I need to get a job.

Anybody seeing any pages disappearing from the SERP's abruptly without any trace after June 3?

Because I am seeing many pages to disappear.

If you are talking about pages of other sites disappearing, then no. If you are talking about mine, seeing it after May 5.

@immrrobot Ofcourse its ours.

@seomotionz I noticed a sudden drop of valid pages in GSC on 3 June - normally one of the Excluded reports would show a spike to show where they went, but in this case they all remain flat

@samseo The strange thing is, these pages are high yielding pages with respect to everything. And in GSC they just vanished so is the traffic. Its like they just disappeared from the SERP's.

@seomotionz

Sadly, welcome to the club. I’ve been wondering for ages how my pages that are consistently on page 1 or 2 of the SERP for years suddenly disappear from the rankings, never to return.

@gatormark

"I’ve been wondering for ages how my pages that are consistently on page 1 or 2 of the SERP for years suddenly disappear from the rankings, never to return."

Which is fascinating, isn't it? It's like, how could a page that you (IE Goog) ranked in the top 3 spots for several years be SO bad that it's literally booted off into oblivion?

If it was so bad, why were you ranking it in the first place?! I could see minor position changes, but to be completely removed from the SERPs (assuming you're not doing anything 'black hat') is just mind boggling to me.

They're putting WAY too much emphasis on the AI, and it shows. I have a list of search terms that 4 - 6 (in some cases ALL 10) of the top 10 results redirect to a completely different website upon clicking on it.

Not to mention other stuff like #*$! sites showing up in the top 10 results (w/ non-#*$! search terms), Amazon ranking #1 for a completely different product (searching 'product A reviews' and getting an Amazon result for a similar sounding product), and Pinterest / Google Books eeevvvveeerrryyyywwwhhhheeerrreeee...

When I search for a product review, I'm not looking for an image of the product. I'm looking to read about someones experiences with said product. Rant over.

Guys, please help. If it's possible. A week ago I also received penalty from Bing too. They vanished my traffic totally. I asked them through Webmaster Support, and received answer which says my website violating their Guidelines. I double checked those Guidelines and see 2 things that could impact rankings: I sold about 6 guest posts with links on my websitesin the beggining of the year (I cleared them about 4 months ago, deleted those articles) and made a bad redirect for 2 articles (I cleared that yesterday).

Now I have a doubt if the problem is in algo changes. Bing says I'm violating rules too, but I can't find out where exactly. As you can guess, there are no additinal info from search engines. I just can't stay and watch my websites are dying.

Do you have some thoughts or experience: what kind of problem do I have and how to find out what violations I did? It's so important for me and I can't do nothing... If you have some guesses - please, let me know.

@cwalker216 You are absolutely correct.

@gatormark Its not new for us. But I have never seen any page which is liked by the audience & also has much influence in the niche disappear completely. Yeah, maybe fall to nowhere. In GSC, I have seen like kw's fall from position 2-3 to directly 91 or 95 but this time its completely blank.

Google Sucks
My forum has gone from jumping from page 2 to page 7 to now page 10
Yet on Bing and DuckDuckGo I am on page 1, which is where I should be.
Google and Youtube are censoring any site that mentons politics
Do No Evil

@seomotionz Apparently G's doesn't like our site. I've lost 10s of high profile keywords to be found nowhere in serps. So nothing new it seems after the May update

@Cyril and others seeing big changes on the UGC side, or simply outbound links side of it.

Could this be related to Google announcing last fall that they are going to be treating no_follow links differently?

Snippet:

Today, we’re announcing two new link attributes that provide webmasters with additional ways to identify to Google Search the nature of particular links. These, along with nofollow, are summarized below:

rel="sponsored": Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.

rel="ugc": UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.

rel="nofollow": Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.

Source: [webmasters.googleblog.com...]

@Cyril TechWebsites

Sadly, if your website got a penalty from Bing, it's almost impossible to get it ranked again. I bought a review blog website a few months ago and found out it is de-indexed on Bing and Yahoo since 2018. I have contacted them thinking it will be an easy fix, but they are repeating the same s**t over and over... "Website violating our webmaster guidelines etc." I have rebuilt the website multiple times since then, there are zero guest posts or paid links and it's all original well written content with 1000-5000 words in each article. Meanwhile, my lower quality entertainment websites rank well on Bing and Yahoo search. Bing is even worse than Google as they are not even trying to help, when there is an issue.

In my opinion this was caused by an Amazon affiliate plugin or Yoast SEO plugin malfunction (which actually happened in 2018) causing flagging the website for bad SEO practices. Even after removing the problem, your site will never be ranked again on Bing. The only thing you can do is to change your domain.

I don't believe you need to change domain for bing.
In the past they had completely de-index miy site. So i emailed them and they removed the block after investigating it.
That would never happen with Google. There are no humans working on google. They are playing ping pong while the search engine is run by manatees everybody knows that.

