Google Algorithm Updates - 2020 Ongoing Discussion

[Henry]

Why does this give me crippling anxiety

 

[Barry]

Looks like round 2 is rolling out.

The update on the 4th had no affect on my sites. However, with this round, I'm seeing red arrows across all of my sites.

 

[bernard]

If you didn't increase your ad budget during round 1, Google is here to remind you they mean business in round 2.

Increase that ad budget.

Now.

I'm not kidding either, it's obvious. If Google didn't intend exactly that, then they would just wait for January to roll out something major like this.

 

[Barry]

If you didn't increase your ad budget during round 1, Google is here to remind you they mean business in round 2.

Increase that ad budget.

Now.

I'm not kidding either, it's obvious. If Google didn't intend exactly that, then they would just wait for January to roll out something major like this.

That’s a point worth investigating.

I noticed you reported a hit from the first wave of this update.

How has this second wave been for you?

 

[bernard]

That’s a point worth investigating.

I noticed you reported a hit from the first wave of this update.

How has this second wave been for you?

Seems like I got hit again, but overall minor.

I had already recovered from the previous mostly, except for one new-ish site.

Just seems strange with these double hitters, what's the point, right at the finishing line of Christmas shopping. Not buying it.

I mean, the update is not a fraud as such, it's just the timing.

I did notice that one site that got in May, that I don't work that much on, got hit again. So as it stands, among my sites, 1 got hit and was less than 6 months old. 1 got hit and I hadn't tried to improve from May. Most sites had a few fluctuations, but nothing major, and those were sites I was actively working on.

So overall, I feel like working with high quality linkbuilding (EAT) and having content clusters that are not review/affiliate only, is the way to go, particularly if you can, like @Ryuzaki does, create some unique content. It's noticeable that the site improved was my little coding challenge site that creates new and unique content that no one else has.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal though.

How did you do?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Just seems strange with these double hitters, what's the point, right at the finishing line of Christmas shopping. Not buying it.

They always seem to be double hitters. Today, Danny Sullivan is saying that the algorithm update is still rolling out, and they always say that... that it takes around 2 weeks. But like we're seeing, what it generally ends up looking like is it takes about 3 days to roll out with the biggest impact up front.

Then it bakes and they make adjustments, and then there's always a 2nd hit which is them tweaking the weights to get closer to the desired results. I'm sure they simulate these updates on representative test indices as best they can, but once it hits the world wide web, there has to be adjustments, which is probably what we're seeing now.

And yeah, it's pretty suspect that one always lands before Christmas shopping time that always has the same results, which seems to inflate Adwords revenue.

Having said that, it's looking like, depending on the next 3 days, to have skated through this unscathed. Of course I'm seeing some ups and downs in rankings but they're averaging out in such a way that my traffic is following its same old patterns.

This is on a 7 year old, DR50+ site with around 300 posts of killer content, and on a 1 year old DR30+ site with about 150 posts of killer content. Of course, "killer content" is subjective and since googlebot can't understand subjective, there's objective things you can do to signal "quality" to the algo's and to real humans. A simple example would be "length implies strength". The copywriting world is full of info like this about how the human mind takes shortcuts to make assumptions about quality, and since Google is measuring people's reactions, they're going to come to the same conclusions and can start measuring these "signals" directly instead.

 

[Maudiggity]

Looks like round 2 is rolling out.

Round 1 gave me a boost of about 15 - 20%.

Round 2 decimated me. Down 70% across the board - almost no post unaffected. Just in time for Xmas

Just another warning that purely SEO sites are inherently dangerous. A warning I did not heed.

 

[Darth]

Round 1 gave me a boost of about 15 - 20%.

Round 2 decimated me. Down 70% across the board - almost no post unaffected. Just in time for Xmas

Wow that is absolutely brutal. What kind of site and were you using white hat only?

 

[Maudiggity]

Wow that is absolutely brutal. What kind of site and were you using white hat only?

AM site. Grey hat, for lack of a better term. No PBNs or anything. Paid links yes.

 

[Barry]

I have two main earning sites - both have been wiped out by this latest update.

I don't typically complain about these updates - bumps in the road are part of the game, but what I'm seeing with this update is insanity.

Two main sites - both sailed through the first wave of this update on the 4th, untouched. This second wave has caused a site-wide demotion for both sites - every page dropped.

