Google Algorithm Updates - 2024 Ongoing Discussion

I get what you're saying and that's one path to diversification... and it will probably work for you.

But as I shared in my 20-year review, I'm tripping down on one big bet. And I'm keeping all of my attention (and the attention of my in-house team) laser-focused on one outcome.

You're talking about diversifying revenue streams... again, that's fine. And it will probably work for you.

But I'm talking about diversifying customer acquisition. Same product, same fulfillment, different channels.

Yeah, I'm going to keep hammering SEO hard. But I'm also investing in other channels and expanding my in-house team to optimize other forms of content and platforms.
 
Damn WTF. Some kid in a 3rd world country got to 1 million visitors in 14 days, then climbed to 5 million visitors and stay there for 4-5+ months, and you guys see doom and gloom?

All that tells me is Google is still conquerable. Long-terms - hmmm that's another question.
 
BakerStreet said:
et's say you are doing a niche amazon affiliate review website. Here's ways you can diversify your income away from Google from the top of my head:
  1. Have your content writing team take on external clients for B2B content writing deals.
  2. Have your link building team take on external clients for B2B link building deals.
  3. Have your digital PR take on external clients for B2B SEO deals.
  4. Have your SEO team take on external clients for B2B SEO deals.
  5. Move to a niche like iGaming where you get a recurring revenue stream per signup. Some SaaS affiliate programs give you recurring revenue per signup too.
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Yeah.

I'll never be a client person, that's just not my thing and it never will be. Maybe with a business partner.

The biggest gripe I have personally with affiliate and content sites as a business site is the monotony of it and the feel that you're shovelling shit. No matter how much shit you shoveled, next day there's another pile of shit to fling at your website. In this case content is the shit and it never stops. The second you posted that in-depth review of nose hair trimmers is the second its time for an even more in-depth review of ear hair trimmers. It never ends.

It used to be different, you could earn a real nice income from just ranking well for a couple of pages, not sites, just pages. That ship has sailed now, it's all about scale, even if you go after individual high value pages.

To me it was over once this became a publishing business and not a "research and idea" business.

I'm liking the idea of Saas and micro-Saas sites more and more, because it's an iterative process. You don't have to start over every day, you're just tweaking and refining your product. Just thinking about it feels relaxing.
 
bernard said:
To me it was over once this became a publishing business and not a "research and idea" business.
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Well said, this is a really important point. It went from "research and idea" business to "publishing" business and now "media business".

I don't know why, but I feel like the launch of Mashable back in the early 2000s was an important tipping point in this direction.

It basically set the stage for Huffington Post and other monster sites that had to keep expanding their coverage to keep their investors happy and their stupidly overpaid editorial teams employed.

But for me, the straw that broke the camel's back was when sites like Rolling Stone started selling air purifiers for pets.

I don't know why, but I feel like major legacy brands like RS being sucked into the affiliate game is shameful. It's like someone buying a '65 Mustang and dropping a 1.8l Honda Civic engine into it.

I was actually targeted with an article in Discover from NerdWallet today... it was about carry-on luggage.

I'm sure the NerdWallet researchers really nailed the measurements.... height, width, depth... no doubt they were spot on. Well done, team.

But like, really? What a joke. NerdWallet is writing content about carry-on suitcases. I mean, guys... what are you doing?
 
What I don't understand is where is all this traffic going to?

There are sites in the millions on SEMRush > basically 0. Check SERPS and top 10 results are Pinterest, IG, Reddit a few blogs from stores/manfs, and after about page 3 it starts to show bloggers/listicles/etc.

Local seems to be the same, no changes.

Even sites that have been around for like 10-20 years, doing the same short content, without doing anything spammy, HIT. All of them, hit. 50% traffic losses for no reason. There's nothing spammy about it.. This makes me question, what it is really going on. These are established brands that have been around for 20 years, doing the SAME content, no spam, and still hit hard. Why can a brand have 1,000,000 followers but G thinks they should be hit in search?

