Google Algorithm Updates - 2022 Ongoing Discussion

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I wasn't sure where I had originally posted the graphs of these AI content sites, but I just found them here in this thread. I posted an update to how all 4 sites are getting on in this other thread about AI content and indexation problems and you can read the update here. Let's just say it's not going so well for them. Just wanted to make sure I share here so anyone waiting for an update didn't miss out.
 
Wild few week of updates...

Lost 10k ahref traffic over the course of a week.
Then it reversed course and gained 25k over about 2 weeks.
Now its back on the down trend again, lost 10k.

Maybe going down some more probably.

But in the grand scheme of things, it's still just about like 10% of my overall traffic so not horrendous I guess. Interesting thing is that I'm like 99.99% informational and the most recent one was a product update lol.
 
Okay, so the majority of the traffic loss came from my #2 most trafficked post. Lost over 20k ahref traffic from it alone.

Honestly, it was 0% related to my niche but I was browsing around some of the major news site and stumbled upon the KW haha.

But yeah it was some tiktok trending video... Dropped from #1 down to #8 so far. Being outranked now by tiktok, etsy, pinterest.

Quite interesting. Most likely going to stay away from these tiktok topics fromf now on. I had another one that I did which was pulling in about 9k ahref but its dropping as well.
 
Darth said:
That's fine, but I assume you've heard of Google Analytics?
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Yes, have dual tracking set up.

It's just easier for comparison with ahref because it literally shows you the KW position and you can set it to compare day before, week, month, or w/e.
I know it severely underestimates the traffic because the GA traffic is more than 2x what ahref shows. But I just like using it as a relative gauge.

Maybe it's just my personal preference but my routine is to check GA last 30 days pageviews in the morning when I wake up... but I check ahref multiple times throughout the day for movements. The numbers are just stuck in my head.
 
JOoa0ky said:
Honestly, it was 0% related to my niche but I was browsing around some of the major news site and stumbled upon the KW haha.
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There's one-third of the puzzle with regard to post-Core/Helpful rankings.

Surprised nobody has mentioned the other two, I thought this place was the big-brained SEO haunt these days.
 
Possible Update: 10/13/22

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Let's hope some corrections are in order. I know lots of legitimate and authoritative sites took pretty massive hits, ranging between 30%-50%. I know someone doing $100k a month that took a 50% hit. I know of someone doing just under $200k a month that took a 33% hit across a portfolio. My main project took a 40% hit, too. Crossing my fingers I can get it back before the holiday RPMs start kicking in.
 
I thought something might be in the works.

I noticed an increase in traffic the past few days, and today is looking even better so far.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Possible Update: 10/13/22

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Let's hope some corrections are in order. I know lots of legitimate and authoritative sites took pretty massive hits, ranging between 30%-50%. I know someone doing $100k a month that took a 50% hit. I know of someone doing just under $200k a month that took a 33% hit across a portfolio. My main project took a 40% hit, too. Crossing my fingers I can get it back before the holiday RPMs start kicking in.
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Brutal. What is ranking instead of all these sites that got hit?
 
Darth said:
Brutal. What is ranking instead of all these sites that got hit?
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That's the question. "Who's winning?" Because I'm not hearing about anyone gaining a ton of traffic this go around either. The only other option is the introduction of SERP features like video, image carousels, and all that on SERPs that previously didn't feature them. 2 or 3 new ones would push organic traffic way down for the entire keyword package.

I've tried to investigate this looking at places like Semrush Sensor where you can select a vertical and then see the percentage of SERP features. I'm not seeing any obviously huge changes there.

I've also looked into my own traffic and other big sites that took hits to see if there was a pattern in the types of keyword intent where they/we took hits and there's nothing obvious going on there either. The one thing I didn't do, which I should have at the time when I was already digging, was to pull up the SERPs manually and take a look.
 
Ryuzaki said:
That's the question. "Who's winning?" Because I'm not hearing about anyone gaining a ton of traffic this go around either. The only other option is the introduction of SERP features like video, image carousels, and all that on SERPs that previously didn't feature them. 2 or 3 new ones would push organic traffic way down for the entire keyword package.

I've tried to investigate this looking at places like Semrush Sensor where you can select a vertical and then see the percentage of SERP features. I'm not seeing any obviously huge changes there.

I've also looked into my own traffic and other big sites that took hits to see if there was a pattern in the types of keyword intent where they/we took hits and there's nothing obvious going on there either. The one thing I didn't do, which I should have at the time when I was already digging, was to pull up the SERPs manually and take a look.
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Does one of these big sites begin with Home and end with ? It is getting nailed....

Remember last year - video snippets got pumped hard for those juicy video RPMs for Google.

In other news SEMRush shows me down slightly but my traffic is about to break the monthly record. Strange times. So tempted to sell when the £ is weak against the $....
 
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Ryuzaki said:
Let's hope some corrections are in order. I know lots of legitimate and authoritative sites took pretty massive hits, ranging between 30%-50%.
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It's crazy. I know at least 5 that took a hit and are 30%, up to 70% down. They have great content quality, optimized onsite and good DRs.
 
October 2022 Spam Update - 10/19/22

Today Google releases the October 2022 Spam Update, in which SpamBrain, their automated AI-based spam-prevention system, is updated to better spot old and new types of spam. In these cases, the spam is usually referring to stuff like doorway pages, cloaking, pages that force you to download viruses, and all that type of stuff.

It's a global update and will take about a week to fully roll out.

For context, the previous spam update was in November 2021, then one in July 2021 (going back in time) that targeted link spam, and there were also spam updates in June 2021.
 
The tradition continues where I see big changes a few days before each update is "announced." Could be my paranoia. Or could be they lag these announcements a bit.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Today Google releases the October 2022 Spam Update, in which SpamBrain, their automated AI-based spam-prevention system, is updated to better spot old and new types of spam.
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How the hell did I miss that Google had a system named SpamBrain! :D

A few weeks of mass-checking and tweaking is on the cards for me.
 
Was up quite a bit last week and now down 5-10% literally after the spam update began rolling out.

My site is not spammy at all and has tons of quality links pointing to it. Hoping it returns to normal levels once the rollout finishes. Frustrating nonetheless...
 
OnlineDopamine said:
Was up quite a bit last week and now down 5-10% literally after the spam update began rolling out.

My site is not spammy at all and has tons of quality links pointing to it. Hoping it returns to normal levels once the rollout finishes. Frustrating nonetheless...
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I was sure I'd talked about this before and found it in another thread and want to drag the quotes into here because they're super relevant:

Ryuzaki said:
I'm increasingly of the opinion that Google is acting just like the US Congress. They'll push a bill called "Save the Veterans" which allocates 5 million to them and then attach a bunch of "pork" to it like "10 trillion for carbon deductions, 8 billion to study tuna fish swimming up stream, 18 million for art museums, 3 billion for gender studies in Iraq, and we're banning firearms." And if anyone votes against it they can say "Why do you hate veterans?" Then all the casuals bark like seals on command.

I don't mean to make it political or to take any side of that debate. But I wanted to give a real example. Google is doing the same crap. They can push an update called "Product Reviews" meant to push quality product reviews, but really it's meant to favor big brands (but not so much as to hurt PPC revenue) only in an effort to help them not have to fight spam, and it also pushes a Penguin update, a Panda update, removes some SERP features and introduces new ones, fights A.I. content, and deindexes spam sites, and updates the perceived intent of most keywords.

Now everyone is confused and anyone who speaks up about anything but "Product Reviews" is labeled an SEO conspiracy theorist, spammer, a moron, low authority, a "go back to black hat world", "someone that did something wrong but won't admit it", and so forth. That's the barking simp-seals. It's meant to obfuscate and confuse and lie, and it's done through a single label: "Product Reviews".
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That's not a long quote but you probably have to click to expand. The main point is that it's a political / societal manipulation tool to use labels to obfuscate the truth.

To add to the Congress example quoted above, and without being specific, we all know about the protest groups that arose in the past 6 years with names that are 100% the opposite of what they actually are and do, so that if you point it out their evil operations, you can be labeled an enemy or evil yourself. I say all that to emphasize that it's about the labels, and it's why people want single-issue bills in congress.

Same thing here with Google updates. They can call this a "Spam Update" but if you were to look at a pie chart of what it actually does, it might only be 10% spam fighting. The other 90% are other general algorithm re-weighting, adjustments to past updates, the introduction of new variables, the introduction and removal of SERP features, and so forth. It's all about obfuscating the truth while pretending to be transparent and making it difficult to understand or even talk about it out loud without meeting resistance.

So yeah, who knows what these updates specifically target any more. Which is cool, I guess. It makes it simpler for us. You'd think we could just build high quality sites with high quality content, but we also know there's agenda's behind the scenes that don't necessarily seek to reward high quality. They seek to increase revenue (especially always around September / October every year it seems, right before the prime time).
 
