Google Algorithm Updates - 2024 Ongoing Discussion

Grind said:
Eli


Bingo. Google has fired the warning shot. They no longer want to share distribution of informational traffic with webmasters. PAA, Knowledge Graph, now SGE and ranking commercial pages for info queries.

The writing is on the wall.

Figure out how to provide Google's users with something Google can't and the money printer will continue to brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....
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Yup. There's this one SEO keynote speaker who says "don't react to the latest algo update, predict what the next update will be" and the path is so clear. Before there were Do, Go, and Know queries. In the future there'll only be Do and Go queries. Know queries, informational queries, will be served by an LLM. So, if you want to prepare for the future, make your company a brand so that people can go directly to your site with a navigational query and/or make your company an e-comm site to target transactional queries. Informational queries are a dying business.

As for me, my worryness is at level 9,000 as I wait for gov authorization. If we get it, I'm in the clear and can run ads and be in e-comm. If not, I think I'm going to close my doors and stomach a $400,000 EDIL debt. I hope EDIL loans can be absolved with bankruptcy.

I used to think I knew everything, but that was just me being very afraid of being wrong. I now know I know very little and do not know a lot. I hope everything works out. Ok, going back to my PPC course.
 
I'm seeing that product lead SEO is doing just fine. Anyone else see this? Looks like update only hit people doing SEO and Content marketing.
 
So I've seen hundreds of these hit sites now. Not an exaggeration. People DM me their shit endlessly asking for help. Wish I could help them all but some of them don't have the skill set to pull it off even if I could make them understand the why of what they need to do.

But I'm seeing more trends, more data points.

Help me out here.

Was anybody running an Info/Review/Content Marketing site (non-transactional, not ecom, not click to call, lead gen, local service, etc) with Link Whisper or similar automatic interlinking tools and survive either this update or the HCU in August?
 
Do you mean e-commerce?

I imagine that is because a lot of those sites spend money on Google Ads.

BakerStreet said:
I'm seeing that product lead SEO is doing just fine. Anyone else see this? Looks like update only hit people doing SEO and Content marketing.
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devise said:
Do you mean e-commerce?

I imagine that is because a lot of those sites spend money on Google Ads.
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No, it's not e-comm. It's like pages like https://www.thetrainline.com/en/train-times/madrid-to-paris where they use in-house data to create a template page for many, many queries. These types of content are doing very well.

The article is from a template and not written and it is in-house data from a database or a program. It isn't e-comm as it is not a PDP or PLP.
 
BakerStreet said:
No, it's not e-comm. It's like pages like https://www.thetrainline.com/en/train-times/madrid-to-paris where they use in-house data to create a template page for many, many queries. These types of content are doing very well.

The article is from a template and not written and it is in-house data from a database or a program. It isn't e-comm as it is not a PDP or PLP.
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These sites are fundamentally data aggregators and data curators using an affiliate payment model.

This is a useful service. It's also a higher barrier to entry service.
 
Grind said:
So I've seen hundreds of these hit sites now. Not an exaggeration. People DM me their shit endlessly asking for help. Wish I could help them all but some of them don't have the skill set to pull it off even if I could make them understand the why of what they need to do.

But I'm seeing more trends, more data points.

Help me out here.

Was anybody running an Info/Review/Content Marketing site (non-transactional, not ecom, not click to call, lead gen, local service, etc) with Link Whisper or similar automatic interlinking tools and survive either this update or the HCU in August?
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I'm running 3 - one main site and two smaller ones. All info sites for display ads. All using LinkWhisper as the internal linking strategy. Didn't auto-link but manually implemented many link suggestions, making sure they're relevant.

Sites have been absolutely clobbered continously since Jan 2023. Every update hitting us harder than before. Despite spending most of my 2023 and $60,000+ on improving the main site according to Google's Guidelines and Twitter SEOs.

I hired experts to review articles, embedded YouTube clips of the experts giving advice into matching articles, included our own images, edited every single piece of content for helpfulness, deleted and 410/301'd anything below quality standard or not relevant, overhauled the site for UX and speed.

