunch now... maybe that's the point. Just perhaps a little too diverse.

I'm still usually ranking #1, sometimes also #2, although Search Console reports the average position has dropped a bit (small traffic dip noticeable). Hard to see which sites would otherwise be ranking above me, no matter what tool or browser I'm using. Any suggestions for that?

[ichthyous]

@HereWeGo123 I was wondering the same thing about disavowing links. I've noticed that a very spammy site is now the largest source of backlinks to my site, with 1720 links to 550 pages. Today I checked and the site hosts malware and all kinds of pop-ups that take over the browser so it has zero value...I added the domain to my disavow file today. Most of the time the spam sites come and go, so I don't bother to add every domain, but this one has been around for a few months and still increasing. I wonder if this will have any effect at all.

[Halaspike]

I'm seeing images & YouTube videos overcrowding the serps. It looks disgusting & pushing down relevant search results making it hard for visitors to find what they are looking for. Images & videos should have their own section.

[Fatlossplanner]

For the sites that lost almost half the traffic.. Have they been hit by a penalty or something? For me none of my pages have improved.. And to best of my knowledge I have not do e things that will may big G unhappy... It looks like it's a penalty or something..

[broccoli]

@JS_Harris

I really don't think the March 12th core update had anything to do with backlinks.

I got hit on March 13-14th, it’s entirely possible the update has more than one component. Also, it sounds like your links look a lot more natural than mine.

[aristotle]

robzilla wrote
A disproportionate amount of academic and scientific sites, along with a bunch of non-profits, have made their way into the SERPs I'm tracking;

This the counterpart in the informational sectors of the increasing dominance of big brands in commercial sectors. It's not just universities, but also big organizations, government agencies, museums, and similar.

Trust and authority have become more important to google than the value of the content.

[thepointer]

Anyone else noticing a huge increase in spam sites stealing images that link out to your site creating a horrible looking PBN link?

[martinibuster]

...it’s entirely possible the update has more than one component.

That's a good observation, broccoli!
;)

[EditorialGuy]

Trust and authority have become more important to google than the value of the content.

Our site has had (and still has) many, many #1 spots in Google for queries related to a topic that we've covered in depth since the 1990s. On the other hand, for a couple of queries on a highly specific subtopic, there's now an answer box at the top of the SERP with information from a site I'd never heard of. To make matters worse, the information that Google is displaying from the site is at least two years out of date.

Still, anecdotal evidence is more about anecdotes than evidence. I'd be reluctant to make any assumptions about what this latest "core algorithm update" is rewarding or not rewarding. There are just too many variables.

[whoa182]

...it’s entirely possible the update has more than one component.

I think the clue is in the name: Broad Core.

Google has said that you need to think about all aspects of the website and user experience. It's not about any one single thing or page...

[NickMNS]

I'd be reluctant to make any assumptions about what this latest "core algorithm update" is rewarding or not rewarding. There are just too many variables.

Also, there is no telling whether or not this update has fully rolled out. I hadn't seen any impact since this is said to have started, last Monday or Tuesday. But, today as of 9am I have been seeing traffic up and holding steady by around 30 to 40%.

[HereWeGo123]

@ichthyous - I hear you and agree. To recap what martinibuster and John Mueller keep saying with respect to obvious looking spam links - they’re pretty good at detecting them and just discount them. Our site has thousands of bad spammy links and I can’t say that we’ve been negatively affected by them, yet. My main concern was always two fold. (A) what if what we believe to be genuine and natural backlink strategies are actually the opposite in Google’s eyes (although those strategies were recommended and endorsed by reputable thought leaders in the industry that you probably heard of) and (b) what if a very clever perpetrator would want to do nSeo against someone but beyond the scope of just blasting thousands of spammy links but rather they were to mimic negative seo in way that makes it appear that they were SEO self made links that Google would frown upon and/or create PBN links? I bugged John Mueller many times on Twitter about disavowing spammy sites like the one you’re describing and he said that there’s no need to, but if it makes me feel better, then I can disavow. So I agree with what you said, I highly doubt that that particular malware site with spammy links would have an adverse effect on you but to play it safe, it’s good that you disavowed it. I would do the same.

