Search changed in some big ways with the arrival of the last big update. Catch up with how SEOs are responding in this month’s roundup.
In the top three stories for the month, you’ll look at how many of the celebrated ranking increases during the update were later wiped out. You’ll also discover why one site owner believes Google crushed his business overnight and how regulatory changes have created two internets for Americans and Europeans.
There’s plenty more to learn after that. The next set of stories covers hidden ranking factors, the death of Google website caching, and a new study into whether Google penalizes AI content. The list closes with news on Google’s moves, including new penalties.
Google Search Ranking Increases During Core Update Wiped Out Post Update
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-core-update-reversal-reversed-38101.html
Barry Schwartz offers you this look at why some hopes for the new update were dashed when the dust had settled. He tracked several SEOs who provided internal numbers on various platforms.
Glenn Gabe was one SEO who provided several internal charts to show how his sites were behaving. His numbers leading up to September 15th showed unnamed sites rising with the update and then slowly falling again in the weeks afterward. The trend was consistent across several sites.
On September 17th, SEO Lily Ray reported that spam seemed to be overtaking good results in the aftermath of the update and received replies from several other SEOs tracking the decline on their own sites.
Barry found dozens of other posts from SEOs, advertisers, and small site owners talking about completely lost gain, randomized results that changed with each new search, and traffic that had dropped by 20-30%.
Many of the SEOs quoted held Google at least partly responsible. In the article, Barry seemed to agree, saying, “It is heartbreaking to read some of these posts, and meanwhile, Google is silent.”
Check out his complete piece for more responses from SEOs about the changes. Next, you’ll explore the issue in depth with a story about how the recent update crushed one business overnight.
The Google Update That Crushed His Business Overnight
The Google Update That Crushed His Business Overnight – YouTube
Sam Oh and the Ahrefs team bring you this look at how content creator Jake Boley had his gym and shoe-related content properties nearly destroyed by traffic loss from the recent update. The team worked directly with Jake to explore why the problem had happened and to find out if it could be fixed.
The video opens early with some graphs that show the extent of the damage to Jake’s properties. One site had gone from a traffic average rate of around 200,000 to well under 1000. The Ahrefs team quickly noticed that most of the traffic drops coincided with the arrival of updates. Now, they had a better idea of what might be causing the problem.
The team looked closer at Jake’s sites and identified several ways that it may have fallen outside of best practices. In a deep audit of his work, they identified key ways he could serve search intent, improve the user experience, develop a better content strategy, and pursue more authority.
Check out the complete video for detailed steps covering each action that was taken to recover Jake’s site. The Ahrefs team is refreshingly clear about the principles that drove each change, so you can understand why they acted and better understand whether the steps can apply to your own site.
Now that two stories have caught you up on the update, you should turn your attention to a problem in the industry’s future. Differences in the law are creating two very different internet experiences for Europeans and Americans.
2 Internets: A European And An American Internet
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/2-internets-a-european-and-an-american-internet/528605/
Kevin Indig thinks that the experience of the internet may be changing for people under European and American laws. However, he also thinks it could be a good thing, and has some ideas for how SEOs can turn these changes into opportunities.
As he argued in an earlier event, “The result could be two internets that allow us to compare the impact and changing AI landscape in countries like the U.S.” Do these changes really mean access to a split-testing tool with world-spanning coverage? Kevin explores the possibilities.
First, he provides some background for those who haven’t followed the passing of new EU laws. The one that matters is the Digital Marketing Act (DMA). This law came with a lot of new rules that applied to sites serving EU customers.
As Kevin summarizes—
“Companies can no longer force defaults on users (like a search engine or browser), show their offering above other marketplace participants, and serve targeted ads without consent. They must guarantee interoperability, data access, ad transparency, and side loading.”
This created a serious fork in the user experience. Kevin takes you through the real consequences by showing how top SERPs are very different. For example, Google features don’t appear for some types of searches in the EU (e.g., flights). They are replaced with direct links to aggregators that don’t work with Google.
Kevin believes that these changes will ultimately create an advantage for EU sites. These sites will compete less for clicks with Google in their own search region.
Next, I explore whether Google’s hidden ranking factor has been discovered.
They found Google’s Hidden Ranking Factor! Is it Real?
They found Google’s Hidden Ranking Factor! Is it Real? – YouTube
In this video, I expand on a Moz piece that was recently featured in our roundup. The piece was called “The Helpful Content Update Was Not What You Thought It Was,” and in it, Tom Capper argued that a very understudied factor had a huge impact.
Like many SEOs, I’ve felt skeptical that following Google’s guidelines was the best or safest way to rank. Google’s focus on people-first content, original information, or insightful analysis didn’t seem to align with what was really rewarded in search.
