Hey Kevin, exact same thing happened to my site. My site was hit on July 27 following the PRU update. I have been building the site steadily for over 2 years and have mounted to almost 300 articles. Only 10% (30 articles) are "review' type articles like "best X for Y" type content. All other content are information based. I would say around 80% of the content doesn't even contain a single affiliate link. I am in a very competitive niche.
Everything was going fine at 12pm and at around 1pm, my site was completed wiped off Google's index. No manual actions in GSC, all pages are still indexed but they are nowhere to be found in the SERPs. All content, including information content with good original video, is gone. Only a small % of keywords survived and I went from 2K pageviews a day to now just a little over 200 pageviews a day (90% drop in traffic). It seems I have lost almost all my keywords.
It was very nerve wrecking to see my business disappear in an hour. I did build a small email list but it's not a sustainable traffic source. I have since gone in and reduced the affiliate content to now just 5% of the entire site. It's now been exactly 2 weeks since the hit and nothing has recovered.
I was finally able to afford a full time writer a few months ago but sadly had to let her go last week as revenue is also reduced by 90%
None of my competitors are using "original images" or following the entire guidelines that Google put out for the PRU. We have similar content. My...
Read Full Story: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-august-6-33883.html
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