Retail seems to be the same, no changes. BUT I'm seeing 5 results from the SAME site for the top 10 spots, for just searching for a random product.

There is literally ZERO independent sites. Is this G's plan? Remove 100% of independent sites. It's only corporate-y sites (don't confuse with brand, some of these are garbage brands to being with) or social, and that's it.

I miss the days where you'd find some random blogger PASSIONATE about the subject or an expert. Now it's just all f'ing garbage.
 
contract said:
I miss the days where you'd find some random blogger PASSIONATE about the subject or an expert. Now it's just all f'ing garbage.
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For sure, this is what made Google, searching for some niche topic and finding a great niche blog, not finding a listicle by some lame mainstream magazine.
 
All the while, non-digital only businesses standing there sipping their drinks and watching it all play out.
 
Smith said:
I get what you're saying and that's one path to diversification... and it will probably work for you.

But as I shared in my 20-year review, I'm tripping down on one big bet. And I'm keeping all of my attention (and the attention of my in-house team) laser-focused on one outcome.

You're talking about diversifying revenue streams... again, that's fine. And it will probably work for you.

But I'm talking about diversifying customer acquisition. Same product, same fulfillment, different channels.

Yeah, I'm going to keep hammering SEO hard. But I'm also investing in other channels and expanding my in-house team to optimize other forms of content and platforms.
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You know what, you're right. I'm going to quit making an agency. I see SEOs on UpWork with 15-25 years of experience, who were Director of Marketing at American Automobile Association taking contracts for $50/hour. The demand is high on UpWork but the supply is high too. This isn't a niche. I'm going to take your advice and quit.

For my productized service, it is banned on AdWords unless you can show that you're an authorized vendor from the government. This is a barrior to entry and one of my competitors found a partnership with a law firm. The partnership allows them to buy 1,000,000 clicks/month so far so I know they're making bank. Due to the category band, their CPC is super low too. I think I'll focus on this direction instead.

Thank you my friend!

As for Google, we all know a huge chunk of their revenue comes from ads :smile: Hopefully GSE and so forth will have SGE ads in the future!
 
BakerStreet said:
I'm going to take your advice and quit.
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Pretty sure I didn't give 'advice' or say the word 'quit'...
Smith said:
You're talking about diversifying revenue streams... again, that's fine. And it will probably work for you.
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But you do you my friend, wishing you luck. This does sound interesting...
BakerStreet said:
...my productized service, it is banned on AdWords unless you can show that you're an authorized vendor from the government...
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This update was deflating as hell. My two sites with legit human written content got smashed - first time in almost 5 years of blogging.

Luckily not reliant on it since freelance money keeps rolling in. However, I finally realized that relying on Google Search is a losing battle. It'll only get worse from here.

Will focus on learning how to code and pivot into building web apps + using my SEO skills to drive traffic (amongst other channels).
 
I saw something interesting and positive in the SERPs among the doom and gloom on my site.

For my lab thread site, I googled my review keyword and I wasn't at the top, but when I made it to my result, Google had added links to other pages below my review page.

It was basically like what you get for a branded page. I google the major keyword and got the result, but google also showed results for the subtopic keywords. If that isn't a clear indicator that Google values topic clusters.
 
OnlineDopamine said:
This update was deflating as hell. My two sites with legit human written content got smashed - first time in almost 5 years of blogging.
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I'm not sure why some SEOs think that Google can algorithmically differentiate between Human and AI content, which gives them a false belief of safety/immunity to the algorithm.

I mean, why are they dishing out manual penalties when they can just write some codes to flush AI sites out of their systems?. Its quicker and cheaper to do this than stressing the hell out of their manual reviewers.

Truth is that they can't differentiate both. They can try to make predictions through the combination of semantics, user engagement and experience metrics, e.t.c... But they can't explicitly tell the difference between AI and Human content. At least not yet.

