However, I’ve gotten the impression that high-profile update announcements mostly affect our money sites rather than informational sites.
How Affiliate Sites React to Google Updates
Take a look at an example of a site that dropped on February 4, and Google said nothing about this update:
At that exact same time, another site of mine dropped:
Yet another site dropped completely outside of a Core Update—on December 23:
It feels like pure randomness rather than a Google Core Update.
Now let’s take a pure affiliate site—dropped on May 5 right on queue and surged upward on December 4, straight out of the Google Core Update textbook:
Where the traffic dropped to zero—ignore that, I was changing the template.
How Informational Sites React in Google
Now let’s look at informational sites without affiliate links.
The site began ranking near the top on January 11. Yet there was no major update announced.
Similarly, an informational site just trends upward without any updates, and the chart doesn’t fluctuate much:
Here’s another informational site—it behaves as if updates don’t even exist, doing its own thing while others go up or down:
Amazon Sites Under the Gun
One new thing the December 5 update brought: while medical-related sites used to be the main targets, Google has now turned to purging Amazon affiliate sites for lawnmowers.
In Diggity’s group, a guy bought an Amazon site for $40k and… a week later it dropped. A real shame. He sent me the link—it was a standard Amazon niche blog.
Plenty of those have fallen recently.
In other words, sites used to satisfy Google and everything was fine, but on December 5, it was suddenly not fine. What changed? Quality evaluations shift, dragging affiliate sites along with them.
An entire era of site networks is coming to an end. Our beloved carbibles.com:
Conclusions:
- A Google Core Update mostly impacts money-oriented affiliate sites. My informational sites seem to live by their own separate rules
- Google updates happen continuously; there is no post-update lull. On February 4 my affiliate sites dropped, yet Google said nothing
- Amazon affiliate sites took a hit on December 5. While Amazon cut commission rates early in the year, Google added fuel to the fire at year’s end by slashing traffic. On the bright side, many niches were cleared out, opening up room for you to step in—if you know how. 😉
Diggity released a great video, worth watching when you have time: