Every year, Google performs hundreds of algorithm improvements and updates. For your search query, a Google algorithm will look for, rank, and deliver the most relevant pages. Google released significant core updates in May 2022 which were the topic in a very insightful Duda webinar named «Master the Craft of Weathering Google Updates».
Marie Haynes, analyzed previous Google updates, explained what the focus was, and shared her techniques for preparation and recovery. She was joined by John Mueller and Barry Schwartz in order to look at what the rest of the year ahead would be holding and explained how you should prepare so that Google updates, announced or not, are plain sailing for you.
At the end of the webinar, the three were also answering various questions from the live chat. Continue reading to see the full transcription of the webinar conversation.
Speakers
- Marie Haynes – Owner and Lead at E-A-T. Working in SEO consultancy, Marie shares insights on how businesses can leverage Google algorithm updates to improve their rankings and legitimize their offerings.
- John Mueller – Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google. John is a search advocate at Google and part of the search relations team. As part of the search relations team, John shares his technical expertise on Google’s SEO algorithm.
- Barry Schwartz -SEO Editor at Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. With over 20 years of experience in Google Search Optimization, Barry provides profound knowledge and tips on how to navigate the world of rankings.
Transcript
Barry Schwartz: [00:00:03] Hey everybody. Welcome to this webinar sponsored by Duda The Master, The Craft of Weathering Google Updates. And with us, of course, I’d like to thank everybody who’s joining us, all those live in the comments section watching this live, definitely throughout this presentation and throughout this talk, definitely, some make comments. So we’ll try to get those answered by one of the three of us on this thing right now. My name is Barry Schwartz. I don’t know what my title is. Sometimes SEO janitor, sometimes I write at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. I’ve been covering search stuff for about 20 years now, a lot around Google updates, which make people at Google scratch your head sometimes. And of course, with us is Marie Haines and John Mueller. Marie, want to introduce yourself quickly?
Marie Haynes: [00:00:48] Sure. My name is Marie Haynes and my company, MHC, what we do is we offer strategic consulting for SEO. And many years ago I was a veterinarian with an interest in SEO. And then over the last ten years, that’s evolved into full-time SEO more than that even. And I just have a real interest in trying to understand how Google’s algorithms work and how legitimate businesses can be on the right side of algorithm updates.
Barry Schwartz: [00:01:17] Thank you so much. And of course, we have John Mueller from Google. John, want to give a quick introduction.
John Mueller: [00:01:23] Sure. Hi, everyone. So I’m John Mueller. I’m a search advocate at Google and part of the search relations team. And on the search relations team, we essentially try to connect the inside part of search with the people who kind of create websites for search, and that includes SEOs. That includes sometimes things around rankings. A lot of times it’s more about kind of technical functionality, so it’s less about how to tell people how to rank number one, but more like, well, if you want your video shown in search, here’s how to do that. Or just generally kind of from a technical point of view, how to make things work well on search. Yeah, that’s pretty much me.
Barry Schwartz: [00:02:09] Thank you. And thank you for pressing that big red button right before this webinar to release the next Google Core update. I was joking. Obviously, John does not press that button and I’m not sure if you actually had any awareness that that was going to be released when it was. And the timing of this was definitely not scheduled at all. But it was a good coincidence and a lot of things around algorithm rankings and fluctuations and all these changes are a lot of time – I don’t know – it depends or whatever. That being said, Marie has a really great presentation which she’ll be sharing with us in the next couple of minutes. During that presentation, feel free to submit questions so that we can get those answered for you after the presentation. The presentation is about 20 minutes or so from what I hear. And Marie, from what I hear, you’re pretty good at timing those things perfectly. She’s well seasoned at giving presentations. And John is really, really good at answering questions off the cuff. He might not be able to answer all your questions. And when he’s not able to answer your questions, I will put on my John-face and answer them on his behalf. Thank you. They may not be from Google, but I’m not from Google, so I can say whatever I want and get away with it.
Marie Haynes: [00:03:10] I’m surprised we didn’t just get the John Mueller bot in. Is it a good replacement for you, John?
John Mueller: [00:03:17] It’s fine. Sometimes you have to, like the weird thing is you can pick answers that seem pretty reasonable, but you kind of have to pick them manually. It’s not that it automatically gives you something useful. You just keep hitting refresh and then sometimes it gives you something reasonable. So I don’t know if that works.
Marie Haynes: [00:03:38] We still need you around then.
John Mueller: [00:03:39] Well, it’s kind of like one of those «it depends» bots. It’s like you click F5 until you’re happy with the answer and then you like, Oh, that’s just what I wanted Google to say.
Barry Schwartz: [00:03:50] Right, so you could search for like a John Mueller bot or John Mu bot on Google to find it. It’s pretty cool. So when built (?) that basically looks at John’s previous answers across Twitter and try to like answers questions that you might feed to it and it’s pretty accurate for the most part. But there are some funny examples of things that are inaccurate and so forth. So that was fun. And of course, we have a lot of people watching live right now from California all the way to Spain and Portugal, some in Argentina, and South Florida. I’m not sure if they’re Republicans or Democrats in the US or what type of political affiliation they have. But we’re not going to get into politics in this webinar. This is all about Google updates and how you should weather them. So I like to formally introduce Marie to go ahead and give her presentation. Thank you for doing this and everybody, enjoy it!
Marie Haynes: [00:04:36] Alright, let’s do this. Well, thank you, first of all, for having me do this webinar. I want to tell you a little bit of the story of how these slides came to be because we were going to do this a month ago and then a number of things happened where we had to reschedule. And my original presentation was very speculative. It was, you know, here’s what I think Google is about to do or things that they’re doing. And to be fair, it was a little bit probably difficult for John. You know, the questions would be things that maybe were hard for him to answer. And so when we come to the question section, I think we all need to be respectful that John can only answer so much. So I am going to do a little bit of speculating here and just know that this is my research and it might not all be completely correct. And then I had this thought for this one. I thought, let’s make it a little bit lighter. And what I was going to do was make a quiz and go over past updates and ask questions like what happened on April 24th, 2012, which I’m sure both of you … Barry knows, right? That was Penguin. And so I was going to do that. But then it turns out that John and Barry needed to see my slides in advance, which would kind of make the quiz not really feel legitimate.