At peak we had 750k sessions/month. Now we're lucky if we get 50k sessions. I've had to fire my whole team, who were fantastic people. Only dabbled in buying a few links after we were hit, but maybe 10 niche edits in the lifetime of the site. Did do well with HARO links (HuffPost, Yahoo, CNet, etc).

If you'd like to take a look please DM me. Happy to give you whatever data you find useful. I've spent the last year of my life and a LOT of money (for me) having faith in Google following their own guidelines. Fuck them.

That said I believe we're a lost cause. Think we've been tagged by Google for too much long-tail 'SEO' content and banished to HCU hell. Instead our expert-approved articles are exiled in place of anon quora/reddit users or shit AI articles pasted onto jimmys local business site.
 
MinstrelJunkie said:
I'm running 3 - one main site and two smaller ones. All info sites for display ads. All using LinkWhisper as the internal linking strategy. Didn't auto-link but manually implemented many link suggestions, making sure they're relevant.

Sites have been absolutely clobbered continously since Jan 2023. Every update hitting us harder than before. Despite spending most of my 2023 and $60,000+ on improving the main site according to Google's Guidelines and Twitter SEOs.

I hired experts to review articles, embedded YouTube clips of the experts giving advice into matching articles, included our own images, edited every single piece of content for helpfulness, deleted and 410/301'd anything below quality standard or not relevant, overhauled the site for UX and speed.

At peak we had 750k sessions/month. Now we're lucky if we get 50k sessions. I've had to fire my whole team, who were fantastic people. Only dabbled in buying a few links after we were hit, but maybe 10 niche edits in the lifetime of the site. Did do well with HARO links (HuffPost, Yahoo, CNet, etc).

If you'd like to take a look please DM me. Happy to give you whatever data you find useful. I've spent the last year of my life and a LOT of money (for me) having faith in Google following their own guidelines. Fuck them.

That said I believe we're a lost cause. Think we've been tagged by Google for too much long-tail 'SEO' content and banished to HCU hell. Instead our expert-approved articles are exiled in place of anon quora/reddit users or shit AI articles pasted onto jimmys local business site.
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Thanks for detailing your situation. I have a few follow-up questions that will help paint a more complete picture:

1. What does https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker/ give you in terms of backlinks/domains and dofollow % for both?
2. How many backlinks does https://www.linkresearchtools.com/ say you have?
3. What branded social channels are you using? Do they have any engagement?
4. Who are the authors? Are they real? Would Google identify them as an "entity" in your niche?
5. Does your site sell anything? Or are you running a pure-play affiliate site?
6. You talked about using LinkWhisper and manually inserting links, but what kind of anchors were/are you using? Did you do any updating to your anchors?
 
Sure, so:
1. 9.1k backlinks, 73% dofollow. 3.9k domains, 90% dofollow. I've built maybe 10 links to the site as a test but that's it.
2. 49k backlinks (lol). But Ahrefs has 47.9k 'all time' links on the overview page. Not entirely sure what that means, I think their 9.1k is limited to 'seen' in the last 3/6months?
3. Branded socials registered but barely used. I did upload clips of expert interviews on YouTube - circa 2k views per month total on those.
4. Just me as an author (on 1.5k posts), with experts listed side-by-side as Reviewers (with 'ReviewedBy' schema). Schema maxed out with links to my and their socials, profiles, etc. Searching "my name + niche" gives my Muck Rack profile, 2 other random guys on LinkedIn, then my site's about page
5. We sell nothing, we have almost zero affiliate plays. Literally just trying to educate people to solve home improvement style problems (with display ads on top). Our goal was purely to be as helpful as possible to our readers. Figured Google would reward us...
6. Honestly I was quite lazy with anchors. Any suggested 1-5 relevant words in a string on a relevant page in the same category = internal link. Just made sure each post had 2+ internal links, I've not done tons of them. Admittedly was sloppy at points so a lot of articles had the same one-word anchor (i.e. 'TV' on many TV related articles). I cleared most of those up last year, but it's not exactly fine-tuned.

Hope that helps, interested to know if you spot any red flags. Though it just seems like EVERY content site under the sun has been decimated, don't think it's anything unique to us.

