The Google Algo update that happened 1-8 is KILLING my rankings

[Sean_Gutermuth]

Does anyone know what happened?? I have a great website, we ranked very highly for a slew of industry keywords, #1 in most of our top-money kws....and our keywords have been in freefall since the update. Help?!

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Oh yeah, Many have the same problem. Me as well. And I can't figure out what's going on. As well as looks like there is no info from Google what was update about.

There is a suggestion floating around that it might be regarding backlinks quality, but there is no proof or reliable info about that either.

Here are my two topics I've asked, you can see what people are saying:

https://moz.com/community/q/recovery-after-recent-google-update

https://moz.com/community/q/january-2016-massive-rankings-fluctuations

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, the industry has developed very little insight into what happened in the January "core update". Multiple tools recorded historically high rankings flux, but Google would only say that it wasn't Penguin and the patterns in our data are unclear.

There were claims that, while it might not have been a Panda refresh, sites impacted by Panda previously were also hit by this update (sorry, I know that's a little confusing). This would suggest that the target of the update was more likely on-page factors and general content quality factors than link-based factors. That said, "quality" is a very nebulous and subjective term. We're not sure what specifically Google targeted.

Have you seen specific types of keywords and/or specific pages drop, or is the drop happening across the entire site and all keywords? Step 1 is always to isolated the targets as much as possible. Have your rankings continued to drop since January 8, or was this a single-day drop that then leveled out (I'm interpreting "have been in freefall" as still dropping)?

[DmitriiK]

Hi, Pete.

In our case it was one time drop over couple days and then leveled out and stays around the same spot  - beginning of the second page.

What confuses me the most is this: neither us or our competitors have had any major (if any at all) changes in content (at least on main landing and ranking pages). Neither backlink profiles have changed. At the same time our rankings had experienced that drop and we are having trouble recovering. However, main competitors didn't have that drop.

P.S. All metrics in our case are better than competitors.

Any ideas on what's happening / what we should pay extra attention at?

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of opinions on what happened and not a lot of solid evidence (including my own, which is inconclusive, sadly). Google tightened up on something content-related, it seems, but we're not sure what.

It's hard to speak in generalarities, but if I had to start somewhere, I'd be looking for Panda-like signals. Do you have content that could be considered thin, and/or are you facing duplication either within your site or across competitors sites? Is your site generally too big, in terms of indexed pages, for your authority (i.e. the strength of your link profile)? It may simply be that Google turned up the volume on a few factors.

If this is content-related, the good news is that fixes should generally impact your rankings fairly quickly. This doesn't seem to be a Penguin-like situation.