Marie Haynes: [00:05:52] So then what happened was I was sitting there going, What am I going to talk about? And that’s when Oh, I should mention this too, before I say that, a lot of people sort of said that kind of implied that John pushed the button somehow to launch the core update, which made me know that that didn’t happen, but it made the timing of this really good. And so I was like, okay, what are we going to talk about? Well, last week when I was preparing this, we lost Bill Slawski. And Bill, I don’t think needs an introduction at all. Everybody who’s on this call probably knows what a contribution Bill made to the SEO industry. And so I spent my Friday afternoon just reading through SEO by the Sea and Bill wrote about Google patents and he gave his thoughts on, you know, I think this is Penguin, this is, you know, something that’s relating to Panda. And so it was really fascinating to go through this. And so what I want to talk about is just the journey that I took on Friday walking through Bill’s site. The first thing that I did was this. I did a site colon search to see what Bill had to say on Penguin. And this was the first thing that came up, which really made me smile because, you know, I spent Penguin is what pulled me into the industry. When Penguin devastated so many sites.
Marie Haynes: [00:07:13] It wasn’t that I wanted to help spammers to get better with Google, but it was the legitimate businesses that had maybe hired an SEO agency. And, you know, the business owner really didn’t know that the agency was building links that went against Google’s guidelines. And this type of thing drew me into trying to understand what it is that Google is doing. Well, one of the first things that Bill wrote, so Penguin launched on April 24th of 2012. And the following day, Bill put this article out talking about how Google could combat Web spam. And I thought it was really interesting that he went back to old patents as far as 2003 to talk about all the different ways that Google could fight against Web spam. You know, as SEOs for Penguin, we talked about the links pointing to our site and a lot of people talked about anchor text ratios and things that maybe, you know, don’t always make sense. And when you look at Google patents, it’s interesting because all of the patents that Bill talked about, we’re talking about the signals that were on the spam sites, the sites that were linking out, which was very, very fascinating. So this is back from a 2003 patent. And Bill pointed out that there were a number of things in this patent that and again, we have to have the conversation whenever we talk about Google patents, just because Google has a patent for something doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re using this in their algorithms.
Marie Haynes: [00:08:39] But all of this makes sense to me. And so even 20 years ago, almost 20 years ago, you know, Google could tell if a domain name when people buy up expired domains and try to repurpose them because they have a bunch of links pointing to them, you know, it’s usually pretty easy for Google to figure out that that this is a technique made to manipulate algorithms as opposed to, wow, this is a really authoritative website. And so and then other things like when it says filling the text of pages with anchor text, you know, the original announcement for Penguin actually had much more about on-page web spam, things like keyword stuffing and, you know, things that were on the page. And so there are a number of ways that Google can determine whether a page was created just for the purpose of making links to try to manipulate Google’s algorithms. And so when they talk about automatically creating links, I would imagine that. This is, you know, it was very common for people to use programs that would make comments and forums or blog comments whenever you get a blog comment. I remember my first comment on my blog was, Hey, great post. And the author’s name was NFL Jerseys, which I thought was a very unusual name for an author. It turns out that it was search spam.
Marie Haynes: [00:09:56] This is the type of thing Google has been trying to fight against for a long, long time. And then the last point on here is basically cloaking where you show people content that’s different than what you would actually show Google. Now, I’m not saying all of these were Penguins, but my point is that Google has been fighting spam manipulation, and link manipulation for quite some time. I found this patent really, really interesting. And again, we don’t know if this is what Google is doing, but Bill shared this example of how an algorithm could look at the words that are on either side of a link. And so in this situation, he showed this site was linking to a page that’s talking about Saturn, the planet. And an algorithm could look at the words on either side of this link and determine what’s the most rare word on either side. So in this case, it would be planets and also elegant. And do other people tend to link to this content in that context? And so if somebody was linking to Saturn, the car brand, they’re probably less likely to use it in the context of a planet or, you know, maybe it’s elegant, but it’s less likely to be used in that way. And so there’s all sorts of ways where Google can look at links and say, oh, yeah, this is legitimately something that we should count or that we should value. And this is why I think, you know, poor John gets asked all the time about somebody linked to my site with these horrible links.
Marie Haynes: [00:11:26] And do I need to disavow them? Well, Google’s algorithms are very, very good at figuring out whether links should be ignored. So if somebody links to you with a bunch of, say, adult terms in the anchor and your website is nothing to do with adult stuff, you know, it’s pretty likely that Google is going to look at those links and go, whoa, this context doesn’t fit with what we expect to see for this site and then just ignore those links. So I found that very interesting. The most interesting stuff, though, was the stuff that Bill had written on Panda. And so Panda, I’m going to go into great detail here and it’s going to seem like why are we talking about Panda when Panda came out, you know, ten years ago? More than that. But I’m going to show you how important I think it is in today’s algorithms. And if you were affected by the core update, which launched yesterday, the May core update, then this is the part that you really need to pay attention to, in my opinion. When Panda first came out as SEOs, we initially called it the Farmer Update, and this was an article that was written by Danny Sullivan when he was not with Google at the time. He was at Search Engine Land and he talked about how Panda closed in on these content farms.
Marie Haynes: [00:12:36] Now, content farms are sites that produce massive amounts of content, not based on let’s provide high-value content, but rather, oh, here are things that lots of people are searching for how can we quickly create this type of content? And a lot of the time content farms would either copy content from other sites or basically take content that other sites were publishing and just kind of reworded a little bit with SEO in mind and then often rank quite well. Well, so one of Bill’s articles linked to this article from Google and you know, I don’t think I’ve seen this before. It might not be a big deal, but it was a big deal for me that just a month before Panda launched, Google launched another algorithm. They didn’t give it a name. They just said, All right, we launched something about search and search engine spam. And in their article on this algorithm that they launched, they said, All right, we’ve heard your feedback and we’re going to we want you to want us to take even stronger action on content firms and on sites that consist of primarily spammy or low-quality content. And they go on to say in that post, this is not about Panda. This is about whatever this random algorithm update was a month before that, this update was going to go after sites that copy others› content and sites with low levels of original content.
