What does this mean for your site? Basically, if your site is desktop-only it will no longer be seen in search. This includes content like comments, data, images, videos, or anything else you want indexed.

Although the original switch was scheduled for September 2020, Google developers never expected a global pandemic to impact businesses. In some cases, the virus has delayed older websites moving to mobile.

They’ve now indicated that this huge switch will happen in March 2021.

John Mueller, Google Developer Advocate, said earlier this year that 70% of sites shown in search results have already shifted over. But, if you’re not one of these sites, you have some work to do.

What can you do to make sure this change won’t destroy your online presence? Keep reading below to learn how you can prepare.

What Happens in March 2021 Exactly?

The switch will happen rapidly but not overnight.

Mueller explained that there will be an increase in Googlebot crawling after switching to mobile-first. The change will take some time and he said it could take longer depending on the size of your domain.

“Afterwards, we’ll still occasionally crawl with the traditional desktop Googlebot, but most crawling for search will be done with our mobile smartphone user-agent,” he said.

This change is also concerning for mobile sites set up as a m-dot version.

After the update they’ll only be able to link m-dot sites to desktop, which could result in dropped content if you aren’t redirecting desktop users. It’s more likely to happen with sites using hreflang attributes.

In fact, Google developers are recommending that sites no longer use m-dot because of the confusion between search engines and users.

Preparing Your Site for Mobile First Indexing

We understand that the big question on your mind is how can you protect your website going into March 2021?

Pat yourself on the back if you’re one of those sites who already set up mobile capabilities, otherwise take a deep breath and get to work.

First, you’re able to check the status of your mobile-first indexing in the Google Search Console. Another way is to use the URL Inspection Tool. Either one can help you tell where you’re at in the process.

Here are some mobile-first indexing best practices directly from Google:

1. Use the same meta robots tags on mobile and desktop
2. Don’t lazy-load primary content upon user interaction
3. Don’t block URLs from crawling
4. Use the same content on your mobile and desktop site (especially clear headlines)
5. Have the same structured data (bread crumb, product, video object, etc.) on both versions of your site
6. Make sure your ads are also placing on mobile
7. Follow the best practices for images (high-quality images, supported formats, and alt-text)
8. Place videos in supported formats at easy-to-find spots on your site

There are many other suggestions, including how to check hreflang links, cutting fragment URLs, and verifying your robots.txt directives. The best thing you can do is read about it from the source.

Don’t Panic About Mobile-First Indexing

This announcement from Google seems scary for businesses running older websites without a mobile component, but there’s plenty of time to update and optimize websites before March 2021.

Follow some of the best practices we listed above when working on your site. You may consider hiring a professional web designer to help if you don’t have someone on staff to do it.

Are you in the middle of updating your site and need help with web copy? We can help you to write SEO-optimized, conversion-focused copy that represents your brand and builds trust with visitors.

We’ll ensure that the copy for both your desktop and mobile site is the best it can be. Reach out today to discuss your site and what can be done to prepare for the next Google update.

The post Google’s Mobile-First Index Is Coming—Is Your Site Ready? appeared first on The HOTH.

For webmasters and SEOs, this year’s “May the Fourth Be With You” felt more like “Order 66” Day.

Google updates are nothing new. They happen several times a year so Google can search results.

Last year, we wrote about the June 2019 Core Update and how the “Diversity Update” was a welcome change for everyone. It prevented the same domain from appearing multiple times at the top of search results.

As you can see, not all core updates spell certain disaster, so let’s all take a deep breath!

So what happened in this most recent May 2020 Core update?

Let’s get into it:

What Is A Core Update?

Google has been releasing core updates for the last few years.

According to Google’s official blog:

What Happened With The May 2020 Core Updates?

On May 4, 2020 Google announced it was rolling out a broad core algorithm update called the “May 2020 Core Update”.

Large Serp Volatility

Early observations of this new update show that it produced higher SERP volatility than others.

According to RankRanger, the impact of this update is greater than the one in January.

Certain Niches Had Higher Volatility

The other point worth mentioning from RankRanger is how this update is affecting multiple niches across the board.

Ranking volatility so far has been sharpest in

• Travel
• Real estate
• Health
• Pets & animals
• People & society

The average volatility in both travel and retail, for example, increased from 1.9 at the end of April to 9.3 on May 6.

Without more from Google, it’s unclear if this volatility in travel and retail was the result of changing the algorithm or the effect of worldwide quarantine orders. These industries were already expected to be hit hardest.

There Were Some Winners

SEMRush tracked some winners of the Google May 2020 Core Update.

News Websites gained the most positions this month, followed by Business & Industrial and Online Communities.

Shakeups Are Happening In Local

What Should You Do If You Were Hit

It’s important to note that, according to Google, that these updates aren’t designed to penalize anyone, and there may not be a lot to do to “fix it.”