I work with my friend's lead gen site that has a GMB + Trustpilot both with 100+ 5 star reviews, great authority and white-hat links (Digital PR -> Forbes), and that's been decimated too. Main commonality is both sites wrote a lot of long-tail content (1.5k+ articles each).

Seems like unless you're a huge authority, tons of long tail content is just a HCU-certified death sentence. Even if that content is pretty damn good.
 
What role does ads play in the machine learning algo that has punished all these sites?

Could it be that in-content ads are simply a negative ranking factor? And in that case, is there any point in trying to fix the site without fixing the monetization method?

I run adblockers so don't really see all these ads, but I do know that when I find some kind of tech support site and there are ads all over, then the content will not solve my question.

How does Forbes and similar run ads? Do they have in content ads too? Or do they do sidebar, top, bottom and slide in ads?
 
MinstrelJunkie said:
Sure, so:
1. 9.1k backlinks, 73% dofollow. 3.9k domains, 90% dofollow. I've built maybe 10 links to the site as a test but that's it.
2. 49k backlinks (lol). But Ahrefs has 47.9k 'all time' links on the overview page. Not entirely sure what that means, I think their 9.1k is limited to 'seen' in the last 3/6months?
3. Branded socials registered but barely used. I did upload clips of expert interviews on YouTube - circa 2k views per month total on those.
4. Just me as an author (on 1.5k posts), with experts listed side-by-side as Reviewers (with 'ReviewedBy' schema). Schema maxed out with links to my and their socials, profiles, etc. Searching "my name + niche" gives my Muck Rack profile, 2 other random guys on LinkedIn, then my site's about page
5. We sell nothing, we have almost zero affiliate plays. Literally just trying to educate people to solve home improvement style problems (with display ads on top). Our goal was purely to be as helpful as possible to our readers. Figured Google would reward us...
6. Honestly I was quite lazy with anchors. Any suggested 1-5 relevant words in a string on a relevant page in the same category = internal link. Just made sure each post had 2+ internal links, I've not done tons of them. Admittedly was sloppy at points so a lot of articles had the same one-word anchor (i.e. 'TV' on many TV related articles). I cleared most of those up last year, but it's not exactly fine-tuned.

Hope that helps, interested to know if you spot any red flags. Though it just seems like EVERY content site under the sun has been decimated, don't think it's anything unique to us.

I work with my friend's lead gen site that has a GMB + Trustpilot both with 100+ 5 star reviews, great authority and white-hat links (Digital PR -> Forbes), and that's been decimated too. Main commonality is both sites wrote a lot of long-tail content (1.5k+ articles each).

Seems like unless you're a huge authority, tons of long tail content is just a HCU-certified death sentence. Even if that content is pretty damn good.
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Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

A few more questions for you:

1. How aggressive were you with ad placements?
2. When was the last time you posted on YouTube?
3. Do you have professional experience in "home improvement style problems"?
4. How much AI content did you use on the site?
5. Over what period were your 1.5k articles written?

bernard said:
How does Forbes and similar run ads?
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As aggressively as possible lol
 
@MinstrelJunkie @Smith

AD density is definitely not the determining factor if you're to take a cue from me... I periodically get emails that my site is unreadable. And yeah, I hesitate to read my own articles with the AD density lol...

All that E-E-A-T stuff is nonsense and just there to distract you. Overoptimization... etc... etc...

There is a much more broad categorization of all websites and you will get hit if you're a) info site and b) affiliate site. The era for info/affiliate is over.

On to the next one or so they say.

Just checked and realized one of my competitors got decimated.
25+ year old domain
70+DR
54.8% Dofollow links
zNCGGZf.png


Me compared to him is like a serf trying to touch a king's link profile lol....

But yeah he's been nose-diving since October while I got barely tickled by these updates. The difference is that he is info vs me (I've an info niche site plastered with ads hidden 3 levels deep within a local biz).
 
JOoa0ky said:
I've an info niche site plastered with ads hidden 3 levels deep within a local biz
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I've heard a lot of people mention something a long these lines...

But how does google actually identify a biz vs an info site?

