Recovering a site from the latest G updates

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Michael Martinez: My partner and I manage quite a few affiliate sites. We haven`t experienced any losses in traffic. There is no Google update that specifically targets affiliate sites. Google says most of these changes are not so much "updates" (in the sense being talked about on the Web) as they are chronologically close-together MINOR changes in ranking signals and algorithms. On average, Google rolls out 2-3 of these minor changes every weekday, up to 15 times per week. So comparing your losses with other people`s losses is not really productive.A lot of bad, pseudoscientific prognostication by SEO bloggers misleads marketers into believing there are BIG updates when, in fact, there are none. And even when large updates do happen, some sites are really being affected by the minor changes (or their own changes).When affiliate sites tank it is often because they are doing something Google determines to be a violation of their guidelines. The perceived violations may not be intentional. It could be that the page copy is too vague and ambiguous, not really helpful to consumers. It could be that the advertising is too aggressive (such as an affiliate link between every paragraph). It could also be that the site design was changed, adopting proven bad tactics such as PageRank sculpting (using "nofollow" on internal navigation), implementing flat site architecture (too many navigational links on every page), or something else.Also, RANKING REPORTS are not nearly as reliable as the data search engines provide you in their Webmaster dashboards. While your traffic may be down you need to look at what changed in Bing Toolbox and Google Search Console. They`ll show you the queries that were driving traffic to your pages, and the pages receiving traffic. Ranking reports (aka "search visibility reports") cannot provide you with that kind of information.
• 
  Amit Kumar Roy: Thank you so much for your valuable information Michael!It helped me to understand a lot!
• 
  George G.: this was a quality update. a ton of people got hit. most were because of the idiotic setting in yoast to create a separate page for each image. this created a ton of thin content google indexed and boom - penalty. i am doing an article on how to remove those fast, since a lot of ppl ask. will post the link later today when i finish it.however, your issue could be something else but i bet its related to the overall site quality.- check what google has indexed and make sure dupes and thin content are noindexed.- check if your canonicals are in place and set up correctly- check for any issues and messages in gwt and fix those- see if your site does not host malware - pretty much fix everything that might be wrong with the site and you ll see a fast recovery.i had 2 sites hit and are now back up.
• 
  Amit Kumar Roy: Love you man!Eagerly looking forward to your article..
• 
  Amit Kumar Roy: Brother:" most were because of the idiotic setting in yoast to create a separate page for each image"Should I uninstall Yoast? How could I identify whether Yoast has created multiple pages for each image?
• 
  George G.: As i said im working on a post. I ll post it here when ready but im not on a pc now.
• 
  Neil Cheesman: "idiotic setting in yoast to create a separate page for each image" Isn`t there a `tick box` for image attachments to auto-redirect to the page? EDIT: Here - https://kb.yoast.com/kb/redirect-image-attachment-urls/
• 
  George G.: Neil Cheesman there is. The default when they introduced it was set to no and created a ton of pages. And it was after an update, the previous version did not have it. And yea making the default option ti create those pages is idiotic.
• 
  Neil Cheesman: I can`t recall which one it is but there is another default setting that seems `idiotic` - I think to do with pagination.
• 
  George G.: ok, there is the article, hope it helps https://george.bg/fix-yoast-image-pages-problem-fast/
• 
  Amit Kumar Roy: George G. Nice one George!