How can this be possible that there is nothing to fix?

There are a few scenarios in which getting less traffic isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the most obvious is that of “search intent.”

For instance, you may have been ranking and getting traffic for phrases that didn’t match what the user was actually searching for. You’d be getting the traffic, but visitors would bounce off your site.

In this case, it’s all about getting the right traffic, not the most traffic.

What’s Google’s Advice for the Core Update?

Google is notoriously non-descriptive about their updates. They’re directing all Twitter questions back to an August 2019 blog post, “What webmasters should know about Google’s core updates.”

Google continues to stress the importance of having the best content possible on your website. Quality is the most important measure.

Here are some questions (from Google) to ask about your content:

1. Is my content original and substantial?
2. Does my content provide insightful analysis beyond the expected?
3. Would my content be referenced by authoritative websites?
4. Is my content well-researched and trustworthy?
5. Is my content clear, well-produced, and free of errors?
6. Does my content provide value and is it for the genuine interest of my readers?

You can also ask unbiased friends or colleagues to audit your website’s content and brush up on Google’s E-A-T standards (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

What Should I Do If I Saw A Ranking Drop?

First of all, don’t panic!

Google updates usually roll out for multiple weeks, in which we see lots of volatility. Keep an eye on it but wait until the rollout is complete before making any drastic changes.

In fact, in Moz’s recent post, they talk about how early data and assumptions get changed dramatically as the updates roll out – there is just too much fluctuation to draw conculsions.

The second thing is that with these core updates over the last few years, each of them often seems to be a reversal of the last.

The winners of one update become the losers of the next and vice versa.

With that said, check out our guide to diagnosing and repairing rankings drops..

Worried About Google’s Update? The HOTH Is Here to Help!

Google’s May 2020 Core Update sounds scary for businesses already struggling to pay the bills. But, following their content guidelines is a good start for holding onto your positions.

If your ranking and traffic has dropped substantially since May 4, you will need to shift your content and SEO strategies to stay competitive. That’s where we can help!

Our digital marketing experts can work with you to craft a new game plan to get back on top.

Contact us now to schedule a free consultation.

If you found that your site has been affected by the update, fill out our survey below and let us know what changed:

The post Google’s May 2020 Core Update: What You Need To Know appeared first on The HOTH.

The Google BERT update was announced on October 24, 2019, but reported that it has already been rolling out for a few days.

According to the release, Google says that this will affect 10% of queries, which means this is one of the biggest Google updates of the last 5 years!

Sound confusing enough?

Don’t worry about the technical jargon; we’re going to break down exactly it means in this article!

10/30/19 Update

I checked in with our internal team who manages and monitors hundreds of client accounts.

Steven Gill, a senior campaign manager weighed in on the recent update:

What is The Google BERT Update?

At its core, this new update is focused on interpreting the intent of search queries better.

(See our guide on Search Intent here.)

Instead of looking at the user’s search query on a word by word basis, BERT allows Google to interpret the entire phrase better to give the searcher more accurate results.

Slight modifications or even simple words in a search query can dramatically alter the search intent.

With this new update, Google is getting better at interpreting what the users are truly looking for when they search.

Google laid out a few examples in their announcement:

Example 1:

In this example, Google shows how the search results change when interpreting when a user is looking for information about traveling to the US vs. from the US.

Example 2:

In this example, Google previously identified the word “stand” and matched it with “stand-alone” which was the incorrect version of the word for this query.

Instead, the searcher is focused on the physical demands of the job, so with Google BERT, Google interprets the query more accurately.

As you can see, the results change based on a better interpretation of what the searcher is actually looking for.

What Does This Mean For Your SEO?

The biggest thing to look for is if there are any changes in your traffic in the next coming days and weeks.

The good thing is that this is not an algorithm that penalizes anyone – It just is meant to better understand the user query and search intent.

The best way to make sure you win with this update is to have content that answers the questions of your target audience.

I expect sites that have lots of good content in the form of well-written, long-form guides to be the winners of this update.

In fact, we just had a client send in this screenshot of his traffic right after the update started rolling out:

What To Do If Your Traffic Is Dropping

Now, if you see a drop in traffic, I would not recommend making any dramatic changes until the dust settles.

Google has a history of rolling out updates, then reversing or tweaking them in the weeks after.

With that said, if you are dropping traffic and continue to in the weeks to come, there are a few things you can do:

1. Identify the queries or keywords that you are causing the traffic drop:

Go to search console (or install it if you don’t have it yet) and run a comparison report:

Then click on queries and look at which you have lost traffic for:

This will show you which search queries you should investigate.

Alternatively, you can use a tool like ahrefs traffic change report:

2. Determine what is ranking now

Search the queries in Google and see what types of content are ranking now.

