Google Algorithm Updates - 2024 Ongoing Discussion

[harrytwatter]

Given the insane frequency with which I hear corporate director level and above say "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" makes me think you're onto something with the "randomness strategy" @Politico

 

[Trump]

I keep saying it but no one wants to hear it - GOOGLE IS FUCKIN WITH EVERYONE and they always have been.

/rant

What are you on about? "I keep saying it but no one wants to hear it" - people, including me, have been saying this for years and years. That's nothing new. I see that theory being discussed weekly on different forums..

I get the feeling that you realized this just now, and believes that nobody else saw it years ago.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I see that theory being discussed weekly

It's not even a theory. Google literally has a patent and has it in place called the Rank Transition Patent.

It calculates your rank, and then varies it randomly over a random period of time, to insert randomness to confuse SEO's. It also includes "temporary negative bounces" and "delayed responses" to further confuse.

Abstract
A system determines a first rank associated with a document and determines a second rank associated with the document, where the second rank is different from the first rank. The system also changes, during a transition period that occurs during a transition from the first rank to the second rank, a transition rank associated with the document based on a rank transition function that varies the transition rank over time without any change in ranking factors associated with the document.

 

[Trump]

It's not even a theory. Google literally has a patent and has it in place called the Rank Transition Patent.

It calculates your rank, and then varies it randomly over a random period of time, to insert randomness to confuse SEO's. It also includes "temporary negative bounces" and "delayed responses" to further confuse.

Interesting, I've never seen that.

But nevertheless, this has been talked about for many years. And I think most of us have been treating it as a fact - since it's been quite obvious in recent year(s).

 

[Grind]

I'd like to believe that Grindstone is still a top SEO expert, but it's difficult when it's cryptic tweets and not much practical advice.

Believe nothing, I'm a moron.

I've heard a lot of people say something along these lines... But what does this actually mean in practice?

It's really simple when you look at large data sets.

Google wants to be the sole authority when it comes to deciding the flow of information. If you want them to consider giving you their user traffic, you need an end point that doesn't stop with information.

You can't build review/info sites and hope to garner that traffic anymore, unless you have insane authority (read that as link equity, same as it ever was). Even then, the market share for those on terms that used to provide nothing but review/info results is down 60-80% since March 6th.

Google doesn't need you to educate their users on topics, that's what they exist for (their opinion, not mine).

But Google doesn't (as of yet) have the capacity to fill all the non-information queries to completion, even though Google News and Google Shopping were their typically half-assed attempts to do just that.

End of the day, Google isn't drop-shipping products, providing services or software. So if you want your informational content to rank for terms, you have to chase intent...and format.

If you think I'm wrong about any of this, take a good look at a bunch of Ecom sites and see what their product/category/collections pages rank for vs their blog posts.

We're in the post-information laundering phase of the internet, adapt and thrive.

Grindtsone is definitely on my list of options.

You don't need to pay me to do it, I gave the recipe away for free. As of this morning, I've had 20+ confirmed partial or substantial (one guy is up 22k in traffic now...from near zero lol) recoveries shared with me based off the video I made on Feb 22nd.

None of these people paid me, they were just on the newsletter and realized they had nothing to lose so why not try what this insane mofo is suggesting. Not all subscribers tbh, I'm seeing a ton of action takers from 3rd party shares.

Considering the biggest update since Penguin has been rolling out since the 6th of March and OGs know that indexing and crawling slow way down during updates, that's even more impressive.

And keeping with my above quote, it's the Ecom sites that are recovering the fastest for the biggest terms.

 

[Smith]

You don't need to pay me to do it, I gave the recipe away for free. As of this morning, I've had 20+ confirmed partial or substantial (one guy is up 22k in traffic now...from near zero lol) recoveries shared with me based off the video I made on Feb 22nd.

Can you share a link to the video?

I'd like to be on that list of people who share a recovery with you!