Here's an example of the kind of insanity I'm seeing.

I have a page that is optimized for a very specific long tail, something like - "best fitness tracker under £100". (I'm not targeting this keyword - just using it as a similar example)

Before the update, this page ranked #1 for this query.

After the update, this page has dropped out of top #100.

The strange thing is, there is no other page on page one targeting this exact search term.

Not a single result mentions "under £100" - anywhere.

The searcher has asked to see the "best fitness tracker" that is "under £100". My page answers this query perfectly.

Google has removed my page and replaced it with a typical big brand magazine showing 10 best fitness trackers - which are all OVER £100.

The results on page one are big brand magazines and news sites with mediocre articles - NONE of which answer the searchers exact query.

Before the update, google marked and scored my page A+, then ran an update which drops it out of top #100.

Think of the garbage spam, non relevant, scrapped crap that is buried 10 pages deep in Google search results.

All of that crap now outranks my high quality, highly relevant page.

How does a page go from being the #1 most relevant page for the query, to being buried with garbage beyond the top #100?

I can understand Google adjusting page scores from A+ to a B or a D, but to drop it out of top #100 is more like a penalty.

This is much like the huge site-wide drops seen when the “medic” update rolled out. Highly relevant, high quality pages, dropping out of existence.

 

[bernard]

Seeing some bounce backs for broad keywords here.

Before the update, this page ranked #1 for this query.

After the update, this page has dropped out of top #100.

It will be back, don't worry.

In my experience, when you drop of the map completely, you will eventually come back. It's the -20 drops that keep going, day by day, that are the real killer.

When you drop off completely like that, it's usually because Google changed something with intent or changed some factors so much, they have to some kind of recalculation.

My guess is that you will be back, probably something like 10 - 15 places down and then you can crawl your way back, particularly if you make some changes to better fit the new rank signals.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Someone in this thread mentioned Fitness as an example of a keyword but not the exact. But maybe they're still in fitness in general.

Among friends, business associates, agency clients, etc... I've been hearing and seeing some severe drops. Yesterday of the 5 people I talked to about theirs, FOUR of them were in fitness.

That led me to believe that maybe it was time for Fitness to get the YMYL EAT treatment? I pulled up a handful of other fitness sites of lower DR (30 and below) and they all took a complete beating across the board. Red everywhere.

SEMRush just put out their early analysis and what do you know:

3rd most positively affected industries are "Beauty & Fitness". I wish they weren't grouped together, but still. Note that these is the industries that saw gains. And SEMRush is generally only looking at sites that get 500k visitors and higher.

So what that means is that the big boys all usurped the smaller Fitness sites in the SERPs across the board. That leads me to think it's an EAT thing. Usually I would say they cranked up the dial on the emphasis on links, but I'm also convinced that for the most part that's what EAT is.

I don't have any ultimate point to make, just that I was seeing a pattern that was then semi-confirmed by SEMRush's crunching of their data.

This is all a big leap in logic but maybe one that can help narrow down what's going on. As time progresses, more sites are going to reach higher tiers of sitewide link metrics, and infinitely more are going to have a hard time keeping up. Infinitely more spammy crap is being published too. Let's be frank too... while 99% of spammers are still doing crap that Penguin cleaned up many many moons ago, the elite 1% of spammers are getting craftier and craftier and doing things that can't be detected as long as they aren't done greedily.

What's the solution to this problem? Weight links more heavily, but not just any links. Give more emphasis to higher powered (page rank) pages getting links from these same types of pages. That pushes up real brands again and moves down the spammers and solopreneur SEO's.

Which goes back to what I said earlier in the thread: "Get a high quantity and high quality of contextual backlinks with natural anchors"

They key word in that sentence being "and". Not high quantity of low power links and just a few high quality links. To skate through these updates you've gotta be pushing yourself up to the DR50 area of things over the course of time, which builds up an immunity to the algo update virus. Trust and authority (vague terms, but link related) happen over time and throttles are released over time. But eventually you build up a defense against too much variation in your ranking changes during updates.