• Is it a different content type?
• Is it bringing up a different angle?
• Is it answering a slightly different question?

3. Change or Tweak Content

Tweak your content to match the content that is now ranking, or create new content that matches.

Google always is showing what it wants, so all you have to do is model that!

What Are You Seeing?

Let us know what you are seeing on your end and we’ll report back the results!

Conclusion

The new Google BERT update may be one of the biggest updates of the last 5 years of SEO.

There is nothing to worry about because this update is not focused on any sort of penalization. Instead, it’s focused on understanding search intent better.

Keep an eye on your search results and let us know what you see on your end with the form above!

If you would like some help with your SEO, you can always book a meeting with us here!

Please share this article if it’s helpful to you!

The post The New Google BERT Update Explained In Plain English appeared first on The HOTH.

SEOs are calling this change “NoFollow 2.0” because it makes changes and gives new more granular options to the nofollow tag.

In this post, I’ll cover what you need to know and what it means for your SEO going forward!

First, What Is NoFollow?

Nofollow is a type of link attribute that tells Google to not give any credit to a link. The opposite is “dofollow.”

In general, getting “dofollow” links are much more powerful than getting nofollow links.

When Google originally introduced the nofollow link attribute, it helped webmasters protect their sites from giving credit to an outbound link when they didn’t want to.

This could be for a number of reasons:

• Comment Spam: By allowing the ability to drop a link when leaving a comment, many link builders would go and leave thousands of comments just to get a link. So by making all comment links nofollow, it discouraged this type of spam.
• Advertising: Say you want to sell advertising on your website and have banner ads that link to the advertiser. In this case, you could mark the links as nofollow, since they are not editorial choices.

In general, you can use the rel=nofollow attribute on any link that you don’t want to give credit to.

These are just examples of when nofollow links came in handy; there are many more.

What Is NoFollow 2.0?

“NoFollow 2.0” is the new name that the industry is using to describe the new link attributes.

There are 2 new types of attributes Google is rolling out:

• rel=UGC: Stands for “user generated content” and can be used any time someone other than the editorial staff of a website is generating content.
• rel=sponsored: This is pretty obvious, but this stands for any time the link has been sponsored or paid for.
• rel=nofollow: This just tells Google to not give any credit to the link. (This is not new).

Why Is Google Making This Change?

In the past, many webmasters would blanket nofollow links, which would tell Google to give the link zero credit.

But in the current ecosystem of the online publishing world, this doesn’t make as much sense anymore, and Google wants to give more ways to more accurately identify the links.

For example, in the past, large publishers would have guest contributors contribute a large amount of content to the site so they could increase their pageviews.

Some of the biggest publishers in the world have gotten into trouble because all the outbound links were dofollow.

So when the publishers got scolded by Google for this, they switched EVERYTHING to nofollow, which may not be the best blanket choice.

With these new updates, Google gives publishers more nuanced ways of categorizing links, and may allow Google to give users better search results by calculating link value more accurately.

What Will Actually Happen?

Just like every update, we’ll have to wait to see some actual data to make any real conclusions.

With that said, there are a few things that we believe will change in the future.

1. Adoption Rate

The biggest question, first of all, is – What will the adoption be?

Even Google says in their official statement that you don’t need to change anything, only if you want to.

The effort involved in changing link types for most publishers / website owners will not be worth the benefit (there isn’t much).

In my opinion, I think that adoption will be very low with the exception of large, SEO-savvy publishers unless some sort of event forces the changes.

There also may be some adoption by CMS changes as well, for instance, if a new version of WordPress comes out that automatically categorized blog comment links as UGC.

But for the majority of the internet, there aren’t many incentives to adopt the new link types vs just keeping things the way they are.

In the case that the new link types ARE adopted, they may affect rankings.

The following could happen:

• Nofollow links: Google may treat these a bit differently going forward. I believe Google already does weigh nofollow links differently depending on related factors (placement, type of site, relevancy etc).
• Sponsored links – Google will likely ignore these links entirely.
• UGC links – Google may give some small credit to these, depending on related factors (placement, type of site, relevancy etc).

Again, we will not know how this changes the landscape for sure until we see some real data on this.

What Should You Do?

Unless you are a publisher, there isn’t much to do here. Again, all of this will depend on the adoption of the new link types for it to affect anything.

1. Keep Building Links

Just as it’s natural currently to have both dofollow and nofollow links in your profile, it will be natural in the future to have all the new link types.

It’s also important to understand that none of the new link types are “bad”.

For example:

• It’s natural to advertise and link to your site (Google makes its own money on selling banner ads and links to sites through its Google Display Network).
• It’s natural to get links by contributing to online publications, commenting on blogs, and posting to forums as user-generated content.
• It’s also natural to get straight nofollow links through creating social media profiles or other methods.

In the future, a natural link profile will contain all of these.

