Initially the update was identified by SEO people and was not officially announced by Google, but after about two weeks Google confirmed that there was an update and said that the update was intended to handle sites with low content quality.
How do you recognize that you were hit? If you see a significant change in the organic movement on the 7th or 8th of March 2017 – you are likely to have been hit. Some of the sites affected by this update reported a 50% drop in overall site organic traffic.
If you are affected by the update, the following steps are recommended:
- Create a list of pages whose organic movement has been damaged.
- Go through on the site pages and update the problematic content that you are discovering. Problematic content in this feed is often low-quality content or pages with too little content.
- If these are meant to be pages with little content – find specific solutions depending on the nature of the site.
- Reducing number of advertisements on site pages – a large number of sites were apparently damaged due to excessive advertising. Many websites owners have reported that reducing the number of advertisements on site pages has resulted in recovering from the penalty.