Edit: I've been hunting for it since you posted and when I couldn't find it I just thought I would ask!

 

[CCarter]

Edit: I've been hunting for it since you posted and when I couldn't find it I just thought I would ask!

Did your try PMing grindstone?

 

[Grind]

Did your try PMing grindstone?

When memes become real lift, the internet is amazing.

 

[MrMedia]

@Grind - I'll save the PMs and just post here.

If I wanted to hire you as an internet hitman to take out my competitor who started a war with me on a scale of 1-11 how confident would you be you could decimate them in the SERPs?

*edit: I don't mean an IRL hitman obviously. Thanks CIA and FBI.

 

[Grind]

@Grind - I'll save the PMs and just post here.

If I wanted to hire you as an internet hitman to take out my competitor who started a war with me on a scale of 1-11 how confident would you be you could decimate them in the SERPs?

*edit: I don't mean an IRL hitman obviously. Thanks CIA and FBI.

Eleven (excellent Spinal Tap reference, sir) but I don't engage in Negative SEO unless someone fucks with me first.

Then I treat them and everything they've built like my name is Daenerys and they're Kings Landing.

 

[MrMedia]

Eleven (excellent Spinal Tap reference, sir) but I don't engage in Negative SEO unless someone fucks with me first.

Then I treat them and everything they've built like my name is Daenerys and they're Kings Landing.

What if you adopted me as your internet brother?

Imagine the scene in Sicario 2 where they say to Josh Brolins character he has free reign to fuck things up for the cartel to start a war. That's me saying to you - if I set you loose could you burn the SERP to the ground and leave the rightful king standing?

 

[harrytwatter]

I like to look at total keywords improved vs declined over time as a rough gauge of how sites are responding to external changes. This would be Ahrefs calendar view or SEMRush's position changes section.

The last few months it's been pretty consistently more red than green, so more keywords lost or declining opposed to new and improving. This losing ratio has correlated to decreases in organic traffic as well.

Reviewing today though I noticed that just within the last week or so that ratio has seemingly flipped, with more net keyword improvements than declines. Bigger green number vs smaller red number.

I know these tools are not perfectly accurate and SERPs fluctuate, but has anyone else seen similar patterns develop recently (more improve/new vs. declined/lost)?

 

[chubes]

Do y'all think Google is looking at the DOM to see if someone is using a custom theme? Do you think if you use a very common WP theme it could be penalized by the algorithm? Something like duplicate content?

Someone in here speculated something along these lines. But do you think there are tangible SEO benefits from having a fully-custom, unique theme on your site?

Aside from having full control of optimization. I wonder if Google rewards uniqueness on that level.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

Do y'all think Google is looking at the DOM to see if someone is using a custom theme? Do you think if you use a very common WP theme it could be penalized by the algorithm? Something like duplicate content?

Someone in here speculated something along these lines. But do you think there are tangible SEO benefits from having a fully-custom, unique theme on your site?

Aside from having full control of optimization. I wonder if Google rewards uniqueness on that level.

They use a lot of machine learning so I'd imagine if 'using some particularly common affiliate review theme that loads of people use' correlates in their data with 'low quality sites' then you could be lumping yourself in with a negative signal. I mean I've seen entire communities of people whose sites all seem to look absolutely identical ... you'd be surprised if Google's algorithm didn't find a way to lump all those in together somehow with at least a slight negative on the overall picture?

 

[chubes]

They use a lot of machine learning so I'd imagine if 'using some particularly common affiliate review theme that loads of people use' correlates in their data with 'low quality sites' then you could be lumping yourself in with a negative signal.

Yeah, this is what I am thinking. I also see no reason why it wouldn't be looking at your div ids, class names, theme names, plugins, etc, when assessing the page to help understand it.

I almost think of Google sending a Chat GPT-like bot around to look at websites. If it sees a theme tag in the DOM it could potentially place you into a category of sites using a particular theme.

If your theme is unique it could possibly stand out for being unique, or for being "branded."