[jmorgan]

I'm a little confused with these "core algorithm" updates.

A) Are they just updates to adapt to the changing search landscape?

B) Does it involve a refresh of the signals/data they've collected on websites since the previous "core algorithm" update?

C) Or is it some kind of admission that the existing algorithm was defective? Which would be puzzling given they have stated they roll these out at least once or twice a year which would imply they believe every "core algorithm" rolled out will eventually be deemed to be defective at some stage.

[Shaddows]

C) Or is it some kind of admission that the existing algorithm was defective?

Is every new model of car an admission that the old model was defective? Or just the obvious result of the fact that technology moves on, and companies can produce a better version now than they could before?

Of course, once the new model comes out, the old version will be substandard (or defective), relative to the new state-of-the-art release.

[seo2019]

I would hold off making changes until at least next week. I can still see ranking fluctuations.

No point in acting on an assumption that may or may not make your situation worse only to discover that the issue was something else entirely.

As with all core updates, Google should provide more details eventually.

[lazywebdev]

One of our ecommerce sites has been steadily improving in the serps over the last few years to having hundreds of our top keywords in the top 5 positions. Previous large updates have given slight jumps in improvement but progress has been steady. The middle of last week we saw our site occupying snippets, 1st and 2nd (and sometimes 3rd) positions all at once. During the end of last week and over the weekend we have dropped down 3-5 places. Competition sites with lower quality that have been slowly dropping over the last 2 years have suddenly jumped back to position they were in 6months-2 years ago. Some content which is being presented is older than what was there recently. Almost like the SERPs are showing listings based on data from historic indexes.

[Jori]

About bad links. Using GSC, we can see there all the links that Google is considering. The really spammy ones would eventually disappear (in my case, all from the spammy "The Globe" network).
I'll manually disavow those that stick on GSC after X months.

[BushyTop]

@lazywebdev I'm seeing a very similar pattern. Almost as if sites that have been around longer are reaping the benefits, regardless of their SEO practises. Could this be anything to do with how EAT is now evaluated?

[BangkokBaby]

So from what I've read on this fourm, blog comments and other forums, the results of the update are:

1. People who did nothing to their sites after Aug/Oct updates, traffic has gone up a noticeably amount
2. People who did work on their site during the hit in Aug/Oct have noticed a traffic increase
3. People who haven't work on their sites saw their sites go down further
4. People who did work on their sites went down even further.

I guess it's safe to say that Google TESTS various algorithm factors and once the data come in that it yields a poor user experience based on all their parameters, it gives that factor that less weight overall. If it does well and improves the user experience, it gives is more weight in the next core update.

I wonder how many new factors they are testing in this core update, and once it shows to provide a better/worse user experience it will be adjusted again. I believe this will be the future of SEO for the next few years at least. This is why Google says work on providing the best UX because that is what's going to win in the end.

You may lose the battle, but you'll end up winning the war if you follow that mantra.

Every few months there will be ranking changes as the AI gets better and better by making assumptions that the algorithm will refine. It's going to be a roller-coster ride for SEOers for the next few years at least.

Buckle your seatbelt Dorothy, cause Kansas is going bye-bye!

[lazywebdev]

@BushyTop We do everything we can to do everything "right": solid technical base (no html errors, the odd script tag validation warning but usually none), relevant content, decent length and informational blog posts, Q&A on product cat pages, structured mark up where appropriate. Galling to see competitors whose web pages have 100+ technical html errors, thin content and no mark up suddenly jump up.

[lazywebdev]

Little update. Seem manufacturers are getting more high positions rather than those selling their goods in our industry. For a long time they have been nowhere near the top (generally have poor HTML to boot).

[ichthyous]

Anyone else noticing a huge increase in spam sites stealing images that link out to your site creating a horrible looking PBN link?

@thepointer Yes, I just mentioned this myself. These sites are a scourge on image heavy websites like mine. They mostly come and go and by the time Google reports backlinks the domain is usually gone, but in some cases they stick around for months and that's when I disavow the links. Still waiting to see if that has much of an effect, but so far it doesn't seem to have hurt.