2. Keep An Eye On Rankings

We’ll see how these affect rankings as they roll out, and it may be for the good as Google is able to give more credit where previously nofollow was treated as zero credit.

3. Diversify Your Traffic

I’m a big fan of being a multi-channel marketer. In this case, I don’t believe that this will have a massive impact on SEO (at least not right away), but you should still invest in diversifying your traffic sources.

If you need some help with that, you can check out our new HOTH PPC product!

Conclusion

Google released new link attributes to give publishers more nuanced ways to identify links. The impact of these new types will depend heavily on adoption.

What are you seeing on your end? Let us know in the comments!

The post Our Take On Google’s New Link Tags NoFollow 2.0 appeared first on The HOTH.

In today’s article we’re going to discuss what happened, what changed, and our advice for keeping your traffic high!

What Happened With The Google June 2019 Core Update

On Sunday, June 2, 2019, Google did something that they RARELY ever do…

They actually pre-announced on Twitter that they were going to be rolling out a core update the following day.

Here’s the Tweet:

On June 3, 2019, Google announced that the June Core Update had officially gone live:

Since Google typically does not pre-announce their algorithm updates, there were a lot of rumors spreading that this one was going to be BIG.

However, Danny Sullivan of Google said that this update was not particularly big or special in this tweet:

Interesting enough, despite Danny Sullivan’s comments, the SEO data shows this actually was a fairly significant update (more on that below).

On Jun 8, 2019 Danny Sullivan reported that the core update finished rolling out:

Google “Diversity Update” Rolls Out At The Same Time

At the same time as the core update was rolling out, Google released another update called the “Diversity Update.”

Essentially, this update will help diversify the search results so the same domain doesn’t appear more than twice.

Here’s the full text of the tweet:

What Was Targeted With The June Core Update?

Analysis of website traffic and ranking data suggests that this update may be similar in targeting to the March 2019 Core Update, which saw larger shakeups in certain niches categorized as YMYL (Your Money & Your Life) like health, finance, legal, etc.

Rank Ranger reported large shakeups again in these niches:

This is similar to what was observed in other core updates like the Google Medic Update.

With that said, Google specifically points out that this is a broad update not intended to target any site or vertical in particular.

Industry Observations About The Update

There have been many industry observations and theories about the update:

Was This A Reversal of The March 2019 Core Update?

Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics was reported in a recent SEL article saying, “my preliminary analysis is that parts of the core update from March were reverted.”

He added that “…it seems though that Google changed some factors to brand/authority too much in March and this is what was reverted. Especially in the medical space like a webmd.com or verywellhealth.com that lost, gained back their visibility.”

With the recent core updates, Google has a history of rolling back the dials. It seems like Google is trying to fine tune this, and with each core update, many of the winners are losers of the last update.

For instance, in the last core update in March 2019, Search metrics data points out that it many of the losers bounced back:

Fluctuations

There were sites that experienced significant increases in traffic one day, just to lose it the next. It almost seems like Google was just testing the waters:

Understanding Relevance & Changes In Search Intent

Google has said that with these core updates, you may be receiving less traffic but there is nothing to change or fix.

This may be partly because we’re seeing Google experiment with changing the results to match a different search intent.

Health Related Queries Intent

To give an example, in the past, we’ve seen sites with a specific health-related supplement sales page ranking for the supplement name.

Then Google changed the type of content ranking from displaying sales pages to informative content about the supplement.

For example, when you search “creatine” – Google doesn’t display actual products in the organic listings, it displays informative articles:

In this case, Google is trying to give the consumer more information about the supplement before purchasing.

If you lost traffic because of this type of search intent change, you could try winning it back by trying to rank informational content vs your actual sales page.

We’ve had a lot of success with getting traffic back to e-commerce sites by creating blog content around their products to help fix this.

Changing Search Intent Experiments

I’m going to go out on a limb and say something crazy – Getting less search traffic may not actually be bad in all cases.

For instance, this is page about how to shoot a youtube video. Right around this update, this page jumped up and then started declining, which may look bad at first sight:

But when you drill down, you can see that this briefly ranked for “shooting youtube” which has 106,000 monthly searches!

But when you investigate this and search “Youtube Shooting” right now, Google is displaying results about an actual gun shooting at youtube:

Clearly, if users are truly looking for the news story, losing traffic for this keyword is not that bad – those visitors would bounce anyways.

Google is always experimenting with this type of disambiguation, so try not to jump to conclusions before drilling down!

Advice If You Were Affected By This Update

The first thing that I’d like to point out is how much the serps are fluctuating. We showed clear examples of how the same sites are losing and winning with each Google update.

So if your site recently dropped, you may not have to do anything to get it to go back up. It’s unfortunate, but the best advice may be to just keep improving everything you can and wait for the next update.