Just speculating, but I don't see why it wouldn't be a thing in 2024.

Plus most of these big brand sites are using custom, branded themes. Not a lot of them are using the commonly-spouted WP themes that myself and others often recommend around here.

I'm also realizing that it is not very hard to build a custom theme from scratch when you have AI.

 

[bernard]

I don't know if a unique theme helps, but I can usually tell if a site is legit (I will trust info there) or not in the first couple of seconds.

There are just a bunch of tells to a trained eye that give of "thin affiliate site". Stuff like an empty sidebar only with "Most recent posts" is a big time tell. No legit sites have that. Every single site that has social proof will show it. Every site that has a business will collect leads etc.

 

[Trump]

Do y'all think Google is looking at the DOM to see if someone is using a custom theme? Do you think if you use a very common WP theme it could be penalized by the algorithm? Something like duplicate content?

Someone in here speculated something along these lines. But do you think there are tangible SEO benefits from having a fully-custom, unique theme on your site?

Aside from having full control of optimization. I wonder if Google rewards uniqueness on that level.

It's possible.

I mentioned earlier in this thread that I found that a lot of the sites that gained traction in this update, in my niches, aren't using Wordpress. It seems to be something to it.

About two years ago I was using Generatepress on a bunch of my sites, and one day they all went down in ranking. Every single one of them. Sites that I had built in the same niche, with another theme, werent affected. Some competitors that used GP went down as well.

I'm not trying to bash GP, it's a great theme - and I see GP sites ranking well. But I definitely think there is a correlation. Whether there is something specific in certain theme codes they don't like, or if it's just because "a lot of people use it", I'm not sure.

 

[JOoa0ky]

If content only site or affiliate site, then googol fingers to the face.

It's most likely a much more broad classifier then snooping for themes.

 

[MrMedia]

Seeing sites using the shitty mediavine theme blasting off upwards. Theme detection theory is limited.

 

[Tarzan]

I am on the fuck Google train. And it's going to Traffic Leak Ville.

My main site went from 5 figures profit per month to ... trust me, it's not pretty. After the updates, that is.

So...

I am currently trying to learn and rely on totally new traffic sources, and see Google traffic as a smelly bonus.

So far it's going well:

This is that same site, but here's how generous Google is being:

Choo choo!

The site is not even 3 months old yet. I create the content I want without a stinky bad-breathed boss behind my back (let's be real, Mueller smells like shit) telling me how to write it, or not to write it???

So far so good.

And the RPMs are 2 times higher than Google as well, hmm...

I have no idea how it'll turn out. But I have never seen traffic gains like this from Google. So I am optimistic, what else can one do.

It feels good to see some light at the end of the tunnel though.

My goal right now is to hopefully rely on a few traffic sources rather than one, and ultimately, get traffic that isn't so reliant on these big sites. So diversifying I guess.

And just for fun, here's how my 100% AI-generated (0 editing) experimental info site is doing after all these updates:

Ironic, no? I don't care about this AI site, but it's still funny.

 

[GeorgeG]

Came to share my 2c.

Background: An affiliate site, used to rank top 3 for 'best' pages and was making around 30k/m. All products are bought and tested by my team, so original photos, videos, and insights + I'm kind of an expert in the niche.

Got hit on 14 Sep. October was bad. I rewrote 50 of the review articles that were falling behind with AI. Started to improve. Never hit the 30k mark, but I was at about 20-25k. Rankings were going up again.

Fast forward to 14 Feb. Site got hit bad. Worse than HCU. On March 7th it took another hit. Now from 25k it is on 1k. Hit is that bad. Since it mostly hit my 'best' pages.

Interesting thing is I still got reviews that rank in the top 3 even N1. And If i publish a new review it gets indexed and ranks in top 3 in a day tops (site has tons of links)

Now my 'best' pages that were hit are helpful and offer real insights, because I have the products and have tested them side by side. I see people scroll and read on the heatmap and average time on page is about 2 minutes. And the pages have some good links.