Marie Haynes: [00:13:59] So that’s interesting. Right. And then even this is from Matt Cutts› blog. And Matt said the same thing. You know, hey, we just launched this algorithm update that primarily affects sites that copy other sites› content. So as SEOs, when we talk about Panda, there’s two things that we really almost always mention. One is duplicate content. And I don’t know, John, how many questions you have answered on duplicate content and whether duplicate content is an issue. That could be something we could discuss in the Q&A perhaps. But I mean, it comes up all the time. And a lot of this, I think, started with this announcement. Just prior to Panda that sites that duplicate content from other sites could be seen as lower quality. So and then the other thing that we talk about is thin content and we’ve had all sorts of discussions on what makes thin content. I saw one just the other day. Somebody was talking about how many words you need in a blog post in order to be considered high-quality content. And I don’t think thin content has anything to do with word count. I remember I mean, so Barry writes lots of articles that are not necessarily super long but still valuable to people. And, and I’ve seen over the years, Barry because Barry, you were hit by Panda at one point, I believe, and I’ve seen you over the years adding more and more to your posts.
Marie Haynes: [00:15:20] You know, he adds now things from the SEO community that something you know, Glenn Gabe said this, Lillie Ray said this, I said something and you know, he adds a lot of value to his posts. And, you know, I think that’s a really, really good thing. So this is the blog post that Google gave the announcement about Panda four is about finding high-quality sites in search. And I want to talk about this article that Wired wrote. Steven Levy did this interview with Amit Singhal from Google and also Matt Cutts. And just an aside, if you haven’t read In the Plex, it’s the first book I read on Google. It’s so good. And I would really, really recommend it. Steven Levy wrote that just talks about the history and how the algorithm was just so much better than everything that was out there. And it really is a fascinating read. Well, this article in Wired is really, really interesting. So Wired said, All right, this Panda update came out and everybody was calling it Farmer because it goes after a thin content, Wired said. How do you recognize they said, shallow content? And you know, as SEOs, again, we talk about word count and not a whole lot more, you know, and Amit Singhal actually gave some really, really interesting answers. He said, Well, we use our standard evaluation system, which we’ve been developing, where we basically send documents to outside testers.
Marie Haynes: [00:16:45] These are the quality raters that we talk about and they ask the raters questions like, Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Well, that’s one of the questions which I’m going to come to you soon. And Google tells us to ask about core updates about even Panda. Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids? These are very, very specific questions that Google is trying to tackle. And then Matt Cutts said, yeah, you know, basically an engineer came up with this set of questions that would determine whether pages or sites, I suppose,are are high quality. So would you consider the site to be authoritative? Now, we know that some of that is measured by PageRank. Google tells us in their guide to how they fight disinformation that PageRank and trustworthiness and authoritativeness are closely tied to PageRank. But there has to be more to it than that because PageRank doesn’t tell us about the actual content on pages. And all of these questions are talking about the quality of the content on pages. So this was really interesting. This was in Google’s announcement about Panda and they talked about prior to Panda, there was a Chrome extension that was available to people. And what the Chrome extension would do was would say, if you go to a particular site, you get a site in your Google search results and then you click on it and you go, Oh, wow, I never want to go to that site ever again.
Marie Haynes: [00:18:16] Please don’t show me that in my search results. You know, whether it says it’s offensive, it’s pornographic, or generally low quality, then you had the option with this Chrome extension to block it. And now Google said in the same blog post that was not factored into a panda. Panda didn’t learn from those sites that were blocked. But it was really interesting to see that when they launched Panda, it had the same effect, that it would have blocked the vast majority of sites that users said, no, I don’t. I don’t ever want to see this site again. And that was kind of cool that Panda did that. And then I went through what I did this morning. I went through some of my notes from Help Hangouts. Some John knows this, but I’ve stalked him for ten years now. John where I started trying to learn about Penguin and just took notes from Google Help Hangouts and John’s been doing I don’t know how many I should count up how many they are, but it’s a lot of help hangouts where he’s answered a lot of questions and I went through so we have six Google Docs filled to the brim with notes from these help hangouts and I went through my first one and every time, you know, John talks about the quality of the content and when somebody asks about Panda.
Marie Haynes: [00:19:34] So, this is where I wanna talk about these core update questions. This blog post that Google produced a couple of years ago is very, very important, and I always have it open in my browser. You know, people tease me that it used to be the quality readers guidelines and I still do read the quality rater guidelines a lot. But the core update post basically summarizes everything that’s important in the QRG in my opinion. And so this is where they ask some of these questions. There are 20 questions on here. I’m not going to list them all because you can go to the blog post, but some of them are, you know, does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis? It’s not saying is it just completely duplicated from another source? It’s saying, does it provide substantial a comprehensive description of the topic? Is it insightful? Is it interesting? Which is very, very interesting. Now, these are from the core update post, but the original questions where Amit Singhal gave us 23 questions to ask about Panda, to ask about the quality of our content. They’re essentially the same, you know, they’re the same thing. And so Google has been trying to answer these questions or to try to promote content that does a good job at answering these questions for a very, very long time now.
Marie Haynes: [00:20:50] And some people would say, well, these are nice. You know, it would be nice for users to see this type of thing, but it’s not possible algorithmically to determine the answer to some of these questions. So I want to show you, that Google told us right in their blog post, that this is the one on Panda that they are. No, no, this is sorry. From the core update post. I can’t remember where it’s from. I’ll link to it later if somebody wants the reference. But they said that the recent panda change tackles the difficult task of algorithmically assessing website quality. It didn’t say, you know, we looked for all duplicate content or we looked for pages with a word count of over this number. It was algorithmically assessing website quality. And in the same post, they say that the questions that they say to answer maybe give us some insight into how Google tries to write algorithms that distinguish high-quality sites from low-quality sites. So that’s something that I think if you were affected by a core update or really any significant update, we need to pay attention to these questions. A little bit of a shout-out to my team. Whenever Google does something we documented in this list of algo updates and for years my initial so I started this in I think 2013 I went back and put some of the earlier Panda updates in there.
