Sign up for our daily teams of ever-changing search marketing landscape.

SEOs have been adapting to the rating shifts that occur when Google is now roughly quarterly major algorithmic updates roll out. Although Google has told us in the past that there is “no fix” for the site that negatively affects these types of updates, good oseinea does not sit idly by. They are making changes to the site to help their customers not only fix problems but realize more positive results from these ongoing updates.

The last major update Google released in September 2019 is the major update and since then Google has provided a few tips around these updates. I asked Glenn Gabe, SEO consultant at G-Squared Interactive and Lily ray, Director of SEO at way Interactive, about what they’ve already seen and what advice they have for companies. They will both be speaking at our upcoming SMX conference today about Google’s algorithm updates.

“It’s extremely important to conduct a thorough audit through the prism of major updates,” Gabe said. “This is a great way to start addressing a range of issues that can contribute to the negative impact. There’s never one Smoking gun with major updates, as Google rates sites overall (on many factors). Instead, There are usually a battery of questions … which can include content quality issues, thin or low quality content, user experience issues, aggressive, disruptive or deceptive advertising, technical seo issues, E-A-T issues, and more.”

Ray said: “When a site gets hit by a major update, it can take hours to days to feel the impact, and in many cases, major updates can cause a devastating decline in organic traffic. Major updates affect the entire domain and tend to cause performance degradation across the Board, although there may be certain pages or sections of the site that are affected more than others.”

“Sites hit by core algorithm updates are generally hit because of a few common reasons: poor content quality, bad user experience, and/or trust issues,” Ray added. “With recent core updates, YMYL (your money your life) seem to be disproportionately affected – particularly medical websites, such as sites containing health advice or nutritional supplement pages. It appears Google is heightening its criteria for good-quality, trustworthy medical content, so medical websites hit by core updates often have issues related to lack of E-A-T. Google (and users) may have issues trusting the content presented on the page.”

“Addressing issues related to content quality, user experience and E-A-T requires significant time and resources,” ray said. “In addition, it may take several months to process the results. Sometimes the efforts of these improvements are not fully taken into account until the next update of the underlying algorithm is rolled out.”

In terms of how ray and her company communicate this to their customers, she said, “We are ahead with our customers that this is the case at the beginning of any interaction involving a performance degradation solution due to an algorithm update. However, it is still very difficult for many business owners to accept or fully believe, so it can be a point of contention. Unfortunately, many business owners can’t afford to wait for Google.”

Gabe agrees. “Right, there’s never one smoking gun and sites will rarely see a quick turnaround in rankings and traffic after seeing a drop based on a core update. Google is on record explaining that content impacted by a core update will typically not see recovery until another core update rolls out (if significant changes are implemented to improve the site overall). And that’s exactly what I’ve seen in the field while helping many companies deal with negative impact based on core updates. So a combination of communicating what I’ve seen in the field over years with what Google is officially explaining is a great way for companies to understand the situation and it helps set the right expectations. “

Gabe said that while the Google post published with tips around major updates is not as specific, “I love the questions they provided site owners have to ask themselves (which extend to the original Panda questions from 2011).”

“Many of these issues can help surface a number of potential issues across websites,” he said, “so it’s a great process to go through topics, including content quality, experience, presentation / product, competition, and more,” he added.

Ray noted that “there is no particular advice on the blog that is more important than other tips, and this is design: Google’s algorithms look at thousands of different components when evaluating quality.

“The questions this blog offers are a good starting point to know what the algorithm is looking for in terms of content quality and E-A-T,” she said. Ray does think the post is missing some technical SEO aspects, “The blog doesn’t talk much about technical SEO considerations, which can also cause performance declines during algorithm updates. It’s important to audit and diagnose issues related to crawling and indexation; page speed and performance; mistakes with canonical tags or noindex/robots.txt; JavaScript rendering issues and any other technical obstacles that may cause search engines problems with properly accessing the site’s content,” she added.

Both ray and Gabe believe Google is doing less, unconfirmed major updates between confirmed.

“Yes, Google does tweaks after major kernel algorithm updates, which sometimes feel like ‘pushes’ or recalibrations after a big kernel update, ” he said . Ray “July 17, 2019 is an example of an unannounced / unconfirmed update during which some sites have seen a huge decrease in performance.”

Gabe said: “Google can definitely push fewer major updates outside of major major updates, but they don’t usually compare to broad major updates in terms of impact. There are also times that Google can tweak broad kernel updates right after they roll out based on what they see in the app (making subtle adjustments). John Mueller of Google confirmed that this was a case of a medieval Panda roaming the Internet. I called these little updates ” tremors.”

Is there any hope? If a site has been negatively affected by a kernel update, can it recover?

Both Gabe and ray said there is hope and the sites can recover.

“Yes, there is definitely hope,” said Gabe, “and a chance to increase during subsequent core updates. It just takes a lot of objective analysis and hard work. Google wants to see significant improvement in quality over the long-term in order for sites to see positive movement during subsequent core updates. That’s why it’s extremely important to surface all potential quality problems and fix them as quickly as you can. Google will want to see those changes in place for an extended period of time, and not just a few weeks. It’s also important to know that sites might have to wait for several core updates to roll out before seeing improvement. It all depends on how bad the situation is.”

“It is possible to fully recover, but more often than not, full recovery can be very difficult and partial recovery is more common,” ray said. “However, given the extreme fluctuations we’ve seen on Google in the last two years, especially with regard to medical websites, some sites that have seen massive drops have rebounded and seen huge gains during the next update. I would encourage site owners to think of website restoration as a long-term process and keep at it; it is possible that the effort may take a few major updates to kick in. “

Listen to Lily ray and Glenn Gabe discuss “Learning from Google Algorithm Update winners” at SMX East in new York, November 13-14.

Sign up for our daily teams of ever-changing search marketing landscape.

Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or our LinkedIn Group.

September 30 – 1 Oct, 2019: SMX Advanced Europe

November 18-19, 2019: SMX Paris

February 19-20, 2020: SMX West

March 18-19, 2020: SMX Munich

June 8-10, 2020: SMX Advanced

Get new strategies and ideas at the intersection of marketing, technology and management. Our next conference will be:

April 3-5, 2019: San Jose

April 15-17, 2020: San Jose

October 6-8, 2020: Boston

Attend this year’s only advanced search marketing conference. Blocking the best rates until June 11.

© 2019 Third door Media, Inc All rights reserved.