OP's website is heavy with affiliate link listicles, which have been recently heavily downranked in favor of forums and content like Reddit and Quora.

We have a single list with affiliate links on there. Which happened because a company proactively approached us to share their link on our site because they liked the content.

Edit: I do see how it may have seemed like we had a lot of referral links due to the setup of outgoing links. Changed that now, so there is pretty much just the one left.

OP complaining about getting delisted when he was gaming the algorithm in the first place.

Website link?

To the parent commenter - have you set up google search console and reviewed what pages and keywords were affected? There could be other reasons why your pages aren't being indexed properly. If it's a small site, it could have been something as simple as changing an image or page title.

If something simple removes a useful site from the search results Google should fix its algorithm not the otheway around.

Not saying that’s what happened here, but if people are searching for “images of X” and you remove your image of X, how is that Google’s fault?

Google's USP once was not falling for content farms and their word lists.

Are we back to the early days of search engines?

But this isn't about “images of X”. Nor is it, likely, about whatever "listicle" links OP's site has[1]. It's about people serching for info about, say, "Day at Nürburgring". And OP didn't remove that, now did they? And I bet most of them don't specify either with or without listicles.

So if people were searching for "Day at Nürburgring" and used to find OP's site, then Google changed their algorithm, and now when people search for "Day at Nürburgring" they don't find OP's site, how is that not Google’s fault?

______

[1]: And Bog knows Google serves me up enough sites with those on...

You can't say what it's about without seeing exactly where the traffic and rankings decreased and looking at the Google search console. I'm happy to take a look out of curiosity if the OP wants to share.

I presume when you say "remove from the search results", you mean removed from the first page or top n spots or whatever.

But what if there are 20 good resources? They can't all be on the first page, or in the top spot.

Perhaps yhe other sites improved, or were better in some way?

Being on top for a while is no guarantee you'll be on top forever. It's precisely Google's business to change the algorithm.

I agree with your general point that it should not be the responsibility of the website to change to make a search engine happy.

I disagree with your specific point that Google should fix anything. Google can choose their own behaviors and motivations. Users can choose to rely on Google or trust them at all, or not.

Remember when Google was a successful business competing against the likes of Yahoo and AltaVista? Back when it was ok to be a successful small business? When you didn't count a millions users as a failure?

Nobody seems to believe anymore that you can operate a successful search company without having a trillion dollar war chest. Few people are willing to give alternative engines a try. They'd rather stick to Google like glue.

I'd like to declare the 28th as "Try something different day." On the 28th of each month people should try a different browser for the entire day. Or a different search engine. Or a different tooth paste. Every month, one day a month, take a different route to work, or maybe even a different mode of transportation. Use a Colemak keyboard. Go to a different church. You don't have to do the same different thing each month. Just start building some experience with shaking up your routine.

When you try something different and it turns out ok, share your positive experience with others.

I have not used Google search or Bing for years and it has worked out pretty well. I started with DDG, but have had good experiences with other search engines, too. Some may argue that DDG is not different enough. So perhaps next month I should try qwant.com for a day.

I have never found search console useful for anything other than random 404's and one-off server errors. When a site is hit by an algorithmic penalty there is never any clue as to why.

This is my experience as well. If someone could mention how to examine the console to improve a site after an algo change, I would absolutely love to hear it .

I also find it mystifying and I’m not a SEO expert, but one way I use it is to compare ranking positions over time for specific pages and queries. That will help you identify where exactly the traffic came from and where you lost it. A lot of times this has to do with gaining or losing the #1 spot to a competitor.

If you don’t see a ranking change, it could also indicate seasonality in your visitors or external events. If your website is brand new, this could be hard to detect otherwise. For example, recently I saw a traffic spike for a random blog article, and search console help me see that people were searching for that topic because Elon Musk tweeted about it the day before.

Another helpful feature is to inspect particular URLs and make sure they are indexed—sometimes if you have multiple similar pages and set the canonical URL incorrectly, Google will try to de-dupe the results.

Hope that helps!

Very helpful, thank you.

> could have been something as simple as changing an image

Or something nefarious like Google skewing their algo to favor websites with more placeholders for google's ads.

You know the consistent allegations against Google on this topic from long time insiders and my personal experience of terrible search results does not allow me to apply Occam's razor at all. Instead its the inverse of assuming malice.

Definitely. All of them were affected equally, pretty much.

If this were true then every site would implement adsense. Most don't.

This reminds of "Bidding Rank" from Baidu decades ago (and I think it pretty much still applies for Baidu) - Google was not only better technologically, but ethically because their search results were not that profit driven as "Bidding Rank" which was (and still is) very much despised. Now it seems Google only cares about profit and started to do things more or less the same way.

Sick.

Disclosure - I was so pissed by the degration of quality (an money-thirstiness) of the search results from Google that I switched to a non-profit search engine as my default for both desktop and mobile. The daily search experience doesn't have much noticible change to me. I do admit sometimes the Google search result could be better sometimes, but those occasions are quite rare for my needs, like maybe once a week.

What's the search engine?

DuckDuckGo works great in my experience as of late.

If this were really the case, wouldn't it be a painfully obvious anticompetitive move?

Investigating and prosecuting anticompetitive behavior simply takes to long to investigate and prosecute. And by the time this happens, the fast-moving nature of the tech industry usually means the issue is not nearly as relevant as it was when the issue arose. Then the company strikes a mea-culpa deal with the appropriate governing body and makes changes that don't actually matter any more.

Are there reasons to believe this is what actually happens? Did anyone document this?