Marie Haynes: [00:22:13] You know, there was a lot of very kind of specific updates with specific focuses. And for the last few years, we really haven’t seen that. You know, we’ve seen updates that have had a big impact on sites. And from what I’ve seen in the chatter, I haven’t looked at our data yet. I usually give it a few days, but I’ve seen a lot of people seem to be affected by this recent core update. And then there are other things that Google doesn’t announce. This is from Barry’s site on the search engine roundtable where, you know, something happened from May 16 to 18. We wrote a little article about it published today, but even then it seemed to affect a small subset of sites, maybe more affiliate sites. But Google doesn’t tell us what these things are. They basically say, you know, we’re doing updates all the time. They’re always working to push the search forward and make it better. And then, you know, as SEOs, we monitor tools like the Semrush Sensor and say, oh, my goodness, there’s a lot of turbulence today. Maybe Google ran an update. And every time we ask Google, did you run an update? You know, almost every time they point us back to this blog post on what site owners should know about core updates, even if it isn’t a core update. I would say of the updates that we’ve had in the last couple of years, the core updates have been very impactful for a number of sites and also the product reviews updates if you are writing about products or selling products in some cases, but mostly if you’re writing about product reviews, they have been very, very impactful in, it seems to me, in similar ways to core updates and they have very similar questions.
Marie Haynes: [00:23:51] Google lists out a bunch of questions on how you should write good product reviews and they’re very, very similar to the core update questions. So in this blog post on core updates, they basically tell us there are two things that are important. One is to get to know the quality rater guidelines they’re available publicly for anybody to find. I just checked this morning to see if they had updated because the last time they updated was October 20, 21. They always update when it’s least convenient for me, so I don’t think that has anything to do with why they update, but they haven’t updated in a little while. But you can learn a lot if you read through the QRG (Quick Reference Guide) and think about your own site and you’ll find there are tons of examples in there where they say this is to be considered high or low quality for these particular reasons. And then you can decide whether that’s something that you could be maybe making some changes on your site for. And they tell us in this blog post that EAT is really important expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, which is so much more than author bio.
Marie Haynes: [00:24:52] For some, I don’t know. For some reason, EAT has become synonymous with just write author bios. And for a lot of sites, you know, even author bios are not what contributes to EAT, in my opinion. EAT is about content, quality, and a number of different things. So Google tells us that if we can learn to assess our sites in terms of EAT or assess our own content, that it could potentially help us rank better. And so it’s something to pay attention to. And with that, I’m going to end it. Although I do want to say one other thing. A thank you to Bill again for all that he’s written. Somebody pointed out to me that in every single post-Bill had in it, sharing is caring. And I was thinking about the panel that we have here today. And if, you know, Bill shared so much with the SEO community and the other people who have shared an immense amount of their time and cared for the SEO community are John and Barry. Barry, I don’t know how many articles you’ve written. Well, you did tell us at one point it’s tens of thousands, like 40,000 or something. You’ll tell me afterward, all to help SEO and then John for years and years answering our questions and then doing it again today. Thank you. So I’m going to pass things over to Barry now and we’ll have a little bit of a discussion.
Barry Schwartz: [00:26:13] Great. Thank you so much. That was great. Just going back to the Bill tragedy. I don’t know if anybody who’s watching this actually knows, but I think John and I both met Bill early on in the creative site forums, creative site forums were an early SEO, web design, and web development forums that was run by Kim Grossberg and Bill was one (..) of the few moderators there, and it just got me hooked. Bill was one of the people that got me hooked on SEO because of how much he shared with the SEO community, how much effort he put into those responses, and how he made sure those responses were something that was useful. And he always asked for follow-ups. He was one of those people that was like, Oh, this community is amazing. And it’s because of people like Bill that we have the community we have now because that has examples. We wouldn’t have so many people, so many people sharing Marie wouldn’t be sharing this presentation Duda wouldn’t have been handling this webinar. John wouldn’t be probably where he is today without the creators web forums. And Bill, I would imagine not putting words in your mouth, but I always I’m going to put words in your mouth. That’s me that’s what I do all day. But John, I mean, I’ll give you a few minutes to talk about Bill if you feel comfortable with it. Go ahead.
John Mueller: [00:27:26] Yeah, it’s definitely the case that in creative site forums he has or at the time he drove a lot of kind of the community work also in the direction of actually sharing more information. And one of the big things that I remember early on was when he would go off and bust myths about SEO. And quite often these were threads where he’d be like, So this is a myth and everyone would be like, No, you’re wrong, Bill, you’re wrong. And then he would explain why this is actually a myth and why it is not correct and what actually instead is correct. And it’s weird that even in those very early days where there wasn’t a lot of history around SEO. There were so many myths where people were kind of misunderstanding things or assuming things and it feels like some of those have stuck around until now. But kind of thanks to a lot of the work that he did, it was really something where people felt a little bit, I guess, a little bit more confident and actually going out and saying, well, actually, this is wrong.
John Mueller: [00:28:36] And instead, like, you need to look at it like this, and here’s some documentation or some proof or some tests that you can do to confirm that this is the case. And it was really always never the case that Bill would go off and say, well, trust me. He’s like, I’ve been around doing this for a while. It’s like, you should just believe whatever I say. He would always bring out proof and kind of some documentation to say, Well, this is kind of why this is different. So that’s kind of the side of Bill that I remember from the early days. And yeah, I think the forum was, was kind of a special place because of that. But I guess also the community was a lot smaller and the information level of information shared by search engines was, was very low. So it’s kind of things have evolved quite a bit and now it’s I don’t know, you all are discussing algorithm changes, which in the early days› Google would just like silently make.
