I'm reviewing a site that lost a good amount of traffic in the May update and a lot more in the recent spam update. In total the site has lost 90% of traffic. All the data in search console for the past 12 months makes sense, except for the average position data. Stretched out over 12 months that chart looks odd. When things look odd the underlying reason is typically interesting.
Avg position on the page report means the avg position for all keywords on that page combined, This chart is what looks odd.
Example:
- When traffic was lost in the May update the average keyword position per page did not change at all, Most pages hovered around #12.
- During the Sept update the avegerage keyword position per page fell 25% and hovered around #16 but no traffic was lost. The best pages were not affected, avg position for the top keywords did not fall.
- During the spam update average keyword positions per page HUGELY IMPROVED but traffic was decimated, which seems counterintuitive. Avg keyword position per page is now around #8.
Overall the site lost 66% of traffic in the spam update alone despite a 50% improvement in avg keyword position per page post update. This is not what happens with most updates, but it did in the spam update.
Top Performing Pages
A closer look at the most important keywords for the top performing pages revealed the bigger picture. Those keywords fell from #1 to #3 on average. They still generate traffic but this is a 66% drop.
Keywords ranked #10 fell to #17, still a 66% drop. Keywords ranked #50 fell to the 80's, again a 66% loss. Keywords above 50 mostly no longer ranked at all so they no longer weighed the avg position down at all, leading to the avg overall position improving overall. It's a very deceiving chart to look at.
The spam update applied a 66% downgrade per keyword, it was linear across the board. This is NOT what happens in a normal update.
My gut feeling is that the spam update may not have been targeting spam at all. It may have simply downgraded the importance of the site until more authority was accumulated and the positions were earned. ie: just a sitewide downgrade if the site was not deemed to have earned the rankings it has based on... ? site too new? Not enough similar content on site? Internal links pointing to content that isn't directly helpful to the page?
Only Google knows what tipped the scale but it was definitely an across the board keyword position reduction of 66%, on this site anyway. I'd be interested to know what the avg position chart looks like over the past year on other sites that lost traffic to the spam update.
