Hit by an unnamed Google update on November 30th - Still suffering

[polycountz]

Hi, Moz Community. Just decided to sign up for a free trial because I'm absolutely at my wits end here.

Here's my site: cheapgamesguru.com

I run a small PC gaming blog monetized by affiliate marketing. I do all the writing, SEO, etc. myself. The content I write is, from what I can tell, fully complying with Google's guidelines, and in and of itself is pretty informative and high-quality.

My site was started in December of 2015, and it was doing very well for a good 10 or 11 months - until late November of 2016. Then something happened. My traffic started plummeting - I went from getting nearly 300 organic users a day (Not sessions - actual unique users) to 80, then 40, and now I'm lucky to get over 15 a day.

I do not do ANY black hat SEO whatsoever. I have not taken part in any shady link building schemes, nor do I try to trick Google in any way. I just write good content, do good keyword research (Targeting only low-hanging fruit and low-difficulty keywords using KWFinder), and do my best to provide a good user experience. I run no ads on my site.

Glenn Gabe wrote about a potential Google update on November 29th, but the stuff he said in his article doesn't seem to affect me - my mobile site is perfectly fine, according to Google's own metrics and testing tools. Here's the article in question: http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/november-30-2016-google-algorithm-update/

At first, I thought it was possible that this was a result of my competitors simply doing far better than me - but that doesn't seem to be the case, as their rankings did not actually move - mine simply pummeted. And many of their sites are far worse than mine in terms of grammar, spelling, and site speed.

I understand backlinks are important, by the way, but I really don't think that's why my site was hit. Many competitors of mine have little to no backlinks and are doing great, and it would also not make much sense for Google to hit an otherwise great site just because they have few backlinks. A friend of mine has reached out to Glenn Gabe himself to see if he can get his input on my site, but he's had a busy schedule and hasn't gotten a chance to take a look yet.

I recently obtained a backlink from a highly relevant DA 65 site (About a month ago, same niche as my site), and it now shows up in Search Console and Ahrefs - but it hasn't affected rankings whatsoever.

Important Note: I'm not only just ranking poorly for stuff, I'm ranking in position 100-150+ for many low-competition keywords. I have no idea why that is happening - is my site THAT bad, that my content deserves to be ranking on page 15 or lower?

Sorry for the long question. I'm struggling here, and just wanted to give as much information as possible. I would really appreciate any input you guys can give me - if any SEO experts want to turn my site into a case study and work with me to improve things, I'd also be open to that I kid, of course - I know you guys are all busy.

Thanks!

P.S. I've attached a picture of my SEMRush graph, for reference, as well.

mhgSw

[polycountz]

Hey, just wanted to address this.

While I believe that is most certainly possible for some other sites that were hit in the latter half of 2016, I'm convinced that is not the case for me. My competitors' positions (All smaller blogs like mine, for every important keyword) have not moved at all - I have simply dropped. Of course, the ad results show up for certain keywords, but they are not relevant to what these keywords are targeting, thus they don't get much traffic - consumers in my niche are pretty savvy about that kind of thing. If I'm looking for a guide going over how to build a computer, and the ads show ""Selling Computers", that isn't going to offer much value to the person specifically searching for one thing. They know they can buy a computer, but they don't want to - they want to build it themselves, which is why they googled that phrase.

No bigger companies or websites have been pushed to the top with the little guys getting pushed to the bottom, in my case. And I wasn't just going by traffic dropping, I am also actually tracking positions - while a few keywords did drop to page 2 or 3, the vast majority have dropped well into the 100s+ positions. In both cases, it is purely small blogs (Sometimes with worse DA and backlinks than I) out ranking me.

My strategy right now is to simply get as many quality backlinks as I can. We'll see where I am 6 months from now!

[anthonydnelson]

Go after every link you think you can acquire that is relevant (topic overlap) and not spammy in any way. Plenty of great small sites out there that have DAs below 30.

[polycountz]

I appreciate the response!

Yes, I'd honestly be quite relieved to learn simply obtaining more backlinks would solve this problem, because I've been smacking my head against the wall trying to figure out what else it could possibly be.

Still open to any other input, but this is a good answer - thank you.

On a related note, what would you say a site's DA is worth going for in terms of backlinks? I've heard conflicting views, but a lot of people have said as long as it's a relevant site, 30+ DA is ideal. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks again! I'll give it a while longer, but if noone has any other input I'll mark your answer as best.

[anthonydnelson]

A quick glance at your site and I can see you are still ranking for a large variety of keywords, but as you mentioned it's mostly pages 3-10. There doesn't appear to be any glaring issues with your basic wordpress setup. I'm not sure why you dropped so much around that specific date, but if it was me I would try to increase your number of external links. Even though you are targeting low competition keywords, for whatever reason since November you just don't seem to have the authority to push your posts up to the top page. I see 22 total linking domains to your site. Every single link you acquire makes a huge improvement over your existing backlink profile.