Arguably the trickiest part of excelling at SEO is tweaking and refining your strategies after Google releases an algorithm update. These Google updates can result in substantial changes to rankings for your site’s pages, some of which may well result in a loss of revenue.
What better way to weather the storm of Google updates than getting insights from Google’s own search advocate, John Mueller. This article presents actionable insights from our recent webinar on Google updates, which features John as a guest alongside SEO experts Marie Haynes and Barry Schwartz.
The recently deceased Bill Slawski delved in-depth into how Google operates from an algorithm and SEO perspective on his SEO by the Sea blog. Bill analyzed patent filings and whitepapers to help people learn directly from search engines.
The infamous Penguin update in 2012 hit thousands of websites with penalties as a result of perceived spam tactics, such as getting links from spammy domains. Since the number of backlinks pointing to a domain plays a pivotal role in SEO rankings, many site owners tried to game the system with low-quality links.
Of particular interest was how Bill flagged Google patents dating as far back as 2003 highlighting some signals of spammy links. These signals included:
So, Google has actually been fighting link manipulation for almost 20 years.
The Panda algorithm update came around a year before the Penguin update, but the purpose of Panda was to address sites with low-quality content, including duplicate content and thin content. “Wired” at the time wrote an article titled “The Panda That Hates Farms” which reflected the targeting of content farms that produced content en masse with little value.
One myth from the Panda update that still persists to this day is that thin content ties into word count. In other words, if a blog post has only a few hundred words, some SEOs think Google equates that to mean thin content. The truth, however, is more nuanced.
The “Wired” article at the time of Panda’s release summarized an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts and Amir Singhal. In the interview, both men indicated that Google quality raters identify low-quality content by asking questions such as:
Using questions along those lines, Google gauges what low-quality content means. The important takeaway here is that next time you’re worried about releasing a valuable blog post because it seems too short, remember that Google has many criteria for low-quality content. The Panda update was about algorithmically assessing website quality.
A very useful post on Google Search Central essentially spells out what site owners need to know about core updates. There are several questions on that post to ask yourself and determine if your content is good enough to weather the storm of an update. But just as important are the instructions Google provides in telling site owners about two main issues:
Above all else, though, persist in your efforts to best serve your target users. The main reason search engine algorithms change is to improve their ability to provide people searching online with the best results for their queries. If you keep users front of mind while not neglecting the basics of SEO, you can’t go far wrong.
Some SEOs and Internet marketers report that core web vitals don’t seem to be making much difference to rankings in search engines. These reports come from seeing sites at the top of search engine results pages that have low scores on core web vitals.
What’s important to remember here is that the main use of Core Web Vitals and other signals of on-page experience is that they are tie breakers. In other words, all else being equal, pages centered around a topic that score better on Core Web Vitals will rank higher. But for some queries, clearly, the quality of the content and the authority of the domain somewhat negate certain domains scoring poorly with CWV.
Traditionally, when assessing the impact of core algorithm updates on your rankings, you tended to see the impact pretty quickly within a day or two. However, in recent Google updates, it’s taken one to two weeks just for the changes to roll out. There can be a lot of turbulence in traffic as the update rolls out, which makes constantly checking Google Analytics a somewhat stressful and uninformative exercise.
A better approach is to wait it out a week or so after a core update rolls out. Then, delve into your traffic analytics to gauge the general trend of traffic following the update. Using these trends you can make decisions about how to adjust your content or perhaps audit the technical side of things.
In general, Google reprocesses the URLs on your site following an update according to their levels of prominence, importance, or the frequency with which they change on your site. So some less important pages might only see the impact of an algorithm update a few weeks after it rolls out.
It’s also useful to remember that just because you see changes in traffic, that doesn’t always mean the change is a result of a search engine update. For example, a competing site might release a piece of content that’s higher in quality, which impacts your rankings for a certain page independently of the algorithm update.
If you make some changes to your site to mitigate some of the negative effects of a core update, you’ll only see what differences those changes make when the next core update rolls out and Google reprocesses your site’s pages.
If your company’s prominence for certain search queries has a notable impact on revenue or visibility among prospects, core algorithm updates can be stressful times. But using the insights here, you’re better positioned to weather their storm. Continue serving your target users and approach these updates as an opportunity to improve, rather than something to fear.
