It reminds me of the old days, trying to get a phone signal and you'd stand in one spot, or wave your phone around, or stick your arm in the air or whatever and then SUDDENLY one bar of signal!
Only, you're not sure which of the things you did changed it... or whether it was something else entirely. 😄
@optimisey@michael_martinez Honestly, I've seen this happen a few times too & can't fathom an explanation. One of the many mysteries in our field.
Other times, you're sure you've made way better improvements & elevated your content & technical above & beyond your competitors & things take a nosedive. Sometimes you just throw your hands up & have to start again.
It's rare, but frustrating when it happens. Damn anomalies!
> What did I change?
> Absolutely. Nothing.
> Literally, not one thing.
Serious question: General reaction would be to tweak and see approach or to A/B test. I'm am curious to know as to what made you not optimize anything for over a year? Were you expecting it to be picked up automatically? What was your thought process?
Sometimes it is good to have a site that sits there without changes for a year or more. With some smaller businesses that is fine - they don't need to constantly optimise the site - frankly they will not be able to afford it. For #seo purposes these are great sites to have as a baseline. They should in theory wane over time but if locally focused, then often not.
For our affiliate portfolio, we may make some changes that we were thinking of making anyway, or we may continue to add new content without changing the basic strategy.
A few years ago some of our advertising-supported sites were suddenly outranked by a network of MFAs that took our articles and rewrote them. We decided to focus on other projects rather than fight that battle, as the other sites were using automation.
Having a portfolio of sites makes it easier to pivot to something else. And some of our sites are now doing about as well or better than after the competitors showed up - but they're all gone now.
@optimisey
I'd say something changed even if you did not do it. That is either something on the site, server or CDN. If it's a WP site then it might have been hacked and something unpleasent added. I'm not sure a Google change could affect something so drastically and then come back, unless there was a manual penalty... and I am presuming that chart is for the whole site not a query or a page. SSL cert not renewed correctly?
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