I did a lot of comparisons of my sites and blogs with the ones that gained traffic and every single of my indications lead to a very simple dilemma:
1. backlinks were "recalculated"
or
2. random reshuffle, as funny as it sounds
My case study #1 - two of my own blogs (same theme, different unique pics, different unique text, same post structure)
Blog A - used to be top traffic one in my network
average session: 01:55
average ctr from google: 18%
300+ posts (pic + short text)
----> DROP to roughly 10% of previous traffic
Blog B - used to be one of the smallest ones (traffic and post wise)
average session: 01:12
average ctr from google: 12%
100ish posts (pic + short text)
----> RISE to 700% of previous traffic
BACKLINKS are practically identical, no strong ones on either - this one I attribute to RANDOM AS FUCK
My case study #2 - My paysite vs competitor
both sites:
- fueled by same script
- both with roughly 15 000 videos
- same niche
competitor
- stole my "preview mode" site idea and even chunks of my html for it
- site half broken (literally, it's a hard script to template for
)
- 10 sec video previews
- enGrish text (very lousy writing skills, bad english)
- very low amount of text overall (titles + video descriptions)
- no gallery section
- 10y old site
my site
- 15 sec video previews, HD
- 100% unique handwritten text, flawless english, for every video, 5x more than competitor
- 100% mobile friendly and fully responsive
- free galleries section (hundreds of full galleries, fully free and surfer accessible)
- 6y old site
RESULT OF LATEST UPDATE
me: google traffic down 80%
competitor: google traffic up around 500%
Conclusion:
Only thing that competitor beats me at is site age and somewhat (potentially) stronger backlink structure.
Therefore I can only attribute this to BACKLINK recalc kind of shit.
Small addition - after March 7 core update - ALL of my sites were growing heavily
March 14th, so called "google tremor" was like someone turned off the light, literally - almost all sites in my network dropped instantly (currently, I get more bing and baidu than google traffic, that speaks volumes)
WORTH MENTIONING:
I've already written here that my sites are constantly targeted by site scrapers and site cloners. Considering the lack of information from google on that matter, it is IMPOSSIBLE to determine how badly and how much it affects the site, since it turns the (text) content into duplicate content. I wouldn't be surprised if google considers my sites spammy because of it, but no real way to prove or recover from that.
Did some writing about it on a mini blog last year, if anyone is interested -
Site Cloning And Google Issues – Google rank and traffic dropping? Is your site cloned?