[lazywebdev]

Additional note: looked in GSC - over the weekend had a spike in 404s which have then gone...appears the links being looked at are all years old. Appears some URLs/index data has been pulled momentarily from somewhere and then gone again.

[NickMNS]

Anyone else noticing a huge increase in spam sites stealing images

Unfortunately (or is it fortunately) I am not noticing a "huge increase". This has also been a problem for me, except that it has been going on consistently for a long while.

[Lagonda]

Looking good.

Comparison between last 7 days (Mar 11, 2019 - Mar 17, 2019) vs same weekdays 2018 (Mar 12, 2018 - Mar 18, 2018).

Avg. Session Duration
+36.73%
Bounce Rate
-4.90%
Pages / Session
+15.36%
Number of Sessions per User
+5.22%

This is me rationalizing.
This is me not rationalizing:

New Users
-78.25%
Sessions
-77.14%
Pageviews
-73.63%

And in the last two days, it got even better:
New Users
-86.69%
Sessions
-86.27%
Pageviews
-85.66%

Now, you don't get to see this written here often so, amuse yourself:
I've always questioned a large number of my top organic pages - in my opinion they weren't useful to anyone.
But hey, free traffic, why not.
Yet, I have several other pages that I considered useful and those got almost zero traffic.
Maybe those aren't high volume searches, don't know, don't care.
It was already a "pet" site, seriously wondering now if it will become a "defunct pet" site.
It's how natural selection is supposed to work right?
It works? It lives. It doesn't? It dies.

I'm only sorry because it had some interesting testimonies that, unfortunately, will be lost forever.
The old rule applied: 20% of the (some bad) content brought 80% of the revenue, when that's gone, the ratio got inverted and it's no longer sustainable.

Background info about this site: [webmasterworld.com...]

[thepointer]

@ichthyous
I've been noticing that these image PBNs have really started ramping up around 2018 and here in 2019 I'm seeing even more. Even worse is if you do a "Site:" for their name in Google they're indexed.

This is a classic PBN but with a new take on them. They're getting clever.

I've noticed that they'll scrape images and more importantly backlink to everyone in a niche. If they're backlinking to everyone it's harder for Google to punish anyone without taking everyone down. They know this so even the sites they want to help still get linked to but I'm thinking they get linked to less. Google has a curve of what weight they'll give to a backlink until they ignore and then start hurting the site for too many spam links. It's almost like a niche-wide negative SEO attack. It's the perfect PBN because Google can't easily stop it. It's every month they spin up a new server and repeat the process to hide their footprint. It must be effective because these types of sites seem to be growing every month.

Just because these spam links don't show up in Search Console or Google says they don't do something doesn't mean they're not hurting your site. What is going on sure does feel like an algorithm penalty to me. So far the sites able to handle this attack either use a CDN for their images or have so many strong backlinks to counter-act these spam ones or still new and haven't been scraped yet.

[Fatlossplanner]

Anyone else who lost the traffic post Google updates?

[lazywebdev]

@Fatlossplanner - down 40% ish traffic this Monday (and over weekend) so far compared to last and previous.

[lazywebdev]

hey all - anyone notice an unusual spike in pages indexed in GSC on 6th/7th March?

[NickMNS]

So to puts thing into perspective on my end.

First, yesterday marked the 1 year anniversary (March 17,2018) of my peak traffic. From that day forward my traffic has been on a steady decline. Actually a sudden decline followed by a steady decline.

As I mentioned in my previous post yesterday I saw sharp increase in traffic, in the end it was +20% week over week.

Now for perspective, year over year I am down 59%, and compared to a day earlier, pre 20% bump, I was down 65%. The increase in traffic puts me back to December levels.

There is still a long road ahead...

[No5needinput]

@ lazywebdev Indexed or crawled? I have a large crawl spike on 11-12th March.

[ichthyous]

@thepointer As Nick points out this isn't new for me either, I've seen a huge increase for the last three years or so. Most of the sites just come and go all the time. I don't bother to even report the pages anymore to Google and request a takedown.

