Google Ranking Updates – Off The Record

Google’s Search Off The Record podcast had Danny Sullivan, John Mueller and Martin Splitt on the topic of Google ranking updates. While most of what was talked about is not necessarily new, it is a good refresher on that focusing on the big picture can often be more important that focusing on specific details around doing better with Google algorithmic updates.

Here is the podcast, it is worth listening to:

The one new tidbit is that Danny Sullivan wants and seems to be encouraging the various Google teams to document algorithm systems more often, but in a general way.

John Mueller asked Danny Sullivan, “Do you see this becoming more granular over time? Or do you think the granularity of what we document there is at the right level?”

Danny Sullivan replied, “I hope that it grows a lot more. The News team just shared about topic authority. And so now we have a new system that we will formally add into that page, and we will create a probably standalone page to explain it a bit more.” “And part of what I hope is that more and more teams, as they are developing ranking systems, are improving them, understand, “Hey, this would actually be useful for us to share with the world generally.” Because both it’s helpful for people who create content to know about some of these things, but it’s also just helpful for people who use Google to understand that we do certain things,” he added.

Michael Adediran has a very good summary of what was discussed, if you are too busy to listen to it yourself:

2. Google isn’t making more algorithm changes than ever, rather they’re being more transparent/communicate more about the changes being made.

3. They prefer to only show one web page listing from the same site. Except when the site is being searched for.

— Micheal | Ecommerce SEO 🔬 (@mich_adediran) August 22, 2023

7. Optimizing for one ranking factor won’t make you rank higher.

8. E-E-A-T is still very important.
That said you don’t need to be a professional in the content. You just need to show expertise.

— Micheal | Ecommerce SEO 🔬 (@mich_adediran) August 22, 2023

11. The majority of Travel bloggers are doing SEO and everything else wrong. pic.twitter.com/3fMUfKhCio

— Micheal | Ecommerce SEO 🔬 (@mich_adediran) August 22, 2023

Out of context:@JohnMu has used so many profile names he doesn’t remember his current one.

A callout to @rustybrick was made pic.twitter.com/zSDSSlGSMr

— Micheal | Ecommerce SEO 🔬 (@mich_adediran) August 22, 2023

And, of course, it was fun to see this podcast come out just hours before Google confirmed the August 2023 core update:

Oooo – @dannysullivan @searchliaison @JohnMu and @g33konaut podcast on Google ranking updates – a sign that an update coming soon? 🙂 https://t.co/QBZoXoaPyJ

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 22, 2023

Help! The search algorithm has been updated, and now I need to start over!

Tune into the latest #SOTRPodcast where @JohnMu, @dannysullivan, and @g33konaut, chat about everything you need to consider when the ranking algorithm changes → https://t.co/ECHKIY4aDT pic.twitter.com/xzVbY5p9UX

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) August 22, 2023

I’m also happy if SEOs read our guidance and take advantage of it to rank better in Google Search. Because our guidance is meant to make search better for everyone. More in the podcast, which has a transcript: https://t.co/Lnhk7kV02D

And our guidance! https://t.co/NaRQqb1SQx pic.twitter.com/Z0TByX2hcU

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) August 23, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.