Something is off-track, IMO. Sites that don't buy or sell links took a beating with this link spam update. It's deja-vu somehow.
- You launch a website and publish a page per week (52 in first year)
- Google sent no traffic for 6 months, then gradually began sending more each month (5k /mth after 1 year)
- One page receives 75% of the traffic, Google trusts your site enough for the topic of that page to continue
- The other 25% of the traffic goes to a handful of pages related closely to the top page.
Sound familiar?
- Problem: The top page is slightly off topic from the main topic of the website. Google should not have chosen it as representative of what the site is about.
- Problem: The site got smacked around in the spam update despite NOT buying or selling links (ie: Something else happened)
Google beat up the site in rankings based on an initial mistake they made in evaluating the site? It's like going to a "how to make a widget" site, finding an article about "acme widget popularity in 1950", and deciding that is the main topic of the site. Articles about current widget making topics just don't rank well, or get traffic at the year mark... and that's not the site owner's fault.
Of course links pointing to the site will be partially off topic if you misjudge the actual topic of the site. The mistake is Google not properly identifying the site? It's worse on some sites that focus on a main topic that intersects between two or more main topics, like repair of a component used in many widget technologies. If Google picks a page related to mobile widgets as a top page, content about security widgets don't do well. It's possibly telling of a larger problem, that SpamBrain might be making worse?
If this is happening, these misidentified sites now have a long road to recovery, and many more ignored articles to write, and even a spambrain smackdown and toxic links to recover from that are actually ALL perfectly fine.
I do wish Google would re-run their initial "what is this site about" assessment more often. I don't think they do very often. As proof of that - the slightly off-topic "top article" doesn't change very often, as you would expect it to if they did re-evaluate the main topic more often. They take 6 months to figure it out in the first place.
To those who think this is silly talk, it's theorycraft talk and I've seen weirdness like this from Google many times in the past.
I remember when sitelinks were introduced and had their own section in webmaster tools. A site suddenly not doing well for a keyword often had that keyword *snipped* from being able to rank sitewide. If the keyword was in the sitelink title, however, it was not appearing in sitelink titles shown in webmaster tools anymore. It was almost funny, if only it didn't suck, to see a word missing in your own titles.
"My most awesome widget website" would become "My most awesome website" in the sitelink section of webmaster tools.
You know what Google's advice was then? Same as it is now, keep making good content... even if you had no chance to rank for it for an indefinite amount of time. It's almost cruel, they could have done other things as a NON-PENALTY keyword *snip* wore off. Instead they wasted time trying to figure it out, and many gave up.
Google makes mistakes like this from time to time. I think they've applied SpamBrain to other mistakes they've made about various websites and are compounding a mistake they need to fix. Perhaps if they had stayed caffeinated instead of being slow as molasses and dependent on core updates to re-evaluate, this growing pain wouldn't exist.
And maybe it doesn't, I don't work at Google. I just know something is NOT right when a webmaster does their best, does not buy or sell links, and gets smacked in a link spam update anyway. Time to dig under the hood, G. Please. You're driving many to the dark side with this "CAUGHT YOU LINK SPAMMER" ranking hits to site owners who didn't.
Some don't dare link out at all because of it. Edit: From 2021 - [
developers.google.com...]
Links still help us discover and rank results in meaningful ways, and we made a lot of progress in 2021 to protect this core signal. We launched a link spam update to broadly identify unnatural links and prevent them from affecting search quality.
Hmm, SpamBrain was launched in 2018 so was the link spam update of 2022 using it in the same way as 2021, but with stronger signals? It would explain the deja-vu.
Yes, keep writing more content and eventually Google will get what I'm referring to sorted, maybe. Still, if you don't buy or sell links you shouldn't lose traffic in a link spam update, but many did.
