Hi everyone, I think my site: SaleSource was hit by a penalty, as ever since the 4th of may update the traffic and organic keyword count have been steadily going down. I've checked on the google console and it's not a manual penalty. I'm also wondering whether I'm linking to too many unrelated sites. I've heard that if you have more than 10% of unrelated sites linking to your domain, your rankings will suffer. If I'm in the ecommerce (dropshipping) niche and I have links from sites in the marketing, seo and tech realms, would that be consiered unrelated and hurt my rankings?
Your statements here are a bit ambiguous. You wonder if you are linking to too many sites? Then you talk about inbound links. Please clarify what you are talking about, IBL or OBL. But you can certainly hurt your rankings by getting inbound links (IBLs) from spammy or low quality sites. That is the whole purpose behind the disavow list.
I'm also have problems with Google traffic this days it decrease 3 times then the last month Many other people also face this, but some of them get increased traffic. So , logically what's happened is the new Google core update think our site's are less preferable then others, it's not a penalty
The best way to check if your website was penalized by an automatic penalty is to login to Google analytics and review your Google organic traffic. If you see a drop in traffic during the dates that Google released an algorithmic change, then most probably you were hit and that's the reason that your traffic dropped.
Probably no need to panic. Organic traffic and keyword count are down for a lot of businesses due to the Covid-19 issues.
When I see a fluctuation I give it at least 2 weeks to find out if it's just a temporary thing or if it's something I need to worry (or to be happy) about. For example, on June 19 I saw a huge spike on one of my sites. I was like "Yes!" but... then it all went back to normal.
From what I have seen so far, the May update seemed to benefit higher authority websites, over say keyword relevance. This happened late last year, then bounced back in January.
It's quite interesting because we have a site with so many links but we see very good results after that update. Sometimes you just have to define what is irrelevant. I would say if you are in the shopping industry then many things fall in that category. I would go and disavow the unrelevant links and keep building relevant ones.
Assuming you mean salesSource.io, I have to ask how long it was up before you took a hit to traffic? Generally I would expect that site to be pimp-slapped by search for the same reason it limits its audience, garbage semantics and being a middle finger to users with accesibility, needs, with an equal lack of working on smaller displays due to broken media query techniques. You'd almost think it it was pissing it's won bed with presentational classes and other such "framework mentality" garbage, hence the home page alone vomiting up 107k of markup for 2.92k of plaintext and nine content media -- not even 8k of HTML's flipping job! You mix in the batshit absurd 356k of CSS spread out over three files for a site that has NO legitimate excuse for more than 48k of CSS in one file per media target, it was bound to get pimp-slapped sooner than later. Particularly with the garbage lack of semantics. Those who don't know what's wrong with this: <body class="bg-light"> <nav class="navbar navbar-expand-lg navbar-dark bg-dark"> <div class="container"> <a class="navbar-brand" href="/"> <img src="/images/ss_full_logo.png" class="navbar-brand-img" alt="SaleSource Logo"> </a> <button class="navbar-toggler" type="button" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#navbarCollapse" aria-controls="navbarCollapse" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Toggle navigation"> <span class="navbar-toggler-icon"></span> </button> <div class="collapse navbar-collapse" id="navbarCollapse"> <button class="navbar-toggler" type="button" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#navbarCollapse" aria-controls="navbarCollapse" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Toggle navigation"> <i class="fe fe-x"></i> </button> <ul class="navbar-nav ml-auto"> <li class="nav-item "> <a class="nav-link" href="/subscription/pricing"> Pricing </a> </li> <li class="nav-item dropdown"> <a class="nav-link dropdown-toggle" id="navbarPages" data-toggle="dropdown" href="#" aria-haspopup="true" aria-expanded="false"> Resources </a> <div class="dropdown-menu dropdown-menu-sm" aria-labelledby="navbarPages"> <div class="row no-gutters"> <div class="col-12"> <div class="row no-gutters"> <div class="col-12 col-lg-6"> <h6 class="dropdown-header"> Dropshipping </h6> <a class="dropdown-item" href="/contact"> Contact </a> <a class="dropdown-item" href="/top-shopify-dropshipping-stores">Top Shopify Dropshipping Stores</a> <a class="dropdown-item" href="/product_markup_calculator">Product Price Calculator</a> <h6 class="dropdown-header mt-4"> SaleSource </h6> <a class="dropdown-item" href="/best-dropshipping-products">Best Dropshipping Products</a> <a class="dropdown-item" href="/faq">FAQ</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </li> <li class="nav-item"> <a class="nav-link" id="navbarAccount" href="/blog"> Blog </a> </li> <li class="nav-item "> <a class="nav-link" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/salesource-dominus/kdfgckhiackgcoefjldejjhpgpedafpf"> Chrome Extension </a> </li> <li class="nav-item "> <a class="nav-link" href="/login"> Login </a> </li> </ul> <a class="navbar-btn btn btn-sm btn-primary text-white lift ml-auto" data-controls-modal="#exampleModal" data-backdrop="static" data-keyboard="false" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#exampleModal" target="_blank"> Start Free Trial </a> </div> </div> </nav> Code (markup): Should do the world a favor, back the **** away from the keyboard, and go take up something a bit less detail oriented like macramé. endless pointless DIV for nothing, non-semantic markup, static image in the markup doing H1's job, endless pointless classes for nothing... ... and that's just the code. Again the broken attempt at being responsive since it goes full Pakled mixing PX and EM, the illegible colour contrasts of white text on light lavender, the hard to read "thin glyph" HKGroteskPro font, etc, etc all does nothing for you apart from alienate potential users and risk possible legal woes, on top of getting you a nice backhand from search. You'd almost think the site was made with something like bootcrap. Go find a stick to scrape that off with.
It's all about advertises and making money, many you-tubers have also suffered from various updates. We need a serious alternative to Google, I have started to use Bing more these days.