Barry Schwartz: [00:29:35] Well, you guys used to make them every 30 days consistently with this Google dance, the good old days going back. I mean, looking at all the algorithm updates that you guys have been doing even before Johnny was there, like the Florida update and even before that, they all go in a certain direction. It was always interesting to see that, and it was always like the old SEO conferences and the old comments and the SEO forums were like, I don’t care about the user. I just want to know how to write better. I don’t really care how I do it. I don’t really care about the user at all. And Google’s like, Forget about that. We’re going, all we should care about is the user and we’ll take care of the rest. So all the SEOs, including myself, were like, That’s not true. We don’t really think it matters to think about the user. What we should really think about is how we can rank in the search results. So I felt that interesting. And if you look at the patterns over the years of the algorithm updates, yeah, Google wasn’t there in 2003 when it came to be like all the user matters. It didn’t it wasn’t about that. It was more about how many links can I have to my page, keyword, density, all that stuff that we really talk about today is kind of like smirking at and saying doesn’t really matter.
Barry Schwartz: [00:30:39] But the direction Google has been going consistently with every single Google algorithm update is about focusing on the user. Focusing on the user is the number one thing right now that you could do in terms of trying to rank better. And it’s always funny because I used to sit on panels and be like, All right with Matt Cutts and be like, Matt, okay, you keep telling us to focus on the user. Tell us what we have to do to write better forget, forget about the user. And then I used to go on these analogies about remember, see how Apple boxes stuff and how beautiful it is. That’s how you should box your content. I’m like, All right, enough with this fluffy talk. Tell us what to do. And the truth is, that’s the direction Google is going. That’s where we are today. And it’s only going to get more and more about that algorithm in terms of that. And so I think it’s pretty interesting with the product reviews update, with these core updates. Obviously early on with the Panda updates, it’s less about Google playing Whac-A-Mole with sites and more about sites trying to figure out how could I make the best possible website in an industry that really goes above and beyond everybody else in terms of that? And sometimes you might not care about search.
Barry Schwartz: [00:31:44] Like when I got hit by the Panda update, I didn’t really care. I mean, I’ve found it interesting. I thought it was super interesting. I found that, oh, this is like it’s not my bread and butter I don’t have to worry about. I’m not paying employees. I’m not worrying about revenue in terms of e-commerce and what I’m going to do with inventory. So I totally feel it when sites get hit by these updates and they have all this inventory sitting in their closet or their factories and all these workers, they have to pay and they’re not shipping. But me getting hit by that update. I’m like, Oh, this is super interesting. I got hit by an update. My rankings stink. I’m going to go ahead and do a poll, to see if people want me to make my website better. I think, John, maybe you kind of said, hey, make a poll on your website, see what people hate about you.
Barry Schwartz: [00:32:23] And I put a poll up there and it really, really hurt my feelings and everybody made fun of me. And I’m just joking, although. No, but the feedback was, keep doing what you’re doing. So I kept doing what I’m doing. I didn’t really change much. I still have the same theme. Maybe I add more animated GIFs now here, there in any event. So it’s pretty interesting to see. And if you think you’re doing what’s great for the user, don’t worry about the search engines. Even if it’s not working today, Google’s algorithms will eventually adjust and do what’s best for the user. So it might be hard to sit there and be like, oh, I’m not getting the rankings I deserve. You might get all the best possible feedback from your users, and your users are telling you you’re doing the best things and you might not be leading in traffic. And I’m just saying stick with it. I stuck with it. And my traffic did improve. And even today, I mean, things work and some things don’t. So just keep trying things and you’ll see what works for you. I’m not sure if anyone wants to chime in there or should I just go into some of the questions that people have been asking?
John Mueller: [00:33:21] I think that makes total sense, kind of very with regards to the kind of focusing on what you think makes sense. I think the aspect also to kind of think about is also look at what people see in the search results because, on the one hand, people might see your content and say, oh, this is actually good content, but you’re looking at the kind of like a small sample of people who actually engage with your content and kind of turning it around and seeing like, what would the average user see when they see my site? I think that’s also kind of important, and you would see that when you look at things like in search console, the performance report, what people are searching for and then look at the search results and be kind of critical of what you see there. I like that the number one query for your site is Gmail login because you wrote about a login problem and Gmail at some point is like chances are your page is not the most relevant one for Gmail login and if that traffic goes away, your overall traffic might change significantly. But that doesn’t mean the traffic that you care about kind of those users engaging with your site are really kind of going away and disappearing.
Barry Schwartz: [00:34:32] For sure. Okay, so let’s ask some audience questions. So Nirav Sampat and hopefully pronouncing it incorrectly at 1:24 p.m. Eastern said, I see a lot of West (?) websites ranking with very poor core vitals. A lot of people on Twitter (..) over at the Internet forums have said that Google has not factored in common vitals in your ranking drop on May 22 Core Algorithm Update. Do we see the Core Web Vitals gaining more importance or not? Oh, John, you can answer that or not. Is it more important or not more important? It’s same importance.
John Mueller: [00:35:07] It’s I would say it’s the same importance. It’s kind of parallel to the core updates. And I think, as we mentioned with the page experience, ranking factors, it’s not the primary factor that changes ranking for your website, but it does help us, especially when there’s more a matter of like, so which of these similar pages should we be showing first? So if someone is searching for your business name, then obviously we show your business name, your business website, because even if it’s really slow, that’s really where people want to go. But if people are searching for, I don’t know, best headphones or I don’t know some random query, then obviously we can map out a little bit more. Which of these pages actually make sense? It’s not that they’re looking for one specific page. It’s more, well they’re looking for a set of pages. And from that set, we can factor that in a little bit more.
Barry Schwartz: [00:36:03] Okay, great. So next question is from Ali at 1:28 p.m. Eastern. I’m just saying, that’s what makes it easier for you to put it up on the screen. And Marie maybe you answer this question first, then I’ll answer it. And John can say you’re wrong. To both of us. This core update does it affect FAQ schema? So is that yes or no?
Marie Haynes: [00:36:24] Well, I can’t answer about this core update we have. We’ve only had it for less than 24 hours, but generally, core updates can impact your rich results. So we have seen cases where maybe a site did have either FAQ schema or FAQ rich results or even review stars, and then they lost them in conjunction with a core update. And my thought on that is that Google only wants to show rich results for high-quality sites. And so sometimes I think the two go hand in hand that if the algorithms have decided that you’re lacking in quality for some reason, that makes it less likely that you’re going to get some type of rich result. That’s the way I would. I would answer that.