Your site may not have anything “wrong” with it, Google may have just changed the search intent.

With all that said, here’s how we analyze sites and how you should go about analyzing your own:

1. Identify Pages & Keywords That Are Losing Traffic

Don’t just look at your traffic as a whole, drill down to figure out what pages are losing traffic and for which keywords.

You can use Search Console if you have it installed on your site, or you can use SEMrush Position Tracking.

In SEMrush:

1. Go to Position Tracking
2. Click “New Position Tracking” and enter the URL you’d like to track
3. Click the red number under “Declined Keywords” to see any keywords that are losing traffic

This will help you identify which keywords & pages you are dropping for. Look for patterns here.

2. Identify Winning Pages

One thing to remember is that if something is dropping, something else probably went up.

Google search the keywords you’re dropping for and see what types of content is Google displaying now and compare that to the content you have.

3. Adjust Your Pages Or Create New Content

If you find a different type of content, you may consider adjusting your content to what is ranking in the search engines.

Here are some things to consider:

• Create More Specific Content: Do you have a page that is covering the topic in general but now find more specific content ranking? Try breaking out your content and create more specific content centered around the keyword you’re dropping for.

• Add Video: Do you see videos as serp features in the search results? Consider turning your content into video and increase your chances of ranking multiple times! For an extra boost, add the video to your content.

• Add Questions & Answers: If you see serp features like “people also ask”, try adding a Q&A section to your articles!

4. Diversify

Now for some non-seo advice, every update like this is a good chance to diversify your traffic. We’re an SEO company, but we’re big fans of preaching multi-channel marketing.

As we’ve seen, Google keeps increasing the number of ads in the SERPs every year, so if you want to diversify your traffic, you might be interested in our newest product HOTH PPC.

Conclusion

Google’s June 2019 Core Update shook up the serps again.

If you were affected, make sure to use our advice above to drill down and investigate what really is going on with your site as well as what Google is now displaying in the search results.

What are you seeing on your end?

The post Everything You Need To Know About The June 2019 Google Update appeared first on The HOTH.

What is the March 2019 Core Update? What changes occurred and what can website owners do to optimize their site for search traffic going forward?

Here are some details about Google’s March 2019 Core Update including what it is and action steps you can take so that your site gets more search engine traffic.

Overview

Google launched a big core algorithm update on March 12, 2019. Danny Sullivan from Google confirmed that an update occurred in a tweet on March 13.

The marketing community previously referred to the update as the “Florida 2” update because the update happened close to the time of the popular Pubcon conference in Florida. However, Danny Sullivan later announced in a tweet that Google would name the update the “March 2019 Core Update” to avoid confusion.

Some marketers speculated that this update reversed changes from the Google Medic update from 2018, which largely impacted medical, health, and fitness websites. The reason for this speculation is that many webmasters that previously saw a drop in traffic from previous updates reported seeing their traffic levels increase after this update.

However, analysis of website traffic data appears to suggest that this update is independent of the previous update and is intended to reward sites that focus on providing a good user experience.

What Happened with This Update

Google does not typically provide details about what they changed when they release an update. But the SEO community usually figures out the most important changes by conducting their own research and data studies from live websites.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened in this update and which websites were affected.

Eric Lancheres from Traffic Research ran a thorough study using over 1.7 million search results, data analytics tools like AHrefs and Scrapebox, and 58 Google Analytics accounts to determine the impact of the March 2019 Core Update.

Here are some key findings…

Word Counts and Title Tags Not Impacted

Average word counts for high ranking articles and keyword phrases in a web page’s title tag remained consistent, which suggests that these on page factors were not affected by the update.

User Experience Appears to Have an Impact

Many sites that experienced traffic drops from the previous Medic update saw an increase in traffic, but not a full recovery.

However, some sites did see a full recovery. The Medic update appeared to negatively impact sites that over-optimized for SEO by doing things like having too many instances of keywords in their navigation links or too many keywords on the page.

Sites that provided good content and good user experience could see a full recovery, despite over-optimizing for keywords. Google now appears to be willing to ignore over-optimization if the user experience is good.

Sites that saw an increase in search traffic and rankings also had a higher average page load speed than before the update.

Excessive Pop-Ups, Ads, and Large Overlays

The Traffic Research study also found that sites with too many advertisements or excessive pop-ups suffered a search traffic decline after the update.

The reason for this decline is likely due to the negative user experience that these sites provide.

Another thing that can negatively impact user experience is large drop-down navigation menus that show up on some e-commerce sites. These large menus can block visitors from viewing the rest of the page and can be particularly annoying if people hover over them by accident.

Low-Quality Content

This update also appears to have reduced traffic to sites filled with low-quality content.

Prior to this update, publishers could create low-quality content and hire cheap writers to research and create the content quickly and inexpensively. Google might be taking other factors into account like bounce rate or dwell time to determine if the content is good.