Well i have recovered traffic from 2017 matt cutts cull. Its about time I should never have got deranked.

Ref post above : I contacted bing when i had problems and a HUMAN helped me get reindexed too.

Good update google

Anyone else seeing strange traffic today? Saw a big drop in conversions yesterday after an extraordinary weekend. Noticed the Semrush Sensor is up to 4.9 today too. Feels like more changes.

So, nearly a third of the way through the month and traffic is up across all stes:

Global 1 .com +16.8% Specialist Widgets
Global 2 .com +18.5% Specialist Widgets
Global 3 .com +33.5% Specialist Widgets Trade Directory
UK 1 .co.uk +67.9% Specialist Widgets Retail
UK 2 .co.uk +194.3% Hotel / Pub - Accommodation Enquiries & Bookings Way Up

Insofar as UK 2 is concerned I have no idea as why people are searching the live music pages ... We know nothing and we haven't known that for very long :-)

Anyone else seeing strange traffic today?

Yes. Looks like another AI money grab shuffle is going on as we speak.

I contacted bing when i had problems and a HUMAN helped me get reindexed too.

Well this might be a thing of the past. Yes, I was communicating with a human support, but all indexing and de-indexing is done automatically by bots and nobody will help you to get re-indexed again. If the bot doesn't like your site, there is nothing you can do.

This exact message I have received 3-4 times after contacting Bing support then I have up:
"We are not able to provide specifics for these types of issues because the relevant teams do not share reports with us. but we recommend that you review our Webmaster Guidelines, especially the section Things to Avoid, and thoroughly check your site for any deliberately or accidentally employed SEO techniques that may have adversely affected your standing in Bing and Bing-powered search results. We will not be able to add your site to the index while Bingbot is finding it in violation Webmaster Guidelines. We have no control over this process and you will need to make quality changes to your site and wait for Bingbot's automated crawling process to agree that the site passes Webmaster standards before it can be served."

By the way, this website is the only one of my sites that pretty much survived the latest Google update and still ranks on the first page of Google for most keywords, yet on Bing it is banned for good.

Then there is a lot of people whose sites are complete de-indexed from Google and ranking on the very 1st position on Bing. Gone are those times when if you had a quality content, you would be on the 1st position on both Google and Bing. The search engines are just a complete mess nowadays.

same as cwalker216

Ranked for 10 years. Now completely dropped off the map. In the may core update.

Kind of spammy niche. Google manages to not rank spam 'moneysites', but since the core update, they are ranking their spammy backlink pages on web 2.0 and other parasite websites instead... Which is worse, since there is an unlimited amount of them.... pushing actual authorities to page 4-10. Like very obvious stuff clearly posted by a bot to create backlinks... and its ranking page 1-4.

I suspect this is a 'bug' that will get fixed sooner or later.

What worries me greatly that so far the 'game' has always felt kind of fair, it felt like the person that worked the hardest was going to win... now it feels like random things are ranking that could be put up by anyone in 3 minutes or by a bot even. So at least in my niche and at this time, black hats clearly won, because they can auto produce the content that google ranks forever.

This has greatly damaged my trust in Google... My livelihood depends on a company that releases updates that can screw users and webmasters alike at times. Sadly they are beyond the point of governments being able to step in and break the monopoly up. Welcome to the 21st century.

I submitted over 1500 spam reports of obvious spam that ranks page 1-3, but so far not a single result has been removed.
Bugged update that screws people that play by the rules? Hahahaha but we released it on May the 4th be with you XD so its cool.

I suspect and hope the head of search got fired for this update that has made google search clearly and objectively a lot worse. And I hope his successor manages to fix this absolute mess ASAP. Also I hope to never ever see another google book ever again. Never ever has google books ever answered a search for me, yet for 'some reason' they are everywhere now.

[edited by: Webweeb at 1:25 pm (utc) on Jun 10, 2020]

Those type of answers from Bing (and Google) drive me nuts. Sure some webmasters are trying to completely game the system and will do anything but I am sure a lot of the manual actions are for webmasters who are completely in the dark.

It then just becomes a guessing game for these webmasters of what to do.

If the SEO technique is listed in "Things to Avoid", why hide it from the webmaster then which item(s) he has been flagged for? Also list a few pages as examples. It's not like they would be giving any ranking secrets away...

I suspect this is a 'bug' that will get fixed sooner or later.

I certainly wouldn't get your hopes up on that!

I have found that once G/B dislikes a page / site for whatever reason, it may come back a little but will then disappear altogether. I have written here many-a-time about a site I had ranking across all search engines at #1 since the early noughties and then in January / February 2017 Google started to demote it until it disappeared altogether.

This was a trademarked and registered exact match domain which I began 40 years ago, it is the Coca Cola / Mercedes of my industry, yet G decided that after all those years a fully dedicated 40-50 page site with hundreds of exclusive images, all now copied eleswhere, was no longer deemed worthy of even being listed.