Barry Schwartz: [00:37:09] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think Google has said previously with previous core updates and additionally with product reviews updates that it does affect other things like featured snippets, rich results, rich snippets, no rich results you call them now and other things like even Google Discover could be impacted by these core updates and product review updates. So I think the answer is yes, it can affect your FAQ schema and John is going to shake his head. Yes or no?
John Mueller: [00:37:37] Yes.
Barry Schwartz: [00:37:39] Okay. We both got it right.
Marie Haynes: [00:37:40] It was very definitive Yes. Thank you.
Barry Schwartz: 00:37:44 Mike (…) asks when a core update is released, now long after it starts rolling out should we start evaluating the impact?
Marie Haynes: [00:38:12] I’ll take that one. Yeah. So most of the time, in my experience, when a site has been negatively impacted by a core update, you tend to see the results very soon, within a day or two of Google launching it. The last few updates, though, we had a few cases where, you know, now Google’s been telling us how long it takes to roll out these updates. And they did say in this announcement that this update would take 1 to 2 weeks to roll out. And so we have seen cases where at some point in that 1 to 2 weeks, we start seeing usually what it is, is you start seeing a direction either up hopefully or potentially down or maybe down. And then over even months, that direction can continue. You know you can see, oh, well, we saw some improvement and then we continue to see improvement over the next few months. So in terms of when should you start evaluating? I know when we first started analyzing core updates, the date like today, I would have been in Google Analytics all day looking at hourly traffic and saying, Oh, this one has a little bit more hourly traffic and you can look at rankings. But the thing is, it’s very turbulent when Google runs a core update, and things can go up and can go down and it’s very hard to analyze within the first few days. So we usually like to give it at least a week or so. But ideally, you should be making decisions after the rollout is done most of the time.
Barry Schwartz: [00:39:42] That’s for sure. John, I guess you would agree. Take your time. Watch it.
John Mueller: [00:39:47] Yeah, I think it’s like one of the things that that we do is some updates. I don’t know if it’s specific actually to the core updates, but one of the things that we do is when we reprocess URLs on a website, then we apply kind of the new settings. And that means that for some pages on your website, we will reprocess them fairly quickly. And usually, those are the more visible ones. So probably within kind of that 1 to 2 week period that we mentioned, the more prominent URLs on your site will be reprocessed and you’ll see those changes. And for the most part, that’s kind of the effect where you would see that change happening quickly and then over a period of time, then we reprocess the rest of the website and some of the pages on a website. We reprocess every couple of days, others every couple of weeks, sometimes even every couple of months. Usually, the pages that we don’t reprocess that often, we tend to assume are not critical for the website or do not change that frequently. So I don’t know on a new site, maybe an archive section or something like that, or we’d say, well, we want to get to it eventually, but it doesn’t change anything for the website overall if we kind of refresh this page very quickly or not. And again, I don’t know if that’s kind of actually the case for this core update or for core updates in general. But that is kind of what happens with a lot of updates that they take effect when we reprocess the pages. And that’s why you kind of see that kind of, I don’t know, almost like a stronger jump in the beginning. And then it settles down and kind of moves on at a slower pace for the rest of the site.
Barry Schwartz: [00:41:37] Yeah. No, I mean, I always saw that reprocessing to be like as often as those specific URLs get crawled by Google and the more often a specific URL gets crawled, the more important that page might be, sometimes, not always. And some updates are happening immediately. I know Google released some spam updates and said It’s going live today and it’s done. It’s immediate. So I assume that’s more about I don’t know, I can make some guesses, but I don’t want to confuse people. But some updates actually roll out immediately. Some updates take 1 to 2 or three, sometimes even four weeks. I think since I’m like they took five weeks to really roll out or Google said, Yeah, it’s done. And again, I think Jon’s making it very clear that it’s on it seems like a URL by URL basis often where the scores sometimes or whatever type of things get reprocessed in some level if you want to think of it a late-term, etc. is more complicated. But I think of always like how often are those URLs getting recalled? And then Google then maybe pushes those singles to those specific URLs to say, What is the Panda score or Penguin score? Not that we have those scores anymore, but what I’m saying, and often that …
John Mueller: [00:42:42] It’s complicated. Yeah.
[00:42:44] Yeah. But that’s why I wouldn’t always jump to say how my site hit the day after a day? Because even after Google says it’s done, maybe the bulk of it’s done. I would say maybe 95% of us don’t, but maybe not every single URL across all of Google’s indexes is actually impacted. Which is always interesting.Marie Haynes: [00:43:03] Yeah. The other thing, too, that I see a lot of people do is the day after an update announcement is spot-check keyword rankings. But a lot of if you’re not doing that on a regular basis, you might not realize that keyword rankings change, you know, for many reasons, not necessarily just an update. And so we’ve had people say like, oh, my rankings dropped for these keywords, but like really maybe a competitor just put out some new content or that was better than yours. So just because you saw drops doesn’t necessarily mean that the core update hit you. I always tell the story of the May 2014 Panda update, which I think was the one that hit you. Barry, I could be wrong with that, but one of my sites saw this massive drop and I was like, Oh great, I’ve been hit by Panda. But it was also a site that I was redoing at the time, and I had taken off my Google Analytics. And so it was a user error. It was nothing to do with Panda. And so that type of thing happens all the time so if you’re seeing drops or losses today, it’s not necessarily because of the core update. There could be other things, especially if you’ve just made changes to your site. You know, if you. It’s amazing how many sites launch a redesign coincidental with when Google is making changes. Not on purpose, obviously, but if you’ve just done a redesign or you’ve just, you know, remapped a bunch of redirects or things like that, I’d look to that first as the reason, you know, that maybe you’ve done something technically wrong because it’s not always because of the update.
Barry Schwartz: [00:44:38] Right for sure. And then the next question we have is from Jaspreet. At 1:37 p.m.. He says, my website rank got down, I guess went down even after having really great quality content. What are the main criteria for this new core update? Why is my great quality website content not ranking well? That’s the wrong question. It’s from (…) 1:37 p.m. (…).