OnlineDopamine said:
Luckily not reliant on it since freelance money keeps rolling in. However, I finally realized that relying on Google Search is a losing battle. It'll only get worse from here.

Will focus on learning how to code and pivot into building web apps + using my SEO skills to drive traffic (amongst other channels).
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If you read in-between the lines, this is actually what Google wants people to do. They don't want traditional "blogs" or "niche sites" anymore (well, except you're a big publisher). They want to rank websites that are more vested in the niche (think e-com, services, e.t.c), even though they have a "blog" section.

So rather than launch another pet content-only blog, you can launch a pet calculator website and put your content library behind it.
 
Encrypted said:
I mean, why are they dishing out manual penalties when they can just write some codes to flush AI sites out of their systems? [...] Truth is that they can't differentiate both.
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I agree. It's another way they expose their cards on the table. If they're doing something manually, it means they can't do it algorithmically. Period. Otherwise they'd do it algorithmically, which is always their ultimate goal.

Without signals/watermarks being embedded in AI content (which can be scrambled to some degree by rewriting or spinning adjectives and possible nouns), they're not going to be able to pull it off in the future, because the pace of AI mimicking human behavior is going to outpace their ability to figure it out.
 
When considering AI content and basically content these last several years, the thing to consider imo, isn't AI or human, it is uniqueness and discovery.

Google has a CEO who's number one priority is saving money and I don't think SEOs have really understood this.

Google wants to see something unique, preferably some kind of discovery, in texts. Discovery means things like data, tables, unique images (an important ranking factor). I do think Google is pretty wise to AI content now from a contextual analysis.

Encrypted said:
If you read in-between the lines, this is actually what Google wants people to do. They don't want traditional "blogs" or "niche sites" anymore (well, except you're a big publisher). They want to rank websites that are more vested in the niche (think e-com, services, e.t.c), even though they have a "blog" section.
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I don't think this is the case, if I am to be fair to Google.

They don't want to rank "for money" niche sites, they don't want to be the one's creating a brand.

They want you to be a brand first, then they'll give you your share. This isn't that uncommon a view today, that if you're something who knows anything, you're more likely to start out on social media first, go on podcasts, participate in discussions online.

There are easily exceptions and I don't believe that SoMe etc is actually the ranking signal, but it's about what writing for people and social media vs writing for SEO and what that does to the ranking signals that matter.

As I see it, search has developed and will develop into these major trends:

1. Facts
2. Opinions

In the case of facts has for years been trying to corner the facts for themselves with snippets and no-click SERPs. These searches will dissappear from Google soon and be replaced by AIs. Clear facts are also things like "How to style a webpage with css".

Then we have opinions, which are becoming more and more valuable with the rise of AI. Now that everyone can put out something as fact with social media and AI, more and more people are beginning their information search by looking at Who, not What.

If you think about, you probably do that a lot yourself. I want to know who is claiming something before I decide on how to understand what is being claimed. If it is someone selling a product, then I understand the commercial intent. If it is someone involved in activism or politics, I understand there might be a hidden agenda.

Thus, if a website doesn't quickly make it obvious Who, then a lot of people will increasingly decide they don't care about the What. This will show in things like clicking the back button.
 
The one thing that keeps echoing in my mind here is "buy backlinks".

I don't know how much time on page is going to help you at this stage in the game.

Looking at my site, again, the content that has withstood the update is content that has powerful links.

From my own anecdotal observations, they have again made things more strict, meaning the more clout a site has, the better it ranks.

This has always been the case to an extent, but they've just made it more difficult to earn that clout.

The question is, how does one earn this clout across the board? At what point do you transition from someone who is trying to be a brand to someone who is recognized as a brand?

How do you surpass a major magazine or newspaper that has been around for decades? It seems like a losing battle, because if these sites catch wind of you taking their ranks they can use greater amounts of resources to gain them back.

It's almost like you have to be sneaky about it. Or find avenues that these big giants haven't tapped into yet.

Not saying it's impossible but it sure ain't easy. There's always going to be fierce competition if you want to make it.