So the update is now done; my two new sites that had reached 1800/day traffic this month are back to levels from a month ago, down 25% total. My old stagnant sites are fine.

From my portfolio looks like an attempt to combat content velocity without links backing it up or increase weighting on links because of AI content spam, but who the hell knows?

Google still can't get half of android auto users' day/nite mode working 3 years later, so I have very little faith their programmers are as good as we were led to believe.
 
tyealia said:
From my portfolio looks like an attempt to combat content velocity without links backing it up or increase weighting on links because of AI content spam, but who the hell knows?
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I'm fascinated by a particular DR75 site that's probably closing in on being a decade old that lost what appears to be over 50% of it's traffic (millions of visitors a month gone) that doesn't have any outrageous content velocity. If they added more weight to links you'd think they'd have survived. They could have done that, though, if most of the articles don't have any links at all and it's just a juicy domain due to the homepage and a handful of articles.
 
Ryuzaki said:
I'm fascinated by a particular DR75 site that's probably closing in on being a decade old that lost what appears to be over 50% of it's traffic (millions of visitors a month gone) that doesn't have any outrageous content velocity. If they added more weight to links you'd think they'd have survived. They could have done that, though, if most of the articles don't have any links at all and it's just a juicy domain due to the homepage and a handful of articles.
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Interesting one; could also be part of another split test of their algo. Here's a really interesting take from an ai engineer I saved a few months ago about short-term bursts shortly after algo updates

"From my experience working with AI developers running on large amounts of data and complex multi-variant models, my thought is this has very little to do with your content.

When Google indexes sites they have a dynamic scoring system that continuously takes into account user response data along with the categorizations Google has already done on each piece of content on your site. Every time they update their algorithms and sub-algorithms they need to re-run all the pages on all the sites that fall within the category of sites they were trying to improve the search results for.

For example if they add another factor to one of their algo models - like how many scrolls and clicks somebody does, or how many internal links a page has, or whether the page uses specific code pattern - then all the pages on all the sites this applies to need to be re-run through the new algorithm. The reason is you can’t compare outputs from 2 different ranking models. So they basically wipe the old post-process data used to rank your pages previously and rerun those pages over time with the new algorithm. If you had good content scores before, that gets wiped and they rebuild it from new user experience data generated by the new algorithm. It takes time and ideally you get the same or better ranking afterward.

The pattern you are describing where irrelevant / bad content sites and large high-authority sites (eg Home Depot) are outranking you now seems to be an artifact of the historical ranking data wipe. When Google wipes and has to reconstruct a portion of the ranking data, what’s left is the data that hasn’t changed. In this case it’s probably the historical backlink ranking data that was left which is now inordinately more important in the rankings because the relevance ranking data got wiped and hasn’t been rebuilt yet. So the guys with tons of backlinks are winning temporarily.

Google also takes time to split test. So they will apply the new algo to one population of sites, and keep the old algo for the other group of sites. Then compare results to see which version of the algo “wins”. Your site might be in the “new algo” rather than the control group. They’re probably using AI to design and run these tests on the fly, too.

Google has been doing a massive development push on relevance and NLP in the last 3-4 years. Relevance-based algorithms are dramatically different than old data-value based algos. Now when they do an algo update they’re not just shifting the value they place on one or more known discrete ranking factors. They are transforming the entire ranking model in novel ways they don’t even understand completely.
in a nutshell:

1) it’s probably not your fault
2) Google is probably not singling out a particular site or post model (unless they are explicit about it)
3) you probably lost rankings because a chunk of your historical data got wiped and needs to be rebuilt by Google over time
4) You (and other good sites) should recover after a few months once Google has a chance to rebuild your user response data
5) You cannot prevent these things - you can only mitigate the damage by “doing all the things” on each site, and diversifying across sites, revenue models and niches."
 
Ryuzaki said:
I'm fascinated by a particular DR75 site that's probably closing in on being a decade old that lost what appears to be over 50% of it's traffic (millions of visitors a month gone) that doesn't have any outrageous content velocity. If they added more weight to links you'd think they'd have survived. They could have done that, though, if most of the articles don't have any links at all and it's just a juicy domain due to the homepage and a handful of articles.
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Here's a question I've always wondered. Say you have a site with 500 articles. Do you build links to every single one of those articles, or a good portion? At say $160/link, for just 250 articles, that's $40K. And even then, most providers probably don't have 250 unique properties to place those links on. How do you build links for many articles?
 
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