For example, I have a site that sells products/services and has tons of helpful/informative/accurate information related to the underlying products and services being sold (content marketing 101).

How would your site (built within a local biz) compare to the site I just described? What is the actual difference?

JOoa0ky said:
much more broad categorization of all websites
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Any suggestions on where to learn more about these broad categorizations and how to "reclassify" sites?
 
Smith said:
I've heard a lot of people mention something a long these lines...

But how does google actually identify a biz vs an info site?

For example, I have a site that sells products/services and has tons of helpful/informative/accurate information related to the underlying products and services being sold (content marketing 101).

How would your site (built within a local biz) compare to the site I just described? What is the actual difference?
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Probably the strongest signal would be the brick & mortar storefront. My hunch would be if you check that off... there's a lot more leniency in the algorithm... There are probably a couple of other "definitive" signals as well which I haven't thought about.
 
@JOoa0ky - that makes sense... so you have a brick-and-mortar storefront for the info niche site you mentioned above? I take it the competitor that was decimated doesn't have a storefront?
 
Smith said:
@JOoa0ky - that makes sense... so you have a brick-and-mortar storefront for the info niche site you mentioned above? I take it the competitor that was decimated doesn't have a storefront?
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That is correct.

Although I would trade my link profile for his any day of the week.
 
JOoa0ky said:
the strongest signal would be the brick & mortar storefront
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Sounds like you don't need it.

Do you have GMB setup and Bing Places and all the other bells and whistles?

And is this actually your storefront or are you effectively leasing the website/storefront from a business owner? Either way, it's a great strategy.
 
LOL! The Verge is now complaining about review query rankings! The verge!

"It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.
It’s weird because the correct answer to the query “what is the best printer” has not changed, but an entire ecosystem of content farmsseems motivated to constantly update articles about printers in response to the incentive structure created by that robot’s obvious preferences. Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting!”
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https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/2...24-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

Everbody, complain for attention!
 
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Smith said:
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

A few more questions for you:

1. How aggressive were you with ad placements?
2. When was the last time you posted on YouTube?
3. Do you have professional experience in "home improvement style problems"?
4. How much AI content did you use on the site?
5. Over what period were your 1.5k articles written?


As aggressively as possible lol
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1. Pretty standard - we're with Mediavine, just asked them to keep it balanced.
2. 7 months ago
3. Nothing professional, but had been running the site for years so figured that was enough. Plenty of pictures of me doing repairs etc.
4. Zero. Not even for edits. Everything written by writers I trust, and reviewed by experts as much as possible.
5. Since 2020, probably 2 years in total.

For what it's worth I strongly agree with @JOoa0ky - Google's gone hard against 'content sites' but not against businesses.

Sites attached to brick and mortar businesses, ecommerce stores, or other businesses where their focus is on selling to a customer seem to be fine. I guess they figured niche site / AI spam wouldn't be placed on business sites, so skipped that out.

Which is extremely flawed. Now there's tons of tiny local businesses getting a ton of organic traffic because they paid some low-tier SEO to pump out content for them. As in 3-500 words of vague advice that's clearly been outsourced to a writer.

Strangely enough the main site I work for does have a GMB and Trustpilot, but it's maybe clear that we are content first and not local business first.

The whole strategy is so dumb, IMO. My site (and many other sites) existed solely to make content for Google's users. And we are the demographic they've specifically targeted. So they've just killed off all the sites making unique, useful, helpful content for their searchers to find.

Now instead we've got Forbes and Quora to rely on, and AI sites recycling content from other AI sites.

Bold strategy cotton, let's see how this plays out for them.
 
Smith said:
Why not setup a physical storefront for your site/business if that's how you feel? Sell some widgets.
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Needs to be a legitimate business unfortunately. As in with many other signals showing it's a real business.

As in it may have some low quality / AI articles, but the majority of the site is clearly built around the actual business. It's typically Jimmy's Local Biz with local area pages etc, and maybe 100-200 blog posts at most. But those 100-200 pages rank well.

Worth noting that the HCU first assesses whether a site qualifies to be considered. If Google detect it's an ecommerce or other site, the HCU signal doesn't apply. And since the HCU signal is only negative (only reduces ranking power and doesn't boost it), lots of smaller or local biz sites are ranking like it's 2018 while content sites have an anchor attached to them.