Marie Haynes: [00:45:04] That’s a common question too, and it’s really hard sometimes to assess the quality of your own content. And this is John mentions this all the time that it would be good to get a third party to, you know, to get some of your clients or your customers to look at your website and also your competitor’s websites and give their unbiased opinion. So my best advice would be to thoroughly look at the core update questions. And what people tend to do is say, well, you know, okay, my site doesn’t meet this question, but neither does the one ranking above me. But it doesn’t work like that. You know, maybe that site above you has some other things that are better in the content. So really, I would say look deeply at the core update questions. Another thing that and this is just my opinion, I don’t know if this is legitimately what happens, though, but I would say look at how your content is structured. I really feel like if the content is hard for a user to read, it doesn’t do as well. So there are pages that, we’ve seen pages that have had incredibly good content, but it’s just one big block of content. And if you think of how we read the web, if I’m looking for something on my phone or I quickly want information, most of the time I don’t want to read an entire block of content.
Marie Haynes: [00:46:22] And so sometimes taking good content and making really good headings that say, all right, now we’re going to talk about this part and making it easy for users to skim and potentially easier for search engines to determine. Oh, there’s content on this. There’s content on this topic. That type of thing can sometimes help make content that’s good content, actually, seem like good content to readers as well. And then the other advice that I would give here is whether people are legitimately linking to your content. Now, I’m not saying go get more links, you know, I’m not saying go build links, but if you have content that the only way people are going to link to it is if you’ve found a way to build your own links, then something needs to change there. For the most part. I mean, some content can rank without links, but if your competitors are earning links from authoritative sites then and you’re not, you have to artificially manufacture those. Then it might not be actually high-quality content, which is tricky sometimes.
Barry Schwartz: [00:47:27] Cool. The next question is around. I was hit by the November core date, which was over six months ago, and after that, we did everything we could to clean up some pages and technical changes we made and so forth. What are the chances of my site recovering for this core update after?
Marie Haynes: [00:47:45] So take that one again.
Barry Schwartz: [00:47:47] Yeah.
Marie Haynes: [00:47:48] So Google’s blog post on core updates, which is always open on my computer, actually says that if you were negatively affected by a core update, you usually need to wait until another core update happens in order for Google to reprocess the signals. And so if you’ve been working on improving your quality, then often it’s the subsequent core update where that’s rewarded. We’ve seen cases, though, where it takes more than one, you know, for. I don’t know if that’s just because we need to keep doing more work or whether it depends on what Google is seeing on your site. But yeah, you know, so if you’ve been working really hard and doing the right things, then you should be seeing within the next two weeks some type of an improvement if you’re going to see it. Would you agree with that, John?
John Mueller: [00:48:37] I would say yes. The thing I would watch out for is sometimes I see questions like this and people focus on technical aspects with regard to a site like in this case, they’re saying, look, I cleaned up my thin pages and did some technical changes. And oftentimes technical changes don’t necessarily map to the quality of the website overall. So that’s something where sometimes I see kind of the technically minded SEOs say, well, well, I can fix this URL pattern or something, and then my website will be higher quality because it has fewer crawling errors or something like that. And for us, that’s not really the primary thing that we focus on. So if you’re purely focusing on technical tweaks to make your website better, my guess is you’re going to also have to rethink things from a broader quality point of view as well.
Marie Haynes: [00:49:29] So it’s a really good point because as SEOs when somebody comes to us with a decline in traffic, you know, we look for the things that we can fix easily. And so, you know, any good SEO can do a technical to some extent, a technical site audit. And we can usually find something. There’s always something that we can say, oh, well, here’s some broken links or whatever. And that’s good to do that we should try to have technically sound sites, but when we see sites that recover after core update hits, it’s rarely because we’ve fixed the technical problems on the site.
Barry Schwartz: [00:50:03] Right. Mike has the next question, but I don’t understand it. If you could repost it, you posted it at 1:39 p.m. Eastern about calling the link graph. I don’t really understand that question. Ian Hey, how are you doing? 1:41 p.m. Eastern. Yesterday, one of my client’s sites, Google, suddenly started crawling the JavaScript files, including missing files. Is that related to this update? Also, why would Google do this out of the blue? So the answer is probably not related to this Google update and maybe John got bored, so he decided to call all of those. Do you want to take that one?
John Mueller: [00:50:39] I don’t crawl files personally, so it’s not that I got bored, but my guess is our crawling system suddenly started to prioritize some of these files that maybe we’ve collected over time, links to those pages. And then like suddenly we think we need to pick them up. Like this is assuming that you didn’t make any bigger changes with regards to JavaScript on the site. And with regards to why the sky is blue, it’s because blue light tends to be refracted the most in the sky. So the white light kind of comes to you directly and the blue light kind of stays up in the sky. That’s why it looks blue.
Barry Schwartz: [00:51:14] I thought we were not talking about politics. All right. We’re moving away from that. Simon Cox asked the next question, and this is a question I actually wrote down beforehand, just in case we didn’t have any questions. So I’m glad Simon asked it. Has John or Google or both of you guys considered notifying us in the Google search console when a core update happens? Or is the rollout staggering? Meaning, that it’s not possible. And I know we talked about previously having some type of a manual action viewer, maybe making an automated action viewer. And I know you guys discussed that in the past, but is that still on the radar?
John Mueller: [00:51:47] So I think for core updates, we’re probably going to stick to the blog and to Twitter because that makes it a little bit easier to have one persistent place to check to see what’s happening there. And it’s also something where I suspect most sites don’t need to worry about, like when the next core update is happening, because most sites are just doing things normally and kind of like life goes on and sometimes things go up a little bit or go down a little bit, but it’s not like supercritical. So I think putting it into the search console and flagging it is like, oh my gosh, like core update warning kind of thing. I think that would just confuse too many people. So I don’t really see that happening. And with regards to other kinds of algorithmic changes, I don’t know, at least at the moment, we don’t have any plans in that direction.
Marie Haynes: [00:52:38] I’m smiling because it was one of the things I reread this morning when you were asked the same question when Panda first rolled out many years ago and people wanted to know in Search (Console), well Webmaster Tools at the time whether you could tell us if Panda was affecting the site. And I think I think it would be just too challenging, you know, to do that. But I thought it was interesting because there’s something in the search console where occasionally you’ll see it says update and there’s a line which is a little bit confusing to Os because what that means is that the search console had an update or there was like a bit of data missing or something. And, and a lot of people think that means there was a Google update because I think there’s a little like Google symbol over it or something. So if anybody sees that it’s not a Google update, it’s a search console update, which is confusing.
