So a big website owner came crying to us for help. He worked with an SEO company for 8 months and started accepting guest postings on his site.
In the June 2019 core algorithm Google update (4th June), his site traffic practically fell off the grid. From our initial site audit, we found that the SEO company had been building loads of new backlinks from “spammy” and unrelated topics.
They had also been adding content onto his site without properly vetting the dozens of incoming guest posts.
At the same time, he started working with a new ad network that was supposed to help him get more revenues from rotating banner ads. This drastically slowed his site down.
As with the latest Google’s core update, sites with duplicate content and slow speed were generally penalized.
And this was what we suspect happened to this site: a poisonous combo of keyword cannibalization, duplicate content, toxic backlinks and slow site speed.
Remember, keyword cannibalization and duplicate content penalty is a real thing in SEO. Adding articles nonchalantly without doing proper keyword research can hurt your site too.
Read more about keyword cannibalization and duplicate content here.
You can also check out our short informatory YouTube video to know more about how keyword cannibalization affects SEO.