Sub-Domains

Another important finding is that sub-domains could see a drop in traffic while the main domain is unaffected. For example, if your blog is on a sub-domain and the content or user experience are not good, then that sub-domain might see a traffic drop while your primary domain stays steady.

Backlinks

This update did not appear to apply any new penalties for linking practices. However, the number of total links to pages ranking on the first page of Google went down slightly although the total linking power remained the same.

The decrease in the total number of links suggests that getting fewer links from higher authority domains can have more impact than getting lots of links from lower authority sites.

Another interesting finding was that backlinks from .gov sites increased by nearly 2.5x for pages on that ranked on page one in Google while backlinks from .edu site decreased slightly. This trend could suggest that Google is giving more weight to .gov sites as these links may be harder to get.

Jeff Coyle from Market Muse also conducted his own data study and discovered some useful information for content marketers.

Splitting Large Sites into Multiple Domains

In the past, some website owners that had content sites that experienced a decrease in traffic from previous updates could re-launch their content by moving their articles to separate domains. This tactic worked well over the past 18 months, but the recent update appears to have caught on to this tactic resulting in a decrease in traffic to such sites.

Long-Form Content

The Market Muse study examined search traffic to long-form list posts. The idea of creating really long list posts grew in popularity over the past few years due to studies showing that long content tends to perform better in the search engines.

However, excessively long content isn’t necessarily good content even if people are more likely to link to it and share it. An example of a really long list post article might be something like “101 Places to Visit Before You Die”.

Some list posts showed an increase in traffic while others experienced a decrease so the data from this study is inconclusive. However, Jeff speculated that the articles that experienced an increase in traffic might have attracted enough links from authority sites to offset any penalty from the recent update.

Publishing Consistently and Creating New Content

Another important finding was that publishing regularly appeared to help sites maintain their traffic levels after this update. Creating content regularly allows websites to keep their readers engaged which enables them to send positive signals to Google, including links, social shares, comments, and website visits.

Sites with lower quality content that also did not publish consistently faced the largest risk of traffic decline. Publishers that got lazy sometimes just updated and republished old articles without creating any new content. However, this strategy now seems riskier than before.

Action Steps

Google doesn’t usually tell us what the exact changes are when they roll out a new update. Luckily, other marketers have already analyzed data on how this update affected other websites.

From what we have seen so far, here are some action steps that you should take to make sure that your website performs well in search after the most recent Google update.

1. Focus on Creating a Good User Experience on Your Website

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Google’s March 2019 Update is to make sure that you create a good user experience for your website visitors. You still need to get links and do on-page SEO, but creating a site that is user-friendly is becoming increasingly important.

Limit pop-ups and ads even if you are running an affiliate site. Focus first on creating a good user experience and check metrics like your bounce rate, time on site, and pages visited to be sure that visitors are engaged with your website and your content.

Basically, remove anything that will make a user hit the back button to look for another search result on Google, including things like slow loading pages and poor navigation.

2. Focus on Getting More High-Quality Links Instead of Focusing on Quantity

Tactics like doing email outreach to lots of sites are popular tactics for link building, but you may be better off trying to get fewer links from high authority sites instead. And if you can get links from trusted .gov sites, those could help you even more.

3. Focus on Creating Quality Content Consistently and Updating Old Content

Most content creators know that being consistent and maintaining a regular publishing schedule is important. But many fail to stay consistent due to the time and resources required.

After the March 2019 update, staying consistent with publishing appears to be more important than ever. Be sure to not only update old content to keep it fresh and interesting to your readers, but also create new content on a regular basis to keep people engaged.

Also, make sure you are investing in creating high-quality content. Google appears to be cracking down on tactics like creating a high volume of low-quality content and getting links to it through aggressive SEO as well as long list posts that readers don’t actually provide value to the reader.

4. Avoid Splitting Old Underperforming Sites into Separate Domains

Some marketers are always looking for an easy way to trick the search engines or create a fast fix for their SEO problems. Over the long term, Google always seems to catch on and such sites get penalized.

Splitting old sites into multiple domains and re-launching the content does not appear to work well after this update, so avoid using this tactic. Instead, focus on creating good content going forward and updating older content to make it more relevant and interesting.

5. Optimize Title Tags to Improve Click-through Rates

One way that Google likely helps determine if search results are relevant and interesting to searchers is if people click on the link. Test out different title tags and try to improve them so that users choose to click on your link rather than competing search result pages.

Conclusion

Overall, Google’s update appears to focus on user experience factors. Links and on page factors are still important, but be sure to spend resources on creating quality content and making sure your website is user-friendly.

What have you seen on your end? Let us know in the comments!

The post March 2019 Core Update: What It Is and Action Steps to Take appeared first on The HOTH.

