January 2016: Massive Rankings Fluctuations

[donsilvernail]

Peter,

I have experienced the same.

[GastonRiera]

Hi Peter,
The same have happend to me.
I'm really concernd about some fluctuations that are drivign my clients crazy

GR

[DmitriiK]

Would this be a problem if all those links are nofollow? Cause they are. Or at least 95%+ of them.

P.S. Also, if I compare our backlink profile to our competitors, they got 98%+ do follow backlink profile, from their clients footers mostly.

[DmitriiK]

Thanks everybody for responses.

Now, so what do I/we do? Is it just timely issue?

[EGOL]

If they are nofollow, that eliminates the problem.

The ones that I looked at were...  (1) keyword rich (2) site-wide (3) do-follow and (4) in the footer.   Each of those 4 items are listed in Google's "Link Schemes" document that I linked to above.

[DmitriiK]

However, if most of backlinks are nofollow, then it shouldn't be a problem, right?

And I attached the backlink comparison. There is a huge difference in do/no follow profiles between us and competitors. It can't be that 2% of backlink profile (and it's been like this for long time) all of the sudden made us drop 10 positions.

VekTF8l

[DmitriiK]

My question and worry why in the world it happened to "web design houston", for which we have been ranking in top 3 forever. And we haven't done any changes to pages recently.

[Mobilio]

And this would be $1M question... even $1B.

As i said - it's core algo changes that's out of our control. I believe that top SEO experts (include Moz one's!) are trying to disassemble what's changed. So far there wasn't news that someone share it.

[DmitriiK]

I'm so sad now

[DonnaDuncan]

I'd take a look at your content. Identify your most popular landing pages and look at the their bounce rates and time on page. Is the content delivering as promised? Has it earned any links? If not, consider deleting, retiring or updating the content with the goal of improving its engagement metrics.

I've experimented with this a bit and noticed improvement. Nothing scientific, but it's worth a try. Pick a couple to start and see what happens.