Earlier this year I decided to move and condense that information to one of my other sites. All search engines have it at #1 with it on the cusp of the top ten with G ... HERE is the kicker!

At #3 & 4 in G's SERPs is my 2013 Pinterest page ... WTF?.?.?

@RedBar
I feel you bro. 92% of all search traffic is simply too much power for any one company to have. I am generally not a fan of government regulation at all. But unless rankings are actually based on merit, which they never will be, Google needs to be broken up.

Google makes a mistake, you are screwed. If there was competition, you would retain 80% of your rankings.... it would still suck, but you can compensate with hard work. Like this you are just screwed.

On top of that noone can talk to Google. Even spam reports are probably never read, simply used to do machine learning and make the algo even more confused. So if they screw up, you can pray to God and thats about it.

Is this now a Bing topic?
Pinterest is still invading Google SERPs - totally ridiculous.

Anyone joined a SEO testing group?
I always trusted that I can succeed by making good content... and it kind of worked for about 8 years. but after this update I doubt that.

Do those groups actually work? I guess you have to regularly rework all your content to please the big Google in the sky... and for no gain to the user, but if thats what it takes...

Those type of answers from Bing (and Google) drive me nuts. Sure some webmasters are trying to completely game the system and will do anything but I am sure a lot of the manual actions are for webmasters who are completely in the dark.

It then just becomes a guessing game for these webmasters of what to do.

If the SEO technique is listed in "Things to Avoid", why hide it from the webmaster then which item(s) he has been flagged for? Also list a few pages as examples. It's not like they would be giving any ranking secrets away...

Exactly. The website has 160 articles and about 250,000 words of well researched original content and has very high conversions on Amazon, because people find it helpful obviously.

But no, Bing says the site is a complete trash. Delete all articles and then we will maybe reconsider indexing it again lol.

Is this now a Bing topic?

No it is not, but I just wanted to say that it is not only Google that has a big mess in their search results. Problem is the badly programmed AI taking over everything.

[edited by: frostitomik at 2:42 pm (utc) on Jun 10, 2020]

@Webweeb

The thing is that when these things happen one has to learn to adapt or die, no matter how many people complain nothing will happen until governments do something about it and regardless of what has recently been reported in the press, nothing is going to happen soon therefore everyone had better learn to live with the Google Advertising Placement Platform (GAPP).

Obviously it would also help if people stopped buying devices with built-in obsolesence but will they?

It's amazing that the world used to survive without all its garbage, certainly I don't use any of it, am I missing anything, nah!

frostitomik +
I did this about 2 months ago. I spoke to someone directly and they said they could only give me the generic message. They, of course, did not tell me what was wrong, I did some maintenance on my site and then said thanks to them telling me I had some issues ( think it was cloaked Amazon links ). Two days later i saw lots of microsoft, manual browsing certain pages on my site.

So i had triggered a manual review from bing and got reindexed two days later.

Webweeb +
Attacking other sites with spam requests will not get you anywhere and will do you more harm than good to yourself by focusing your energy on harming other sites.

I said all this 3 years ago when I got slammed and we all agreed then that this business model was destined to cause you problems and stress. At that point I accepted that and still do today, I no longer get up or down with website traffic and earnings as I know it could be taken away at any time. I used to get so angry with google and other sites, but trust me you need to let it go, there is nothing you can do. After I got slammed with the big culls in 2016-2017 I kept adding content at a much slower rate ( as i felt i was wasting my time ) but it seems to have paid off for now, but I know this can change at any time.

No more of these google ruined my income blah blah, we had this 3-4 years ago and if you didn't learn then you have learned now. Welcome to the real world, the horn of plenty is nearly empty.

A website that relies on Google traffic and or/amazon to make a profit is not a viable business and not something that will help you look after your family.

Having said all this, after using google for the past few weeks, I have found it the worst it has been since i started using google.

All the great forum results we used to get, all the more fringe websites we used to see are all gone, its all corporations, official sites and google friends. Even though my ranking as improved, I will agree the searches are not what they used to be. We are now seeing censorship on the search engine to match that of youtube.

30K_a_month +
LOL no. Im not getting outranked by 'spam'... im getting outranked by actual SPAM... you know the kind on Web 2.0 with no images, 2 bitly links and 700 keywords at the bottom. Profile spam, parasite post spam, forum post spam.... nothing 'omg im getting outranked by spammy webistes' here. Actual bot spam pages. Actual obvious spam linking to websites that have been deindexed for years.

Thats also why I call this a bug. If it was not actual spam, I would just have to admit defeat.

It just boggles my mind that stuff a 2 year old could detect, Google sometimes cant. Maybe its just an exotic blackhat SEO thing thats going on in my niche... they probably figured out some secret thing where you put links in YouTube, then have 7000 bots click on it and woosh it ranks.... looks kind of like that to me.

[edited by: Webweeb at 2:52 pm (utc) on Jun 10, 2020]