Health niche pages disappear from SERP since November

[MikeCaldari]

Hi,

I'm new here and I have an interesting seo case.

Website is in health niche - online workouts and sport supplements.
Been present since 2013.

Suddenly at the end of november, blog articles started to dissapear from serp. And these articles were in top 3 or 5 positions for years, bringing good traffic and conversions.
Checking GSC, these articles are indexed by Google, but you can't find them if you search by parameter site:domain.com + keyword. However they appear if you enter a full url to site:domain.

I've been in seo for 7 years, also asked all seo people I know and nobody had ever experience similar problem. I went to check everything I know about (technical, backlinks, negative seo,...), but I have no clue.
Our content is relevant, brand is strong, we have expertise and lots of successful stories...thats why I wouldn't think that EAT or YMYL should be a problem. Sure, improvements can be made, so I predict it could be a medic algoritm.

Whats bugs me is that only our main market was hit, other 3 countries did not.

I've read some articles on this forum where people mention weird Google behavior from november on, anybody find any solutions?
Its been a month and those articles still didn't recover. What is also interesting that newly published content (14 day old) gets indexed, gets clicks and impressions in GSC, but then also disappears days later.

My plan is to:
- update articles that had most traffic and hope for the best and
- add more EAT/YMYL elements

Anybody ever had similar experience?

Thanks for help.

[aristotle]

If those pages completely disappeared from Coogle SERPs, wouldn't that cause all Google organic search traffic to those pages to also completely disappear?

So just checking the rankings might not tell the whole story. Have you also checked what GSC says about the traffic to those pages?

[not2easy]

Hi Mike and Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I wouldn't make any decisions based on an oddity using any of Google's tools or features. The 'site:' modifier has been known to return peculiar results at any given time. Try again next week and see something different.

[Wilburforce]

I had an issue about 15 years ago when my entire site (.com) disappeared in UK SERPs, which was clearly some new (then) Google geolocation filter that had been misapplied. It righted itself after about four weeks.

Aristotle's post is relevant: if GSC reports traffic, where is it coming from? Rather than treat this as disappearance resulting from some deficiency in those pages you might ask why, if others find those pages in the results, you don't see them yourself. Note that my site disappeared in UK SERPs, not globally. Check the SERPs in other locations, if you haven't already, but above all remember that what you see in the SERPs is what Google shows you, not what Google shows everyone.

[RedBar]

Whats bugs me is that only our main market was hit, other 3 countries did not.

Which is your main market, USA?

If so, are you a USA registered company and hosted in the USA?

I'm tthinking along the lines of localisation here, this not only affects the local SERPs but will usually also affect the national one.

I have several global sites that have been hit this way in the USA only.

If you are US etc then you need to be looking down another route.

Has anyone scraped / cloned your site?

[JorgeV]

Hello-

- update articles that had most traffic and hope for the best and
- add more EAT/YMYL elements

In all events, these are things you should do on a regular basis. You constantly need to improve your content. Never rely on old glory.

That being said.

Our content is relevant, brand is strong, we have expertise and lots of successful stories..

How do you measure this? Is that "your" perception of your content? Is it recognized by third parts?

[MikeCaldari]

Hey,

Thanks for replies.

Traffic also disappeared in GSC - impressions and clicks are at 0. Because these are top pages, we almost lost about 40 % organic traffic so far...that can also be seen in Ahrefs, where organic traffic and organic keywords fell down significantly.

I noticed this drop in GSC a couple of days later and sent fetch and render request, hoping it would make any diference.

These pages don't show in SERP even in different locations, computers, devices... they are gone :)

Market is Slovenia, Europe.

3 months before the drop I found some websites that were scraping my content. Text from my article would be displayed in meta description of fake site, but when I clicked the result, I got redirected to some other fake site. Firstly I was convinced that this was main issue, but pages are still dropping out and they are not scraped. I found these faked pages with copyscape, but when I check new articles, there is no copied content found. I also thought it was maybe canonical hack, but canonicals in GSC show right urls (urls of my articles).

1 week after the drop I reported some of these pages to Google spam form.

If I compare competition and us, my perception is that our EAT/YMYL is better. We have lots of success stories, videos in almost every article, content has useful stuff, our brand was mentioned in all the big portals in our country, we have GMB, we have 2 endorsments from doctors for our workouts...
I read Google raters guidelines and was thinking, maybe that is not enough. Maybe I need to pimp up author bio more, try to get more endorsments from experts, strong backlinks from health portals. The biggest issues I see are some articles that are years old, which is not optimal for health niche, but that still doesn't explain why new articles are dropping out.