I cannot speak to the effectiveness of the negative SEO attack, but I have more of these kinds of sites linking to my images than is even possible to count and adding them to a long disavow file hasn't helped me at all, my site has been dropping steadily since Sept of last year with only a brief recovery of some of the loss for about a month, then just kept going down further.

I do use cloudflare CDN, but these sites link to the page as well as the image. Having thousands of links to your pages from spam sites hosting walware cannot be good so those get disavowed. Unfortunately cloudflare's anti hotlink feature also blocks Google images, and I've never been able to get it not to do that even with their workaround, so I don't use it. But yes, it is very plausible that innocent sites with lots of their images getting scraped are getting hurt now.

[NickMNS]

The increase in traffic puts me back to December levels.

I forgot to take into consideration the fact that yesterday was a Sunday where traffic is typically much lower. Regardless I probably should wait a little longer to see "A" if this traffic boost holds and "B" to see over the span of a a week or few days how it all averages out.

@Ichthyous

my site has been dropping steadily since Sept of last year with only a brief recovery of some of the loss for about a month, then just kept going down further

I experienced a very similar pattern. My issue is two fold:
Rationally / logically based on all the Google has said about the topic, I tend to believe that this spam is not having a direct link to my ranking issues. So I fear that blocking the hotlinking will cause more harm than good.
But at the same time, if it is causing an impact than loosing traffic from Google image search seems like a small price to pay to regain all the other traffic.
There is just no way to know for sure.

A while back I tried blocking the hotliking with Cloudflare but that was utterly useless in my case as my images are SVG's, and their hotlink protection is only for png/jpg/gif. There is method for blocking htolinking using CloudFlare workers that will allow Google and other SE's through, but it isn't fool proof and it costs money.

[martinibuster]

I have more of these kinds of sites linking to my images than is even possible to count and adding them to a long disavow file hasn't helped me at all...

If disavowing the scrapers linking to your images does not work, then that is a strong signal that those links were not causing your issues.

It's quite common for publishers to report that disavows did nothing to help. That's because the links were not the problem.

Veryl likely the problem lies elsewhere.

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:28 pm (utc) on Mar 18, 2019]

[lazywebdev]

@No5needinput Crawled - yes my error. Large crawl spikes on some site. Those with large crawl spikes have all dropped. Those without haven't. Makes me concerned that the other sites might be recrawled shortly and more upheaval is to come.

[edited by: lazywebdev at 3:30 pm (utc) on Mar 18, 2019]

[samwest]

This "update" feels just like the first Florida update, totally punitive across the board...another cash grab by Gorg.

[Mark_A]

For me, March 12th and days following have been noticeably down on expected traffic.

The shape of last week is just lower than a usual week of working days.

Will be interesting to see what this week brings.

I have no viable plans to radically change the site.

[aristotle]

First, yesterday marked the 1 year anniversary (March 17,2018) of my peak traffic. From that day forward my traffic has been on a steady decline. Actually a sudden decline followed by a steady decline.

As I mentioned in my previous post yesterday I saw sharp increase in traffic, in the end it was +20% week over week.

Maybe google's algorithm gave your site a one-year duration penalty, and it expired yesterday (:

[tangor]

Traffic up, generally a good thing.

Revenue down (adsense) not a happy thing ... but then again the growing number of young folks surfing the web are NOT spenders, and may be among the most reluctant spenders we've seen in decades.

Just something to think about. IOW Know your users and their demographics.

[zapmachine]

Our main ecommerce site has lost massive traffic in the past week and the seprs are a mess in the niche right now. what a disaster in terms of organic traffic.

[Selen]

I noticed a couple national newspapers from Europe that own very reputable news sites in local languages, like Italian or Spanish:

1. Registered a .com domain.
2. Take the content from their national domains and translate it (possibly via auto-translators) into English. Then publish this English content to their new .com / English website.

Result - an overnight "reputable" news source in English language that ranks higher than small, but established English sites that have existed for 1-2 decades. All it took were some strong links from their national website.

