What changed since 2021?

[cheese]

Just like I wrote in my introduction, I had to stop building websites for a year. When I stopped working on mine in 2021, I was ready to find out that Google killed the SEO game when I come back. I'm back now, reading the forum now and it seems that Google didn't kill anything, @MrMedia s volume content strategy is still king, plus they delayed killing the third-party cookies.

So, a poll. Did you see something change?

 

[Ryuzaki]

The biggest changes were, in my opinion:

• the explosion of the scale at which people were scraping People Also Ask queries or targeting really long-tail queries and rolling out AI sites.
• the introduction of the new product review guidelines and algorithm changes

Both of these have led to some fairly interesting consequences.

The Product Review Updates were clearly not ready to go live, which is why I think we've seen so many iterations in half a year (so many I've lost count). There's been a ton of collateral damage to non-product review sites.

But also, as if it wasn't already hard enough to target those kind of keywords due to the competition level, you now need to go through much more effort when producing that content (ideally having hands-on access to the products for photos and videos). Part of this raises the barrier to affiliate marketing drastically, which is something to celebrate for the serious affiliate marketer and something to cry about for the "at scale" SEO.

The collateral damage to non-review sites has been unprecedented. Combine this with the core updates where I think they're also trying to sneak in fixes and we've seen sites crashing 90% to 100% for 3 months then popping back like nothing happened. And it's a rolling problem where different sets of sites are getting their turn. Even big, nice sites are being whacked for 40% to 50%. It's been a wild year in that regard, with a lot of theories and insight coming up about how Google may work internally, or may be shifting heavily towards "live machine-learning" algorithms where chaos has to reign for a while as data is collated.

The whole AI content debacle spawned another type of update, the Helpful Content Update, which we've only seen one update related to it very recently so far. If you ask me, they learned their lesson with the Product Reviews Updates coming in heavy handed and they ended up pushing out a very light-handed update meant to down-rank crappy content. I think as the data rolls in we'll see more of those updates to tweak the severity and to refine the thresholds on what is "helpful" or not.

Otherwise, it's business as usual. Publish good content, and if it's your bag, publish a lot of it. Get links. Do marketing. The only problem now is it's not just sites on the fringes being targeted. Everyone's getting a go in the clown suit as the Google bull runs around like a chicken with its head chopped off, mainly because Google has had to (perhaps purposefully and temporarily to gather data) chop its own head off..