Whats up with the last google update.

[waqid]

I have numerous clients who were at the top of page in the top 3 spots. They all dropped to page 3 or 4 or 2 and now they are number 1 in maps or in the top 3.

Content is great on all these sites. backlinks are high quality and we do not build high quantity, we always focus on quality. the sites have authorship information. trust . we have excellent content written by professionals in the industry for each of the websites.

The sites load super fast. they are very mobile friendly. we have CDN installed. content is organized per topic. all of our citations are setup properly and no duplicates, or missing citations. code is good on the websites. we do not have anchor text links pointing to the site from gust posts or whatever. we have plenty of content. our DA/PA is great.

Audits of the website are great. I've been doing this a long time and ive never been so dumb founded as to what google has done this time.

Or better yet what exactly is wrong with our clients websites today that was working perfectly for the last 5 years.

I really am getting frustrated. im comparing my sites to competitors and everything's better.

Please someone guide me here and tell me what im missing or tell me what you have done to recover from this nonsense.

[Colemckeon]

This has been a theme since Aug 1st. People are Yo-yoing around. I watched a site go to 8th page to 2nd back to 8th and finally crawled its was back to the 2nd. I would wait a week or so and let everything cool down. I have been extremely perplexed by the recent algo updates.

I am hoping for some predictability as well in the future. What I do see as a trend is sites with a lot of backlinks from a poor quality site ( Such as SEO by Company X ) are getting hit hard. Seeing a lot less backlinks from high authority sites ranking sites very well.

[shannerss]

I hear you, it's awful when you're stuck trying to figure out a sudden change like that. A couple questions, since I'm curious about what would cause such a drop for so many clients. If you haven't, you may need to break out a spreadsheet to track the changes and try to find the pattern.

1. I'm guessing you checking Moz and google search console for crawler errors? (First thing to rule out here)

2. Are you assuming that the issue is an algo update because you are having the issue for multiple clients? Or does the changes you've seen also line up with the dates of recent Google updates? Wondering since the last big update was a while ago in June now. You may be able to track down the date of the drops, which may give you more information about whether/what changed on that date.

3. Have you ruled out other reasons that these sites could have suddenly dropped in the rankings? This Moz post and this Content King post both have some tips for other issues that could have caused the drops.