So, I think it is not about user engagement or links.

All the pages however use the same structure, have almost the same elements and similar titles (Best 'Product type' of X products tested)

I have not done anything yes sine im waiting for the update to finish, but my hunch is there is something onsite that google does not like about the pages.

TLDR: I think the helpful clasificator is onsite and in the text. The way they have trainded the new BERT or SBERT or w/e they use for embeding and information retrival does not like my writing style anymore. Its a guess ofcourse but I ll know more when I start rewriting those pages I guess.

 

[PickleRick]

What types of sites are ranking instead of you now?

 

[BakerStreet]

“
Google's recent March Core update states that they are reducing "low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%".

What does Google actually mean here? Some believe Google is implying "plagiarized" content. Others believe Google is implying AI content.

After some investigations and research, I think originality is penalizing queries that see a lot of SERP Content "Similarity" and Google's imminent release of SGE. This is why Google isn't decreasing originality by 100%.

Here's what is happening:
1. Topics have varying degrees of SERP similarity.
2. Featured Snippets are produced when almost all content agrees on the answer
3. Legacy Google algorithm focused on serving content from authority site that focused on answering standard questions
4. What's AI and LLMs (and SGE) good at answering? Questions where there's already a high amount of information similarity
5. Does it surprise you that Helpful Content Update decimated a bunch of content that looked similar?
6. If the new Google model has an SGE sitting on top of the SERPs, and the goal of that SGE is to answer the highly agreed upon questions.... what's the future of Google need to look like to stay useful?
7. First-hand, experience-rich content. Yes, that's why you saw a rise of discussion boards like Reddit and Quora. Yes, that's also why Google inked a deal to capture that
8. Manual Search Evaluators with updated Page Quality Ratings to include "Experience" because SGE / AI expected to cannibalize a ton of "similar" content queries
9. So what's one to do about it?
- Create Engaging, Experience-rich, and Entertaining Content
- Build a brand that's searchers trust in the industry / space
- Prioritize content strategy that offers new perspectives

Agree, disagree? Open to thoughts here as I'm still workshopping this theory!”

From Bernard huang, founder of clear scope on LinkedIn. He might be on to something.

 

[GeorgeG]

What types of sites are ranking instead of you now?

For the most lucrative queries with 'best'

Query 1:

1. Niche site, was N2 before I got hit. Very similar but better researched content than mine.
2. An app with a shallow porrly written gpt piece, but a brand (has thousands of searcher for the brand name)
3. reddit
4. amazon
5. another shop
6. cosmopolitan
7. womanhealthmag

Query 2:

1. GQ
2. Niche site
3. Brand that makes one of the products
4. allure
5. reddit
6. womanhealthmag
7. amazon

Agree, disagree? Open to thoughts here as I'm still workshopping this theory!”

makes sense, although at the moment it is not the case.

check yahoo rankings and you will see it at the top of many searches with the exact copy of the article they syndicated. both areticles are in the serp usually one after the other.

I did a test with reddit, copied one thread that was ranking high on a test site and i am not right after it, but i got in the top 10.

 

[harrytwatter]

Agree, disagree? Open to thoughts here as I'm still workshopping this theory!”

I thought this was the direction Google was going about a year ago. Decided to spin up a creative and well researched passion site to test it out. Things were going great for the first 7 or so months until this last Feb/March when it was wiped out and the SERPs became objectively worse.

My new favorite hypothesis is that Google simply doesn't know what the fuck it is doing any more. Too much complexity over too long of a time period. Corporations are notoriously bad at retaining tribal wisdom below the c-suite, if even there, given how many career ladder jumpers exist in "tech".

Didn't Google just shuffle some chairs around at the top of the search experience team too?

Everyone seems confused and I can't think of a time in the last 10 years where the shared knowledge of the SEO community at large seemed so sporadic and hypothetical.