That sucks.

Guess it's time to stop using Google for traffic and list-building purposes.

Google rolls out something every week now. People need to stop studying "techniques" for ranking in Google, because today by the time you spend a year learning and getting good at something, Google shoots it down, and you've wasted a bunch of time acquiring skills and knowledge that are rendered useless.

I think we are reaching a turning point. My prediction is that SEO will be a thing of the past soon.

I agree SEO isn't a stable, reliable biz model, but while my site was ranking it was a nice income stream. I have been searching & learning about more reliable ways to earn in the mean time. I also don't think SEO will become a thing of the past... it will always be here as long as Google is alive. Just like Google has to adapt so will people who do SEO.

Well we call in phantom update. It is rolling out and hitting most of the site sand blogs that offering how to solutions.

There appears to have been *something* going on yesterday.

https://algoroo.com/

No no, SEO dies only for quitters. But not generally. And yes, I noticed that there has been some recent dancing with Google - more so than usual.

I haven't checked traffic, but I have heard others have experienced that.

Hi,

Yes, Google roll out with a phantom update. This update seems to have had a broad impact, but Google didn't reveal any specifics about the nature of the signals involved.

If your site is not mobile-friendly, you want to solve that issue first since you can already identify it immediately.

yes there are more Google dances recently, but there is no official algorithm updates (though Google does update frequently on their end without announcements).

Yeah, my site ranking improved all of a sudden so i thought so too

After checking my Google Webmaster accnt I think Google may have penalized my site specifically for having hotlink protection on images. Anyone have experience w/ this? There was an option to submit a reconsideration request but I'm still not sure if that is the issue or not. I'm just surprised they did not send a notification to me about it & I had to dig through my webmasters account to find that. They also mention that if your site is not optimized for mobile then it shouldn't affect Desktop traffic... but my site seems to have taken a hit on both platforms meaning it can't be b/c of the mobile-friendly ranking signal.

Update:

I'm seeing traffic slowly being restored and some of the pages going back up in rankings. It seems Google penalized my site earlier and set a manual action against my website due to "Image Mismatch" in the search results. I simply turned off my hotlink protection & sent a review req, and I believe they are restoring my site. They haven't sent me any official notice yet though. I'll probably enable hotlink protection through htaccess and simply allow google hotlinking since ~90% of my traffic comes from there. There other ~10% come from direct and bing/yahoo searches.

Yes Google did roll out an update, but its not panda