When these updates landed, it was almost like another factor was separating the winners from the losers. Did Tom find it?
Tom hypothesized that the HCU has something to do with a “suspect ratio of search volume for a site’s navigational terms to its link signals. To put it more simply, if a site has an impressive number of links, but no one is looking for the brand, Google may assume that the links are bought or bullshit.
The data from the original article seemed to support the theory. Sites with a lot of brand search volume were likely to benefit from the HCU even if they didn’t have a good link profile.
I was excited to see brand search volume highlighted as a signal because I have focused on this signal for a long time. Past experiments have shown that high brand search volume alone accounted for many winning sites.
However, I’ve only focused on that, while Tom thinks the ratio of the two signals may be more important than the signal alone, and studied that. Tom performed a huge study that looked at winners and losers across nearly 2 million sites. These results seemed to confirm his suspicions strongly.
My team has been actively working on brand search volume techniques for some time now, and I share some of them with you near the end of the video. Content marketing and influencer marketing is still effective for this part, but I also share some of my “gray” strategies.
Check out my video and the complete piece by Tom for more into this big development. Next, you’ll say goodbye to a long-time Google feature that many will miss.
Google Will No Longer Back up the Internet: Cached Web Pages Are Dead
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/google-search-kills-off-cached-webpages/
Cached sites have been an option tucked into results for decades. Google once made backups of pages that could be accessed from the search engine menu in case the website or page you were trying to access was inaccessible.
This practice has now come to an end. As Danny Sullivan pointed out in a recent statement, this was a much more essential feature in the early days of the Internet. In the early 2000s, pages often would not load fully over slow connections. When this happened, cached pages summoned a copy of the text and non-interactive elements.
SEOs and other search-watchers have noticed that cached results have disappeared since December 2023. However, this disappearance was not always consistent, and Google chose to be silent about what it intended to do until now.
This move won’t seriously impact SEOs, but it may make it more difficult to recall old information for research. Tools like the Internet Archive may have a harder time making copies and may provide less research for your own case studies as a result.
Next, not all of the news on Google this month is negative. Google is getting credit for being better at recognizing content creators, and it could lead to a breakthrough in SEO.
Google Recognizes Content Creators: A Breakthrough for E-E-A-T and SEO
Jason Barnard brings you this look at Google’s increasing ability to recognize the creators behind the content that it features. This recognition is now appearing as identifying labels inside the knowledge panel. As Jason shows in his article, knowledge panels now include labels identifying individuals based on their field (for example, Medicine or Travel).
This could mean serious benefits for site owners who regularly develop content. Google’s recognition that you are a creator could be considered a powerful trust signal for clients considering your services.
The advantages could go further. Being recognized as a creator could make it easier to rank any of your content in the future. Google now has a place for you as an entity.
Good things may be ahead for content creators because Google is working hard to improve its identification of them. As Jason points out, Google focused on creators in the multiple updates.
A tool Jason was using showed that Google has been frequently updating the Knowledge Graph to make changes to person entities all year long.
These changes may be a Google strategy to bypass the problem of AI-generated content. By verifying and tracking creators, Google may eventually intend to make a quick (and ruthless) determination about whether new content can rank based on whether the author can be identified and whether they have credentials or an audience.
Next, you’ll examine a mini case study that explores how far Google is willing to go to crack down on recent types of SEO abuse. It examines the evidence that one of the former biggest players in SEO is buckling under manual action.
Did Google Hit Forbes Advisor With A Search Penalty Over Site Reputation Abuse?
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hit-forbes-advisor-38147.html
Barry Schwartz brings you this look at Forbes Marketplace. Even if you don’t think this name sounds familiar, you have heard of them.
For several years, Forbes appeared in nearly every search result. Their articles ranked all over the world for topics completely unrelated to Forbes, the financial magazine. That’s because all those Forbes results weren’t from Forbes but from Forbes’ SEO company.
This SEO company made its sites look like Forbes (even though it was independent) and then set out to sell links to nearly everyone. SEOs have been complaining about this problem for years, most recently in a Lars Lofgren piece titled Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host.
Now, it turns out the party may be over for this not-exactly-Forbes behemoth. Glenn Gabe discovered evidence the site is dropping heavily. While tracking the changes, Glenn found that 1.7 million queries dropped in rank. The damage is still ongoing, but it signals Google’s willingness to target reputational abuse against even the largest players.
That covers this month’s news. Big changes are coming for Google, and we’re just now finally starting to see what’s behind the curtain. Come back soon for more SEO headlines, guides, and case studies in a future roundup.