Many have referred to the August 1st, 2018 update as the “Medic Update” because it largely affected health/medical sites.

However, the updates have spread outside to many different niches including e-commerce, fashion sites, local, affiliate, and more.

Google has said the original update wasn’t targeted specifically at Medical sites, but was a broad core update.

The general consensus is that this targeted what Google calls “Expertise, Authority, & Trust” (or E-A-T) in their Google Rater Guidelines, which is determined by a variety of signals (as we’ll discuss below).

As the “Medic” update rolls out, don’t forget that other factors may be at play as well, including rolling Penguin updates as we have seen evidence of link-based changes in the last few months.

If your site was hit, the unfortunate part of the updates is that the majority of the advice to fix it up until this point has been a bit bland without strong compelling evidence to back it up.

So in today’s article, we’re going to look at the latest data and break down what you need to do based on everything that’s out there.

We’re also opening this up to the community – If you have information, even anecdotal, please let us know in the comments. We will compile the information and publish it to help the community.

Medic / Late 2018 Core Update Timeline

Like we mentioned, there have been many updates and SERP fluctuations associated with this update after the initial rollout.

Here is a timeline of the various tweaks that have come out over the last few months:

• August 1 – First “Medic Update” Rollout
• Aug 17-18 – Tweak To Medic Update (source)
• Sep 8-11 – Local Update (source)
• Sept 17-19 Medic Updates (source)
• Sept 24 – Broad Core Updates (source)
• Sept 27 – Update (source)
• October Updates – Sistrix points out there is a tie between links and medic, especially for october updates (source)
• Oct 15 – Update (source)
• Oct 16 – Update (source, source)
• Oct 31 – Halloween Update (source)

We continue to see tweaks to this update and we expect to see more.

Actionable Steps For If You Were Hit

As with any update, it can be hard to determine the exact cause of the problem, but the good news is we’re seeing evidence of sites bouncing back.

Over the last 5+ years as Google has come out with updates, the industry panics about getting penalized.

But with almost any form of marketing, there is almost always a way to recover. Let’s talk about the strategies that you can implement and check on for this update:

Create New Content To Support Search Intent Changes

One of the things that we have noticed is that Google has changed the “search intent” for many queries. Google is trying to provide more information up front to help satisfy users.

For instance, if you searched for a supplement before, Google may have displayed product pages to buy the supplement.

After the update, Google is starting to display more information based pages that explain the supplement before displaying a product page/buy page.

(Well to be clear, Google shopping ads impressions have increased by 47 percent year over year – so if you want to be at the top, you can always pay for it! But if you want to rank, it’s probably a good idea to create informative content)

This is why it’s a good idea to really flesh out your pages, create blog posts and articles that explain your services, and likely points to why our HOTH Blogger service has skyrocketed in sales in the last year.

For any terms that you have lost or dropped for, check out what types of pages Google is now ranking. It may be that you need to create a different type of content vs trying to fix what you currently have.

Penguin – Disavow Unnatural Links

We’ve seen reports that disavowing unnatural / low quality links can help with recovery. Sistrix pointed out a connection between links & the medic updates.

Check & Improve Page Speed

Another big talk has been page speed. As Google is moving sites to mobile-first indexing, they are placing a larger emphasis on user experience.

Check your page speed with Google’s tool here.

Read Google Rater Guidelines

Much of the talk about this update is in reference to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.

The document is quite repetitive and long, so we went through it and pulled out the actionable advice below:

Create An About Page, Make sure it’s linked from every page of the site.

In the rater guidelines, Google is huge on being able to find who is responsible for the site and the content. One way to make that clear is to create an “About” page and make it easy to find.

From the rater guidelines:

Create an author bio on every post

Google also wants you to clearly state who is creating the content and what their credentials are.

From the rater guidelines:

If you’re on WordPress, you can use a plugin like Simple Author Box.

Create a Job / Careers Page (If applicable)

This is a sign of a real company and comes up in the rater guidelines.

From the rater guidelines:

Create A Contact Us / Customer Service Page

This is pretty obvious for any real business, but Google makes multiple points about it.

From the rater guidelines:

Get Reviews Off Your Website

Google is huge on reputation. We’ve seen evidence of this in the last few years of more and more schema stars being displayed in the SERPs and aggregate reviews being pulled into knowledge panels.

From the rater guidelines:

A great way to encourage real reviews is to set up a system for collecting reviews as we do with HOTH Stars.

With HOTH Stars, we help automate asking for reviews and getting reviews on third party sites that matter most to you.

Get Awards For Credibility

Google likes if you have awards or other signs of credibility.

From the rater guidelines:

Get Good Ratings on BBB

Google actually calls out the BBB multiple times in the document.

From the rater guidelines:

Check your BBB rating on the official Better Business Bureau site.