Also, the Google investment into Reddit is some bullshit. Google is probably just going to buy Reddit and try to make it the only website on the internet.
 
chubes said:
The question is, how does one earn this clout across the board? At what point do you transition from someone who is trying to be a brand to someone who is recognized as a brand?
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A lot of the best links now are traded between vets on private slacks and discords etc. Stuff that cost you $600 to buy direct from a site (if you could buy at all - eg a real good traffic DA70 SaaS) suddenly is open for trading. The world has just changed - we do that for our tech clients all the time now. The key of course is always doing an amazing deal - trade a link you bought for $50 for a link you would have had to pay $600 for direct etc...
 
Steve Brownlie said:
The key of course is always doing an amazing deal - trade a link you bought for $50 for a link you would have had to pay $600 for direct etc...
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When you say an amazing deal, would it be something like trading a topic-curated, in-depth interview for a high authority backlink?

Because I've got curated interviews for days. I'm thinking like, next time I have a high profile interview, instead of publishing it on my own site, pitch it up to the next tier up of media in exchange for an author backlink.

Then it becomes a win-win for everyone involved. The magazine gets a free interview, I get my name in the magazine, and the interviewee gets more eyeballs in a bigger publication.
 
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LOL even John Mueller's website got hit by the new algorithm updates! ROFL!
 
chubes said:
When you say an amazing deal, would it be something like trading a topic-curated, in-depth interview for a high authority backlink?

Because I've got curated interviews for days. I'm thinking like, next time I have a high profile interview, instead of publishing it on my own site, pitch it up to the next tier up of media in exchange for an author backlink.

Then it becomes a win-win for everyone involved. The magazine gets a free interview, I get my name in the magazine, and the interviewee gets more eyeballs in a bigger publication.
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This isn't very practical for us at scale because, of course... clients... and their fickle needs.

But in ye olden days I used to use similar strategies involving interviews with basically 'mid tier but semi-well known players' to get links from poker media sites back to my site. Sometimes I ended up getting nowhere ofc and just publishing it on my site but the player would often link from their own blog (this was before nobody had blogs lol). Be interested to hear how it works out for you today. I'd imagine some outlets would love to host your interviews if the folks are well known enough.
 
Very early days but I am seeing some VERY positive results by going through some pages that were slipping in rankings by de optimizing them.

I ran some tests on POP and switched on the over optimization feature and then worked up from there.

Take it for what its worth but I'm seeing some almost instant gains - like a few hours later rankings improve.
 
@MrMedia congrats on the gains!

Just trying to dig into this a bit...

Are you saying your articles were previously de-optimized, so you went in and over-optimized them? Or, were they already over-optimized and you went in and de-optimized them?

Also, you mentioned...
MrMedia said:
over optimization feature
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Do you mean:

1. The "Advanced Analytics" tab in a page run where you can see whether you have over-optimized exact match, keyword variation, and LSI?

2. Setting the "Approach" to "Aggressive" or "Hyper-aggressive" on the "Custom Strategy" tab of a page run?

3. Or something else entirely?
 
I literally think what they've done (or part of what they've done) with this update and maybe the September HCU is run an LLM trained to recognise "blogs" and then applied a penalty to them. Using factors such as:
  • No address
  • No phone number
  • No product/service offer
  • Looking at link anchor text, if they have the computing power (no BBB/GMB listings)
But more likely just looking at the overall structure of the site, since you obviously can't fool the classifier with an address or phone number.
  • What does the homepage look like?
  • Do you have product pages?
  • Is the blog the site or is it separate at /blog/? If separate, what are the other pages about?
I have seen sites that have their affiliate offers set up more like a shop suffer no losses. Maybe because they're not built on WP this helps avoid being associated with the types of sites they want to kill.

Roast this idea: why don't I just convert the sites to ecom and have a separate blog, then wait 3-6 months for the classifier to run again? This would not be particularly hard or expensive to do.
 
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