Negative SEO attack could be responsible of a drop of %50 of impressions / click ? (search console)

[Veptune]

This post is deleted!

[Chris.Menke]

My,

These days, it's about as hard to accomplish negative SEO as it is to do regular SEO, so I wouldn't think that's what caused your problem.  What happened back at the end of March when you dropped and then came back up?

[Veptune]

That is interesting.

A few days before the previous drop in march, I have put online on my website a big article.

So when the fall occurred, I thought it was because of the article, so I removed it. But I also disallow a lot of low quality links. At about the same time. And then the ranking came back.

So I can't be 100% sure if the drop was because of the article or because of the low quality links. The article was a quality one, and not with keywords stuffing. So I thought it was really unfair from google.

As you can see in the graph, the drop in march is about the same magnitude as the drop in July. This is crazy.

Thanks for your help.

[Chris.Menke]

I haven't been there in a while but doesn't Ahrefs show your historical link data?  Does it show an increase in links before the previous drop?

[Vanderlindemedia]

Dude, you need to stop panicking when you publish an article and you suddenly drop. I never heard of a website dropping after publishing, as you said a good article. You wrote when i disavow these links it recovered. So you have an answer to why your traffic dropped.

I have it alot of times; people are spawning up business pages with on there links to sites. In order to give the page some content they quickly google for a bunch of sites and start linking them on that. Many times it brings a negative effect and thus there's a small drop.

[Veptune]

Hello all, and thanks you for your interest in my issue :)Yes, I indeed did notice an increase of negative links in the weeks  before the drop of mid-july.I have disallowed all of them last saturday (august first).I join you a capture of the ahrefs summary graphs.   It seems that there is a correlation between those new backlinks and the drop.But at the same time I read everywhere that negative SEO (or low quality links) cannot be so "efficient". Actually, 99% of those stupid backlinks are hotlinked image.Again, it is not a small drop. It is a very big one, 50%-60%.I underline that I did not update my website, I did nothing at all for the last few months, no change, remove or add any pages or change meta data.

Thanks again.

capture-ahrefs.jpg

[Vanderlindemedia]

Then place the links in a disavow and call it a day.

[Chris.Menke]

Interesting: https://twitter.com/Pechnet/status/1291459518627483649

[Veptune]

@Chris My website is adult related so it was blocked by safe search since the beginning.

But i discovered that since the last update of WordPress Yoast SEO plugin (I can't tell you when I updated it) Yoast added a canonical tag on all my pages. But I have a lot of URL that do not have slash "/" at the end (and that's normal, that is how I made the slug, even if it is useless ...)But here is what Yoast SEO wrote :As you can see, Yoast added a "/" at the end.(Thanks to WordPress, if a page has no slash at the end, the with-slash URL is 301 redirected to the non-slash URL)On my Ahrefs dashboard I got hundreds of "Canonical points to redirect" issues because of this canonical and slash issue.I was wondering if my website could have crashed because of that ...Thanks for your help guys.

[Veptune]

Actually, there was another issue, also related to slash "/" non slash "/" issue.Each page of my website had a hreflang tag with URL with the "/" as the end.But a lot of my URL, including the most ranked ones, doesn't have "/" at the end of the slug.
But anyway, URL with "/" are automatically redirected 301 to non slash URL (in case, the good URL has no /)Was it a big issue ?The hreflang tool from google showed a lot of errors because of that (now it is OK) but my website has not yet recovered.Thanks

hreflang.jpg