I’m still very perplexed by the update that happened on September 28, 2012. It seems all of my websites were hit, no matter how they were designed, how they were formatted, what the topics were, or how good the quality of the material was. My sites all seemed to take a 50% hit in traffic. It has now been four months and I’ve seen no consistent evidence of any change, regardless of what I changed on my sites.
On one site, I tried removing all ads. That site has had minimal change in traffic.
On one site, I tried nofollowing all of the short articles, leaving only longer articles with good original content on the parts of the site that were getting indexed. The site has had no significant change in traffic.
On one site, I removed all old articles, removed all short articles, removed all affiliate links, nofollowed any outbound links that were to commercial sites (even though they weren’t paid ads), added a few more quality articles, and still there has been no significant recovery.
I’m still wondering if somehow Google is grouping my websites together even though they are all on unique domains and have unique content. While a few of the sites have relevant links between them, several of the other sites have no linking between them. I’m just wondering if Google groups my sites because of sharing a Webmaster Tools Account or for sharing a Google Analytics Account. The general belief is that Google does not look at webmaster tools or analytics accounts for ranking purposes, but the behavior of all of my websites moving in unison sure makes me question that.
All I can do is keep the quality up on my various websites and enjoy the good traffic I continue to get from Yahoo and Bing.