A common problem I see when Google rolls out major updates is people start complaining about "lost traffic" and "lost rankings" without admitting to the drastic changes they made to their Websites just before their traffic/rankings began to drop.

You can often see these changes by looking at their sites in the Wayback Machine (archive.org) and comparing their appearances a month before the change in direction to their current appearances.

I also look to see who was noindexing content (like category pages and author archives) and nofollowing internal links.

While every major #Google update does usually result in ranking changes for some once-successful sites, people who want to study the lost-traffic situations need to differentiate between who is down as a consequence of the update and who shot themselves in the foot.

A frequent [probable] cause I find is that sites purge themselves of old content, which may be pissing away good content and inbound linkage. Creating 404 destinations isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you purge half or more of a large Website, you SHOULD expect to see a significant change in search behavior - and it won't necessarily be for the better.

#seo #webmarketing #digitalmarketing #searchengineoptimization