I imagine all national reputable websites, in all commercial niches, could do exactly the same. The little guy will never win.

[mosxu]

I have stopped worrying about updates, all are a joke.

They are trying to convince us to pay more but for what? Bots pretending to be researching products?

[broccoli]

It felt punitive to me too. I’ve been rising and rising with every quality update and this was a huge punch in the gut. I suspect they will never let my site rank as it should do. I think it’s been caught in some averaging machine learning algorithm that compares my site to other sites in the niche and subtracts a score from my site because my links and my content are different to the people who came along after me and copied what I did. I’ve been labelled a black hat and a misfit and that’s it. I’ll rise during quality updates and then get beaten back down by core updates before I can get my traffic back. What am I supposed to do?

[whoa182]

Makes me concerned that the other sites might be recrawled shortly and more upheaval is to come.

Both of my sites were crawled a lot before this update. I saw around a 4-5 x higher increase in pages crawled for my main site with about a 15 x increase in downloaded bytes. The pages crawled was quite high for a number of days, but now has settled to about 2-3 x my previous pages crawled (per day).

It started around the 2nd of March and then I recovered on the 12-13th. My 2nd site hasn't really seen much of recovery and I've not really worked on it anyway near the level I overhauled my main site.

I haven't seen a recovery of all of my keywords or articles. By the looks of it, without my new articles, I'd still be much lower than pre-August. Unless in time I recover those old long tail keywords over time. But as JM says, the internet changes over months and years, and so does user intent. So, you can't expect to always land where you were before (if you recover).

I have over 15 years experience (offline and online) with my main topic but only 2-3 years with my other site. So the quality of my articles is much better for my main site.

By the time the update came around, I made sure I accomplished the following on my main site:

- All pages determined to be low quality were given a 410. Over half of my pages were very bad (very old blog posts).
- Similar pages were merged to create stronger pages where intent and/or topic were similar.
- All pages were given a tighter focus and edited for clarity, spelling, and grammar.
- I created a lot of new posts between August and now that were I would say are my best so far.
- I did zero link building.
- Other improvements: Fixed bad links, massively improved speed, better internal linking, better navigation menu
- All metrics on Google analytics had improved significantly.

My 2nd site which didn't recover (at least not yet)
- I quickly went over with Grammarly and scanned the articles to check for mistakes (They might still exist, so I need to go back).
- I fixed bad internal links.
- Improved site speed.
- Built no links (site has very few links because it never had enough time to accumulate then naturally other than spammy ones).

For me, it was the site that I spent the most time on that got rewarded. The 2nd site, I barely touched it other than quickly fixing a few things. The 2nd site got hit in April 2018. My main site (which has recovered the traffic but not all keywords) got hit in August.

Does Google take into considering the entire site when re-evaluation it during these updates? Or just a sample of pages. I wondered if it were possible that some people are "on the edge" where sometimes Google crawls a good part of the site and other times a bad part and this is why.

One mistake I kept making over the last few months when I tried to recover was removing the 404's from my Search Console and marking them as "fixed". This, I believe, resets the whole process and so my poor-quality pages were never removed from the index until I did it properly and assigned a 410.

Google crawl rate and traffic increase

[imgur.com...]

[vicky2885]

During this core update, our website’s traffic dropped about 30% to 40%. It’s daily organic session dropped from 140K to 90K. I began to work for iMobie English site since 2014, and our daily organic session rose from 8K to 150K, and we have never been attacked by Google update algorithm. We also have 5 site in Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, and also with the similar SEO strategies as English site’s, and all of them function well, and did get a big rise in traffic in recent years.

Last year, our French site was attacked in March update, its organic traffic dropped about 20%. Because we are using the same methods on all sites, French site is the only victim. We didn’t make any change or recovery actions on French site. Then it did recover in August update, almost back to the level before March.

Then from September to November, 2018, we made 301 redirect non-English sites (except Japanese ) to English site, and become 4 sub-directories, like, /de/, /fr/, /es/, /ar/. After this 301 redirect, our German site got a rise on traffic and sales, French site dropped about 10%, Arabic and Spanish keep as normal.