Natural anchors matter because as link building becomes more sophisticated, the way to catch it is to see who's getting greedy with their anchors. The best move are phrase match anchors. I'm a proponent of getting one exact match anchor per page and that's all. From there out they should be natural or phrase match if you don't want to trip the radars. That's going to be a key way of getting links discounted, if a pattern arises in the anchors, especially in the coming years as we get craftier with link building.

Anyways, I know it sounds overly simplified, but I'm alarmed by the influx of people not only on BuSo but on in the industry at large talking about "no backlink SEO". The bulk of the algorithm is about backlinks and is built around them. It's like the protein of your SEO diet. On-page is your carbs, Tech SEO is your veggies, etc. But backlinks do the heavy lifting and build up your entire system.

Anyways, without outting yourselves past where you're comfortable, how many of you guys are seeing big sitewide drops on fitness sites?

 

[harrytwatter]

Funny you mention that @Ryuzaki, I have a rag tag bunch of sites in various niches, quite small, nobody really saw much big up or down, however, my 5+ year old fitness blog didn't seem to fair so well. It doesn't have great links and started more as a personal blog than a full-blown affiliate-focused machine, meaning more first-hand tips/reviews than well cited expert advice, which since I'm not a trainer I guess means it is void of any and all EAT..

 

[Philip J. Fry]

@Ryuzaki I concur. At CF 63 (~Pagerank 6.4), this update appears to do nothing. Volatility from the last 3 months is probably more due to changing quarantine regulations, which affects actual search volumes for the travel industry, than changing rankings. Also, at 11,805 referring domains, I don't optimize the backlinks for shit. I just get the backlinks. It's not "Hey, can you link to my site with this exact anchor on this exact page to this exact page?" but more like "A link to anywhere on the site works with whatever anchor you'd like, but this page is the one I'm promoting, if you want to write about it." It's easier to do it this way too: it'll be impossible to micro-manage that many referring domains.

... and yes. I'm spamming This wasn't done because we wrote good content and waited for webmasters to link to us. No way

 

[bernard]

Anyways, without outting yourselves past where you're comfortable, how many of you guys are seeing big sitewide drops on fitness sites?

I have a fitness site, but it didn't drop that much. I'm more focused on the equipment side, not the nutrition, so maybe that's why. I also have really gone to great lengths with this content. I can with absolute certainty that the roundup reviews are the best currently ranking top 20.

My largest drop was in kitchen and food niche. I chalked that up being a new site.

 

[tyealia]

So far according to some of the people with enough pull and test sites to trust it looks like it was a huge emphasis on authority update and 50%+ youtube boost. Charles floate has a good video.

In my own niche, I saw this exactly, I have my competitors in Ahrefs which are smaller affiliate sites, every single one of them dropped, and who rose? Big-name sites, it almost didn't matter how crap their content was as long as they had 5 backlinks to that page and big dr and authority name they were pushed up into the top 10. The better content pages with 5000+ words were dropped to page two with thin content authority sites winning out.

So looks like UR is less of a factor these days compared to the overall authority, you need to work on building up your site overall only then will rankings come. Seems like one page hit wonders are becoming more of a thing of the past...now sites like the spruce are taking over.

How to go forward? Well if you want to compete this update definitely moved the bar, your budget will have to be higher. I don't think in this day and age I would ever start a new site...I just don't have the years to build it up to compete with a mega authority like the spruce. Auction domains or marketplace sites already earning is the only way I would touch a new SEO project right now.

 

[MrMedia]

Looks like age was a major factor in my analysis so far. Two of the ages sites I sold have made major gains whilst three newer sites have dropped -40 to -50%

 

[Barry]

Madness.

Don't know whether to laugh or cry.

From around 2,500 visits per day, to 400.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

How to go forward? Well if you want to compete this update definitely moved the bar, your budget will have to be higher. I don't think in this day and age I would ever start a new site...I just don't have the years to build it up to compete with a mega authority like the spruce. Auction domains or marketplace sites already earning is the only way I would touch a new SEO project right now.

You also need to work as a team instead of working solo. The amount of labor a single person can produce is limited. For the sites that are winning big on this update and the general trend to reward big sites, it incentivizes webmasters to work together on big sites. Makes total sense. How could 1 person write trustworthy, authoritative content about a topic? He can't. It'll be biased AF. It's only through having a group of many individuals can content be good. Sorry solo-entrepreneurs but your days as a resource for information is ending.

