During the hangout on 10/1/2021, one webmaster asked John Mueller whether or not their site had been hit by the June spam update.
The webmaster’s situation is that they had reverted a few sites back to their prior format. Then they did a redesign. After the redesign, the site has dropped in rankings and performance.
John explained that he would not expect the spam update to target sites that were hit after doing a redesign.
He expects the spam update to really go after very bad spammy content or really bad spammy links.
Even keyword stuffing is not the type of spam that would have been targeted by that spam update.
To John, it sounded like perhaps the site is set up in such a way that Google is unable to process the pages as it was able to before.
John also mentioned that the algorithm runs into lots of sites that offer illegal movie downloads, and as a result of that, perhaps the algorithm is seeing the client’s site as a potential site in that vein, which is why they dropped in performance.
The conversation starts at the 24:55 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
And so yeah, this issue has been happening since the June updates. And you know, we reverted back a few sites a few weeks afterwards. But you know, the current site we’re looking at has been that case for since the June update. And before the June update, it was active for since December of last year, constant top-five ranks. And then site redesign ranks dropped and they’ve been dropped ever since. And we know based on the experience of the other domains, if we were to revert back the site, they’ll just kind of pop right back in place. So there’s something going on with the new template. And it’s really, these websites are really just the homepage, we’ve had subpages, but you know, that the synopsis page and even the gallery page, those been those have been moved to the homepage. And that’s really the only change.
John 25:49
Now, I wouldn’t expect the spam update to have any effect there. Because usually, the type of spam that we pick up is more along the lines of like really bad spammy content or really bad, spammy linking. And if you have a site and you do a redesign, even if it’s seen as like, Oh, it’s like, maybe there’s keyword stuffing here or something like that, then that’s not something that these kinds of spammy updates would be looking for. To me, it sounds a little bit more like maybe just like the onsite setup of those new pages is, I don’t know, not not the way that we can process them as easily as the other ones
Webmaster 6 26:35
No, they’re almost the same, like, I mean, I could look at the Google Search Console render, and it sees the content all, all, as it shouldn’t be, you know, Google’s, you know, the HTML, it outputs from Google search console is there. So it’s, and the render looks great. So it’s, it’s, you know, we have no idea why this is happening. And the spam is the only reason because, you know, it really happened at those spam updates, like, you know, the tool we use for ranking, you know, gives us little footnotes, and all the sites we review all fell in line with that update. And the only reason why we’re thinking it’s spam is because, you know, this site hosts very similar content, a lot of other sites, you know, the synopsis content is pretty much, you know, boilerplate played across, you know, other entertainment sites across the industry. But you know, we’re dealing with the official site, you know, so we’re trying to figure out why this is happening.
John 27:34
Yeah. If you can drop some examples in the chat. I can take a look at that afterwards. Yeah, I was, I think, like, the one thing that I could imagine that maybe our algorithms are running into is we see a lot of sites that essentially offer I don’t know, illegal downloads of movie content, or things like that. And it might be that kind of combination of lots of movie content, and maybe a different template, is throwing us off in that direction, when we’re like, Oh, is this actually the official site or not?
Webmaster 6 28:11
And the odd thing about that aspect is that, you know, we lost ranks for like, the core movie site ranks, you know, just the movie name, and just some some simple variations, but we actually retain all those piracy rings. So it doesn’t make any sense. Why is this happening? And we’re, you know, and yeah, if we, if we revert the site, we know it’ll all come back. So I’ll throw a few examples in there that you could take a look at.
John 28:36
Okay, cool. I’ll pass them on to the team to kind of double-check.