Keyword rankings and traffic was growing nicely until end of november. I compared historical traffic drops and it can be nicely seen that last 3 major algoritms had negative effect on our traffic. One of these was medic update, thats why I'm assuming, maybe it hit us again.

[RedBar]

Do you have any national competitors, if so, how are they doing?

Do I assume the site is in Slovenian?

[Wilburforce]

I read Google raters guidelines and was thinking, maybe that is not enough. Maybe I need to pimp up author bio more

My advice is not to change anything until you know what the problem is, but the problem is NOT page quality. If the pages have effectively been deindexed, Google guidelines are irrelevant: pages don't disappear completely just because the quality is slipping a bit.

Scraping/duplication might still have something to do with it, but even if it hasn't you need to deal with the scrapers. Try searching for exact text strings (i.e. using quotation marks) from the missing pages and see what shows up.

[aristotle]

Google has cracked down hard on the health niche. A lot of people had jumped in pretending to be experts and hoping to make some fast money by promoting various "hot" nutritional supplements and other medical products. There is also a long "tradition" of quackery and snake-oil salesmen in the field of "home remedies", and this has migrated to the web.

Apparently about two years ago Google concluded that the situation had gotten out of control, and began a purge that may be still ongoing. Anything that looks the least bit suspicious could be in jeopardy.

[MikeCaldari]

Yes, site is in Slovenian. A couple of competitiors lost a bit of visibility, we lost 10x, everyone else gained.

The only solution for scrapers I have is to update content. I don't expect Google to remove fake sites from serp, even if I reported them.

Google bot was crawling our pages yesterday, they appear normally in cache:, still they are below 100 positions.

[engine]

You might want to consider submitting dmca or Electronic Commerce Directive, article 14 for Europe.

[tangor]

The only solution for scrapers I have is to update content. I don't expect Google to remove fake sites from serp, even if I reported them.

As for scrapers ... you need to be a bit more proactive on who (and what) you allow on your site. You can't PREVENT 100% but you can knock out 80-90%. See our [webmasterworld.com...] forum.

Meanwhile, as aristotle noted above, g IN PARTICULAR, the other SEs following, the health niche has been decimated due to abuse, fraud, malpractice (medical!), and a variety of other reasons as well. Unless you are an ACCREDITED medical site you will find very little love from the search engines IN GENERAL.

Because of the above changes there might be nothing you can FIX to make things better.

Just sayin'!

[MikeCaldari]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Some update. Today couple of pages miraculously came back to previous positions. Will see if everything will return back to the state before december.
Been reading more post around internet that pages were getting deindexed. I guess Google reverted stuff back in the last 2 days.

[browndog]

I'm having problems with this too, two of my top articles have vanished and I can only see them when I type in the topic + my site name. It's only a handful of posts, not site wide.

[Lisa01]

Hi. I don't think it has anything to do with the niche as it's happening with my entertainment site as well. A few of my articles are just disappearing from the SERP and are coming back when I'm fetching it on the search console. The weird part is that it's again vanishing after 24 hours or so. And the same is happening with new articles. The new posts get indexed immediately, even start ranking well, only to disappear after a couple of days. It started happening around 15 days back. 2 or 3 posts have gained the past position but few are still missing.

[browndog]

Mine is getting worse by the minute, pages that I ranked first (or close to) are vanishing and I can't find them even by typing in my site name. Other pages are showing up with my old .au domain, even though they have been redirected and I have told Google I've moved. Something is desperately wrong my end and I'm not sure if it's another penalty or if I've moved to .com and made some terrible mistake. I have almost zero traffic and am losing more and more pages.

[Lisa01]

I hope search engine roundtable writes ab article on it. Only then will Google notice the problem

[RedBar]

Today couple of pages miraculously came back to previous positions.

I've seen this happen with the #1 US company in my widget sector ... they had many important keyword pages completely disappear a couple of months ago, and it was very noticeable by their Amexa rating, however several of them have returned to the first page the last few days.

I also had this with one of my Indian sites with a big jump in traffic this week as it returned to the first page ... meanwhile all other SEs remain stable ... Who's in charge of the flip switch at Mountain View this week?

[tangor]

Who's in charge of the flip switch at Mountain View this week?

Heh heh!

Could it be that simple? (Somebody messed up?)

:)

[MikeCaldari]

browndog: Similar happened with my site a month ago. When relevant pages vanished, my pagination pages started to rank 0.o

Almost all pages came back to life in my case now. I didn't make change to deindexed pages, but I did publish new blog content.

[browndog]

What's really frustrating is I just did a search and my most popular article is completely off Google but the feature image, which has een stolen several times shows up on the search. I do hope this gets sorted out, as if things couldn't get worse...