For reference another large lead gen site I work with (no ads, just custom lead gen CTAs) has been decimated too. In this case we have a physical location, 100+ 5-star google reviews, 100+ 5-star trustpilot reviews, active socials, tons of citations, everything. But the site has 2,000+ long tail articles with lots of duplicated/templated content across that. We've since pruned and improved basically every article but I believe that puts us in the 'content site' bucket and so HCU slammed us.

TLDR I believe physical storefront etc is a signal but not a silver bullet. Lots of long tail 'SEO' articles = death in this update.
 
MinstrelJunkie said:
Needs to be a legitimate business unfortunately. As in with many other signals showing it's a real business.

As in it may have some low quality / AI articles, but the majority of the site is clearly built around the actual business. It's typically Jimmy's Local Biz with local area pages etc, and maybe 100-200 blog posts at most. But those 100-200 pages rank well.

Worth noting that the HCU first assesses whether a site qualifies to be considered. If Google detect it's an ecommerce or other site, the HCU signal doesn't apply. And since the HCU signal is only negative (only reduces ranking power and doesn't boost it), lots of smaller or local biz sites are ranking like it's 2018 while content sites have an anchor attached to them.

For reference another large lead gen site I work with (no ads, just custom lead gen CTAs) has been decimated too. In this case we have a physical location, 100+ 5-star google reviews, 100+ 5-star trustpilot reviews, active socials, tons of citations, everything. But the site has 2,000+ long tail articles with lots of duplicated/templated content across that. We've since pruned and improved basically every article but I believe that puts us in the 'content site' bucket and so HCU slammed us.

TLDR I believe physical storefront etc is a signal but not a silver bullet. Lots of long tail 'SEO' articles = death in this update.
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Okay, so you're saying...

Local business operations are key for ranking in a niche.

But, businesses that try to be the ultimate source of information in their niche by covering all the topics under their topical sun will fail because Google will think they're a content site instead of an actual business.

Is this lining up with what others are seeing?
 
MinstrelJunkie said:
Needs to be a legitimate business unfortunately. As in with many other signals showing it's a real business.

As in it may have some low quality / AI articles, but the majority of the site is clearly built around the actual business. It's typically Jimmy's Local Biz with local area pages etc, and maybe 100-200 blog posts at most. But those 100-200 pages rank well.

Worth noting that the HCU first assesses whether a site qualifies to be considered. If Google detect it's an ecommerce or other site, the HCU signal doesn't apply. And since the HCU signal is only negative (only reduces ranking power and doesn't boost it), lots of smaller or local biz sites are ranking like it's 2018 while content sites have an anchor attached to them.

For reference another large lead gen site I work with (no ads, just custom lead gen CTAs) has been decimated too. In this case we have a physical location, 100+ 5-star google reviews, 100+ 5-star trustpilot reviews, active socials, tons of citations, everything. But the site has 2,000+ long tail articles with lots of duplicated/templated content across that. We've since pruned and improved basically every article but I believe that puts us in the 'content site' bucket and so HCU slammed us.

TLDR I believe physical storefront etc is a signal but not a silver bullet. Lots of long tail 'SEO' articles = death in this update.
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Is the site hierarchy well established to reflect without a shred of doubt that "this is not a content site?"

Below the home page, it should be only services/products/about/contact/etc linking across to one another. Never link downwards to any seo posts from here. Of course, no ads at this level.

Bury all of the seo blog posts down to the 3rd level. Wild wild west at this level.

But, businesses that try to be the ultimate source of information in their niche by covering all the topics under their topical sun will fail because Google will think they're a content site instead of an actual business.
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I will be testing that out once I get back into this... currently taking a break for personal reasons.

My hunch and theory is that the internet is currently flooded with information. G would prefer to at least show SEO content through a local biz rather than an unknown unnamed source. Yes, all of these local sites aren't writing it themselves and are farming it out to an agency but nonetheless... that will be the name of the game.

Perhaps... consolidation of content sites into agencies that work for local only?
 
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