Why did our site get hit in the October spam update?

[vsander]

On Oct 18-21 our site lost about 15-20% of its organic traffic and I can't seem to figure out why.

I've reviewed all of Google's spam policies and we don't even remotely break any of them. We've never engaged in any type of questionable SEO tactics. We've never even bought a link or a guest post.

All our content is written by professionals, most with a university degree in a relevant niche. Most of our content is also more comprehensive than our competitors, we usually average 2000 words on a normal article.

Here is a graph of our website traffic since our site migration in April 2022:
[photos.app.goo.gl...]

The red arrow indicates the drop on Oct 18-21 from the Google spam update.

Most of our articles lost 10-50% traffic, and no articles lost all traffic as far as I can tell, but it's hard to know with all the small pages which aren't shown in GA-stats... A few of our articles even gained traffic during the spam update, but that was a minority.

It's also worth noticing we did a website migration on April 4 (as you can see in the graph) that cost us about 60% of our traffic. That's another mystery we can't seem to solve, the traffic just won't return. We've hired an SEO consultant with experience in the area, but the minor things they found had no effect in the end.

But the question of the day is why we got hit by the spam update? My only theory of why we got hit in the spam update is because there are lots of spam sites that have scraped/stolen our content for years. And perhaps because of the site migration Google no longer recognizes our content as the original anymore?

Does anyone have any theories or advice on how to start recovering our traffic?

[edited by: not2easy at 3:56 am (utc) on Nov 15, 2022]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[StupidIntelligent]

When you say site migration, do you mean you changed web hosting server and moved the site to another IP?

Or do you mean that you changed the domain name of your site?

[not2easy]

Hi vsander and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Thee are a number of details that can happen when a site is migrated. If it is moving to a different host only, there should be no noticeable difference in traffic. If it is migrated to a different domain, it can take longer to be sorted by Google.

There are things you can do to make domain migrations more seamless and less prone to traffic problems. First is to ensure that each of your old pages is found on the new domain and that visitors (and robots) can visit the old URL and land on the new equivalent page on the new domain. You can test this by trying to visit your old pages and see that you land on the correct page in your new domain.

If you still control the old domain, maintain its GSC accounts, it will help you see how the old pages are dropping as the new domain's pages are crawled and indexed. If you were submitting a sitemap on the old domain, remove that sitemap. You should be able to verify the robots' activity in the old domain and new domain's access logs.

[vsander]

Thanks for your input StupidIntelligent and not2easy!

Regarding the site migration, we changed from one domain name to another. Everything else remained the same. All redirects are working as intended.

But I'm mainly concerned about the spam update because getting a traffic loss on it feels like there must be something seriously wrong. And the site migration was so long ago I don't think there's anything else we can do.

[not2easy]

There are a number of discussions here on the topic of Google's October 'Spam Update". An overview of others' observations s found in the monthly threads,: [webmasterworld.com...]

If you want to compare notes with others to possibly spot some related detail, the primary discussion is here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[janhai]

Hi, I'm assuming the new domain is/was an aged or expired domain? Because of its history, you may have a lot of spammy backlinks (you can use e.g. Ahrefs free backlink checker). Google can automatically ignore most of them, but some perhaps need to be disavowed manually. Did your hired consultant do that?

[not2easy]

If you didn't create spammy backlinks, don't worry about them. Do not bother to disavow them, they will disappear the same way they showed up - on their own.

[vsander]

The domain was old and had only been lying on a domain auction site for many years before we bought it, so we assumed it was pretty clean when we bought it. In hindsight, we should definitely have waited a couple of extra months after our purchase just to make sure Google also understood that it was a fresh start.

[vsander]

not2easy, thanks for the encouragement and advice. I looked at everyone else's experiences and at least I'm seeing a lot of people also saying they were affected with 100% clean content. So maybe it's not just us. Although I've also noticed that some people call their content clean and white-hat even if it's AI-scraped garbage.

It's so infuriating seeing some SEO-authorities give the advice "Just follow Google's spam guidelines and stop spamming" to people like us who only put out high-effort content.

[tangor]

It's so infuriating seeing some SEO-authorities give the advice "Just follow Google's spam guidelines and stop spamming" to people like us who only put out high-effort content.

Lazy speak for those "experts" who embrace the g ... until g bites them in the a$$ets.

[janhai]

Why do you think you were hit by the "Helpful" Content Update in September?

Have you analyzed your website loading times (page speed), both desktop and mobile? Google has a tool called PageSpeed Insights.

[vsander]

janhai, Not sure, it's the same conundrum as in the spam update. It made no sense. Ironically we had just improved several of our top articles right before the helpful update, and the improved articles were among our biggest losers.

Our page speeds are pretty ok all around, not excellent, but most things in the green and some things like LCP just a bit slower than "green".

[janhai]

Actually, it seems to have been the core update after the HCU. Nevertheless, all in all it sounds like you didn't lose traffic because of what you did or didn't do, but Google just "thought" that some of your competition was previously undervalued. Nothing to worry about, as long as you aren't being outranked by garbage.

If your niche is very competitive, I would definitely try to improve web vitals that are in yellow. Could be something simple, e.g. related to ad networks or Ezoic or something (if you are showing ads, that is).

[vsander]

Thanks janhai, I appreciate your thoughts!

Your quality-theory definitely holds some weight. I think the type of quality we lack is probably trust, we lost a lot of Google's trust during the site migration. We never really got much outside coverage to our site, we just focused on making great content, so I believe our trust was largely coming from historical presence. And that's gone now.

I checked our site speeds and the only thing not in the green is LCP, but that's at 2.58s average (2.5s is green).

[janhai]

Well, since your content is genuinely helpful without any spam (btw, if you have comments on, are they well moderated?), concentrate on what your competition is doing right and not what you're doing wrong. I presume you migrated to a better domain name, which is kind of pointless (or just a vanity thing) unless you focus on building a brand and an audience. Not only will you then get branded searches (your brand plus topic), but you'll become less reliant on Google traffic. Good luck!

[vsander]

Our comments are semi-moderated, we remove most of the bad comments. But a lot slip through the cracks and lots of spelling errors in the comments too. We're hiring a person to review and fix all our comments promptly thanks to your reminder. I doubt it's the major problem as some of our more heavily commented pages actually suffered less in the spam update, but fixing should still be good.

We'll keep at it. Thank you.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Sure G - let us all read those quality guidelines for the 150th time each, they are certainly the reason content apparently sucks AGAIN after yet another update, right?

Hint - those quality guidelines don't change nearly as often as you play whack-a-mole with content.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Sites that I've reviewed in the time since the Spam update all have one common issue - they don't convey E.A.T. very well. How important is E.A.T. ? VERY, read the latest Google rater handbook.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

Ignore the Youtube gurus if they focus on "passive income" and tell you where to buy content or what keyword niches to go after. They clearly don't understand E.A.T. It's been around since 2010? but is now part of every query and the main focus in the rater handbook.

note: I don't know the inner workings at Google but I can tell you that a site which starts off strong , gains rank and traffic quickly, and then gets smacked into oblivion often has E.A.T. issues, or too few E.A.T. signals. To me, that suggests you will trigger a rater review when you start flirting with #1 rankings on something so don't ignore E.A.T. even very early on.