Site Rankings Completely GONE - Cause = Search Spam Issue + Fix?

mrpotato

mrpotato

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Oct 23, 2020
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I have a site that has recently lost ALL keyword rankings. I noticed that when I went into Google Search Console I've got a CRAP LOAD of terrible search result pages. For example, I've got 26,000 URLs like this showing up in GSC as excluded by noindex tag. Would love to get some feedback from @Ryuzaki and others that may be able to chime in on what steps to take here.

Full transparency, this is NOT the same site I did the Kitchen Sink Recovery on. This is a completely different site and niche.

How can I stop this?

What should I do to try and recover from this? :( Ahrefs legit dropped to ZERO Keywords as of today. But site:domain.com shows it's still indexed as does GSC.

Happy to be as much of an open book here as possible to get some good feedback and how to attack/fix. Will to experiment here too.

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I should also mention no manual penalty in Search Console.
 
Start by making sure you're not in the viagra selling business.
 
Have you looked at the majority of your competitor sites from 1-3 years ago? I’d bet 95% of them are in the same position. This goes for all content-based sites with no other “wings” to them like an e-commerce store as the forefront.

The Japanese spam hack (in this case just hoping your search results are indexable) is fine if you have it all no-indexed and it is actually dropped from the index. I’ve posted tutorials on how to drop it out of the index fastest if you search (sorry I’m on mobile and slow).

I’m not trying to be Mr. Pooh-Pooh here, but this is the stone cold reality for the past couple years and it started well before that. Nobody has cracked the code yet (working under the assumption you don’t have something catastrophically wrong with your site).

Things that will help us talk about it is telling us if it’s a content site, you checking out historical (not current ranking) competitors, how much content is published, etc.
 
secretagentdad said:
Start by making sure you're not in the viagra selling business.
Click to expand...
No Viagra selling here. Although I'm sure that paid well back in the day. lol
Ryuzaki said:
Have you looked at the majority of your competitor sites from 1-3 years ago? I’d bet 95% of them are in the same position. This goes for all content-based sites with no other “wings” to them like an e-commerce store as the forefront.

The Japanese spam hack is fine if you have it all no-indexed and it is actually dropped from the index. I’ve posted tutorials on how to drop it out of the index fastest if you search (sorry I’m on mobile and slow).

I’m not trying to be Mr. Pooh-Pooh here, but this is the stone cold reality for the past couple years and it started well before that. Nobody has cracked the code yet (working under the assumption you don’t have something catastrophically wrong with your site).

Things that will help us talk about it is telling us if it’s a content site, you checking out historical (not current ranking) competitors, how much content is published, etc.
Click to expand...
Happy to be an open book here. The site is content in a sense that it focuses on a couple of key types of content:
1. Reviews + Topical Posts
2. Discounts/Deals - think Athletic Greens Discount (no it's not the health niche) - Lots of this content
3. Profile Bios of prominent individuals relevant to the niche/industry
4. How-Tos which are industry related

All content is post-driven with timestamps and to be fully transparent some not updated in a while.

700ish posts in total:

44 last updated in 2020
324 last updated in 2021
328 last updated in 2022
6 last updated in 2023
0 last updated in 2024

Traffic was holding up until Dec 2023 overall.

Probably a multitude of things going on here and not just this spam, but that's what really triggered me to deep dive this and try to recover.
 
Hmmm, so your drops didn't happen recently but last year in September? I missed that.

In that case, I would have to agree with @Ryuzaki, you've been hit by all the google updates of the last years. Honestly, deal with the hack if it's a thing (https://sucuri.net/ maybe), but as it seems, I would agree you might unfortunately have gotten slapped by what we all got slapped by.
 
Wondering if I should just pull this site offline and transfer the content.
 
I've been dealing with this since about a month before the September HCU and still haven't found a solution to stop it. I have it all noindexed, but I'm still getting spammed daily, and every once in awhile one will slip through the cracks and get indexed, like this one:

https://mydomain.com/?tb=rhjkk&s=บาคาร่าauto

Where the live URL just spits out the following:

---

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<response>
<error>1</error>
<message>I really need an ID for this to work.</message>
</response>

---

I know the consensus is that this shouldn't affect rankings if its all noindexed, but I wonder if it's all having a negative impact on crawl budget or something.
 
mrpotato said:
I am going to remove the search entirely from the site for starters.
Click to expand...
I don't think this will stop someone from generating those URLs and getting them crawled. It's definitely an automated operation, so I'm doubting they're running any sanitization checks to remove your domain from their list in the case you don't have a search function available. I'm assuming the only check they're doing is seeing which CMS is used in order to figure out how to format the URLs.
 
Update here. I ended up doing the following:

1. Switching hosts to a faster provider
2. Killing all content that didn't get any traffic (Kasra D + Diggity Methods I discovered on YouTube)
3. Changing posts to pages that were more static/evergreen content
4. Reducing plugins
5. Updating year dates on site from 2020-2023 to 2024.
6. Removing some shady ass inner linking I did below every single post
7. Focused on in-content linking instead

I'll keep you posted what happens next if anything lol....
 
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