 

[bernard]

You also need to work as a team instead of working solo. The amount of labor a single person can produce is limited. For the sites that are winning big on this update and the general trend to reward big sites, it incentivizes webmasters to work together on big sites. Makes total sense. How could 1 person write trustworthy, authoritative content about a topic? He can't. It'll be biased AF. It's only through having a group of many individuals can content be good. Sorry solo-entrepreneurs but your days as a resource for information is ending.

I assume most people who work solo actually work more like ad-hoc teams with freelancers, but what I'm curious about are the EAT effects, if any, of having an actual team.

One of the things that stand out at larger sites is the editorial and writer team are very prominent. It's quite easy to connect a writer to certain topics, once they're known across a few popular publications.

Like if I take this random Wirecutter article and google the author, she doesn't have an infobox, but she does have enough of a clear presence and her name autosuggest to "wirecutter".

I think this is something to consider. Authority Hackers also talked about this and how it's better to keep your articles published under fewer names, that have actual web presence.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

I assume most people who work solo actually work more like ad-hoc teams with freelancers, but what I'm curious about are the EAT effects, if any, of having an actual team.

For EAT, Google wants formal qualifications for subject matter expertise. That means hiring someone with a law degree who practices law for legal articles, hiring someone who has a nutrition degree and is a nutrients with many years of experience for dieting articles and so forth.

Those $1/100 word writers are not going to cut it, even if they have subjective experience in the field, such as personally losing a lot of weight, or whatever.

 

[bernard]

For EAT, Google wants formal qualifications for subject matter expertise. That means hiring someone with a law degree who practices law for legal articles, hiring someone who has a nutrition degree and is a nutrients with many years of experience for dieting articles and so forth.

Do you think it is a content quality analysis that creates EAT or is that these names can be connected either directly or "two degrees of separation" to other known names in the niche?

 

[secretagentdad]

My ultra specific technical schizo summary.

Historical Time series data points got ratcheted up.

Alternative weighting’s for new and smaller sites missing the time series data straight up removed or massively scaled back.

Small rollback of the ehow update dilution factor thing using the time series data to keep the shit mass sites down and probably the creepy author entity id stuff to.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

Do you think it is a content quality analysis that creates EAT or is that these names can be connected either directly or "two degrees of separation" to other known names in the niche?

EAT's not out yet. We only know of it from the quality rater guidelines, which were made publicly available. Therefore, we don't know how the algorithm works but we can speculate on what signals the algorithms would promote and what signals the algorithm would punish, as the guideline tells us what they deemed as signals for "good" webpage and website and signals for a "bad" webpage and website.

Formal qualification is something the algorithm would promote. A negative brand reputation is something the algorithm would punish. Having informative content that's exhaustive of the topic is something the algorithm would promote. It's right there in the guidelines, if you read it.

 

[janky]

My ultra specific technical schizo summary.

Historical Time series data points got ratcheted up.

Alternative weighting’s for new and smaller sites missing the time series data straight up removed or massively scaled back.

Small rollback of the ehow update dilution factor thing using the time series data to keep the shit mass sites down and probably the creepy author entity id stuff to.

I 100% agree with this, this is what I'm seeing on my sites too.
2 older sites gained, 2 newer ones lost rankings.
Similar linkbuilding on all, mostly niche edits, some tier2 to powerup and some barely/don't have pbns, some are heavily pushed by pbns.

The interesting part is that one of the older site that gained has 20+ powerful pbns.
Are PBNs nowadays a signal of trust or is it the raw power that you are getting from them that makes the sites ranked? This site lost 50% of the traffic it had in May, now it's almost back to old levels.
I added 100+ articles to this site after the May update and that's it. No backlinking since May.

The other one that gained a lot is an expired domain + ~30 powered up niche edits.
This site started ranking somewhat last year in September and had like 50-100 visitors/day then it completely disappeared from google from December to February.
It came back and it's growing since.

All the sites are similar, are optimized as highly as possible (to the best of my knowledge).
Sites are very fast <2 sec load time on all of them.
The Onpage is maxed out, as much as possible (in-depth content optimized with surfer + lots of interlinking + images and whatnot).

I don't think this update has anything to do with EAT, well at least in not my niches.
I have an author box and an about page on all my sites and that's it. No fancy sh*t.