Then in this March, our website is attacked by this core update, all sub-directories dropped about 30% to 40%, including English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic. While our Japanese site is normal, doesn’t get a rise, or drop. Even we have a sub-domain site in English site, it is also very normal, didn’t drop at all.

Therefore, I am a little doubt that the French site was attacked by this update, but it is a sub-directory of English site, this makes the whole site attacked, but I am not sure about it.

After reading all the posts in this thread, at this moment, I am thinking how to recover our website, I plan to do from the following aspects ( I know my ideas may not comprehensive, I will appreciate that if the SEOers can give me some advice. Thank you in advance):

1.Improve the website structure and inner link structure. Semrush always remind me some pages are orphan pages, or get only one link.

2.Fix grammar and spelling mistakes, and other mistakes on pages that make users don’t feel good.

3.Complete the author profile, Contact us, About us section. We only have a short bio that doesn’t offer users too much info about authors or company.

4.Fix duplicate contents. We had written many posts on similar topics in 2014, for example, fix iPhone Touch ID not working, we wrote the different pages on Fix iOS 11/12 touch ID not working, Fix iPhone 8 touch ID not working, etc. Although they are in the same topic, some of them can rank in first page in different keywords.

5.Deal with thin contents. At first, the articles we wrote only have the solutions in our products, then we find the featured snippet always are the articles with default solutions and with free tools. Then we changed our articles’ contents. While many old articles only have thin contents.

6.Link to other website instead of only mention them without links. Sometimes, we write some review articles, it mentioned some tools from other websites, we didn’t give the links, only the brand or product name mention.

7.Avoid Over-optimization in pages. Normally, when optimizing some page, we rearrange the contents of article from the Google Webmaster tool’s search query keywords, and emphasize this article’s relevance on these query keywords, instead of users reading experience.

8.Then I follow the Google E-A-T guideline to adjust and improve our site. And also study the featured snippet results.

That’s all I thought about, I know they are not comprehensive. If you find anything important, but I didn’t mention, be free to tell me. Thank you very much! And also hope all guys in this thread can get better result in the future updates.

[prica]

Did someone checked his rankings in other countries with the same language? Seeing a lot of domains winning e.g. with the co.uk and loosing in US or sites loosing in DE and the exact domain winning in AT and CH (all three German language index)

[bostongio]

We're a health education site, online for over 20 years. We compete against many of the big names, but have done well in terms of keywords for certain areas, many times having had an important keyword on the 1st page of the SERPs. We have a very large content site and don't sell any widgets.

Medic was a mixed bag for us. We seemed to have gained some traffic from it and were up nearly 30%. But then we were impacted somewhat at the very end of the Medic update, at the end of Sept/beginning of Oct. 2018. Our traffic went down 13% during a time of the year where we normally see an increase of 4-10%. That means our overall gain from Medic was maybe around 15%.

We recovered slowly over the past few months, and were feeling good about our upward trajectory. Until this core update.

Our nightmare started on March 13. From March 13-18 compared to prior 5 days, our organic traffic from Google is down nearly 30%. Most of those 1st page SERPs have gone down to 2nd or 3rd page (generally moving from somewhere in the top 10 results, down to 15-25).

So basically it looks like we're now down 15% from our pre-Medic traffic levels.

[anfrox]

@vicky2885 @prica I have a web app website that's 3 years old. It is operating in a quite a fresh niche that got ultra-competitive very quickly. We had localisations in sub-folders e.g.: /de, /fr, /it and others. We got hit in early August last year but then grown since the end of month. We also got slightly hit with all updates thereafter but a recovery followed every time with further slow growth upwards in position and traffic. Until now. After this update our localised pages lost 80% traffic overnight, I can see our website's keywords go off the serp's completely everyday and I am also seeing G pushes local cTLD websites over .com's with sub-folder translations. Our website loading speed is good, we use all modern best-practices and try to adhere to mobile-first approach.

I am also seeing a huge amount of spammer sites linking to our images, they are also present in GSC. Been disavowing all of them since the last week just to be safe.