Barry Schwartz: [00:53:30] For sure. Bhargav Gopal at 1:43 says How prominent are author bio pages now and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)? Does it continue to play a part in the core updates as well? Everything I know. Author bio pages are not specifically something that Google looks at, although maybe I’m wrong. I know there’s a lot of confusion around that, so I don’t know if John could talk about that, if not.
Marie Haynes: [00:53:59] Go ahead.
John Mueller: [00:54:00] John. I would defer to Marie just because it’s one of those things where I read our blog posts and see kind of that information there. But I don’t have any firsthand experience with regard to websites. And I’m sure you’ve worked on websites where you kind of started adding these pages and where you saw some effects or you didn’t see effects. So I’m kind of more curious to see what you see.
Marie Haynes: [00:54:26] And this is probably the most common question that we get about E-A-T that is the author bios, because sometimes author bios can make a difference. You know, we’ve had clients that had, for example, medical content, and then they actually got doctors to either author their content or more likely to review it and legitimately did. They didn’t just throw a medical doctor’s name on it but fixed any errors in the text or, you know, things that were not legitimate. And we’ve had a number of clients that have seen really nice increases after doing that, but that’s not the norm. And so my opinion on author bios is you do it where it makes sense for the user. So if a user, if you have content where a user would expect to see advice from a professional, whether it’s like tax advice or financial, medical, legal, things like that, if it’s WMYL (?), then I think it’s really beneficial to have an author bio, or at least in some way to say like, Hey, this content was actually written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about. And, and so that can be helpful. But if you look at E-A-T in the quality readers guidelines, it’s fascinating to see. They talk about how it is measured. It could be measured in different ways for different types of sites. Oh, sorry, I’m having a headphone problem. I think I’m okay here now. And so bear with me 1 second here. Oh, right. So for some sites, it talks about, for example, recipe sites, you know, some of E-A-T might be measured on popularity as opposed to just who wrote it. And so, you know, I’m not saying that that’s in Google’s algorithms, but I’m saying you should read the QRG and look at what types of things might be factored in when people are trying to figure out, is this site legitimately one that I should be taking this information from? So sometimes an author bio can help.
Marie Haynes: [00:56:29] The other thing, too, is that if we’ve been talking a lot about E-A-T and entities and Google understanding, you know, I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but if Google is trying to understand that content is expert written, then you want Google to know who your experts are. You want to have an author bio, maybe a page about each of these authors to help Google connect the dots, to say like, Oh, this is the same Marie Haines that wrote for search engine land, you know, things like that. So in some cases, an author bio helps with that. But if you had like say, an e-commerce site, there’s an example in the QRG of a page selling backpacks. It’s from Target and you wouldn’t expect to see an author bio if you were searching for backpacks. It’s not you know, that’s not going to help that page rank any better. In that case, E-A-T is probably more important to look at the authority and the popularity of the brand target itself. So my advice would be to look at the keywords that you’re trying to rank for, look and see who’s actually currently ranking, who is Google preferring, what kind of authors do they have, and do they promote their authors? Not that you always want to copy the authoritative sites, but if all of the sites above you are written by people with extensive expertise, then you probably need to have that to some degree on your site as well.
Barry Schwartz: [00:57:54] Awesome response. We have like less than 2 minutes left, so I figured I’m going to quickly answer as many questions as I possibly can if I’m wrong. Yell at me, John, and we’ll let me know.
Barry Schwartz: [00:58:06] Do Google Updates roll out simultaneously across all countries and languages? It depends. Some do and some don’t. The core updates, I believe, are across all countries globally and all languages, whereas some other updates are not. So it depends on which update it is.
Barry Schwartz: [00:58:21] Are core updates driven completely by machines or as per quality guidelines. Are there manual interpretations, whereas human insights are also considered? No. Human insights are considered directly in the algorithm updates themselves. Although Google may ask quality raters, humans, to evaluate those results after the algorithms live or during tests, and Google will then send that information back to the engineers who may tweak the algorithms and test them again. But no humans press any button to remove any search results or any rankings. So far, so good.
Marie Haynes: [00:58:52] Um.
Barry Schwartz: [00:58:55] John. I noticed whenever a spam algorithm update happens, you’ll be wearing a black wig. Just wondering if it’s false. The answer is yes. A good policy. Nobody wants more space on their laptop. I’m not sure I can help with that. How long does it take for Google to rank keywords? I recently published. About a month ago, about only two keywords that are ranking, how to determine the timing issue, or is this type of ranking issue? It depends on how competitive those keywords are. But if it’s not competitive at all and it’s a brand new word, you should rank them mostly as soon as Google indexes that piece of content is something Google desires to index that content. So you’re probably having an indexing issue if it’s not indexed, if it’s indexed, you’re not ranking, and nobody else is competing for that term. And there’s probably some type of indexing issue because I could be wrong. But if there’s no competition and your index is used to rank.
Barry Schwartz: [00:59:53] It’s 2:00, so I just want to take everybody so long. So I appreciate all these questions. There are so many more questions here. Thank you, Marie and John, for doing this. And this is a great, great tribute to Bill. And yeah, we are there’s basically a whole community right now with Bill gone. But I know Bill has left so much information for all of us on his blog and his webinars that he produced across many, many websites and many, many platforms, including here and what I believe. So definitely go back, watch this stuff, read his information, and learn about what he shared. And I think we could the best thing we could do that Bill would want us to do is basically share, verify, show evidence and keep sharing with the community. Because as we have on the slide here, sharing is caring and that’s what the SEO community is all about. Thank you again, everybody, who’s watching. Thank you, John and Marie. And thank you, Duda, for sponsoring everyone. Have a great day or night or middle night or whatever it might be. Bye bye.
Credits
- Pictures courtesy of Mitchell Luo and Benjamin Dada
- Related article in German with Google updates in May 2021: Die neuen Bewertungskriterien von Google
- Webinar video recording
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