Improve Content

“Improve content” is pretty generic as advice so we will break down what are some ways to do that in the following bullets. Here are some examples from the raters doc where this is addressed:

Add References To Content

Marie Haynes commented that as part of a successful Medic recovery, they “Added a large number of references to scientific articles in each of their posts”

Update Old Posts

From the rater guidelines:

Publish Editorial Policies

From the rater guidelines:

Flesh Out Content Fully

From the rater guidelines:

For E-Commerce Sites: Add Customer Service Information

From the rater guidelines:

For E-Commerce Sites: Flesh Out Product Pages

Google wants your product pages to have a significant amount of information on them. E-commerce sites are at risk if they are just providing stock manufacturer descriptions.

From the rater guidelines:

If you have just stock descriptions, you might be interested in our e-commerce descriptions product.

Remove ClickBait Style Headlines

Google doesn’t like clickbait, they want you to just be straightforward with what the content is.

From the rater guidelines:

Remove Distracting Ads

Ads are mentioned multiple times in the document. So despite Google drastically increasing ads on their own platform and making them look more and more like search results than ads, Google doesn’t want YOU to do that.

This is probably the funniest one of them all.

From the rater guidelines:

Fix Grammar & Punctuation

From the rater guidelines:

You can use a program like Grammarly to help out.

Create Original Content (Especially for E-comm Sites)

Make sure you have original content that’s not “stolen”.

From the rater guidelines:

Conclusion

Most of the recoveries from the Medic updates involve taking the ninja approach and fixing multiple issues at once. We hope this article was helpful in giving some actionable advice for improving your search results.

What have you been seeing on your end? Let us know in the comments!

The post The Medic Update Aftermath appeared first on The HOTH.

Whether they did or not, this is a great time for you to learn how to safeguard your website from Google’s Medic update and any other future algorithm updates.

Before I tell you how to hold on to your rankings, here’s what happened with Google’s Medic update and why it’s important for your site.

What Was The August 1st, 2018 Medic Update?

With the Medic update, Google changed the significance of its algorithm’s core ranking factors. This is the overall framework for how your content gets ranked in search results.

If you want to know whether or not you were impacted by the Medic update, you should look at any changes in your rankings and compare them to their positions prior to August 1st.

Finding advice for what to do if you were impacted is made a bit problematic by Google’s initial statement below, which made clear that there was no specific fix for the update:

This week we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains the same as in March, as we covered here: https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoX

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) August 1, 2018

It’s important to note that pages were affected across a variety of sites and no specific niches were targeted directly. The “MEDIC” update was not meant to target health sites, but it earned that name due to the number of sites in that category that saw major rankings changes.

Also, the August 1 core algorithm update was’t designed specifically to target health or YMYL websites. It was just a happy coincidence that it also impacted sites in that vertical.

— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) August 19, 2018

Data-Based Factors to Improve for the Medic Update

There are more than 200 search ranking factors that Google looks at. Your goal should be to improve on them all over the long term to build your brand’s equity.

We looked at data from a variety of sources, including SEO experts, software companies, and publishers to determine what you should do to avoid being negatively impacted by the Medic update.

Certain commonalities between sites that saw rankings changes from the Medic update have been observed by the SEO community.

Below is a checklist of those factors to improve on your site.

1. Optimize Your Content and Link Profile for Expertise-Authority-Trust

Google provides guidelines for how it rates the quality of different web pages. E-A-T is Google’s measure (section 4.1) of overall quality for web pages. It stands for Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness.

Rather than read the 164-page document of Google’s Search Quality Rating guidelines, you can check out this article.

According to early reports from Marie Haynes and Search Engine Land, the Medic update was mainly directed at better evaluating website authority in terms of E-A-T.

The Data

Haynes added that she believed that the update was “primarily about Google getting better at assessing Trust, the ‘T’ in E-A-T.” The data revealed that sites affected negatively by the Medic update had issues related to trust mentioned in the Quality Raters’ Guidelines:

1. Selling a product that could possibly compromise the safety of people
2. Reputation issues
3. Lack of positive reputation as compared to competitors
4. No authority in the niche
5. Large number of negative reviews

This all comes with a big caveat mentioned by Charles Float: The Quality Raters Guidelines are meant to be used by manual, human reviewers. It’s unlikely that Google’s algorithm can reliably tell if a site is meeting the E-A-T guidelines authentically, or if it’s manipulating the algorithm for the appearance of “expertise.”

In other words, content isn’t the only factor. A site with poor content in terms of E-A-T might still rank thanks to a robust link profile, as a UK site tracked by Floate did for the term “Casino.”

Source

The site had scant content, but plenty of relevant links, and went from #15 to #4 during the update.

The takeaway: Both your content and your link profile should be improved to raise the E-A-T of your site, and its rankings as a result.

Here’s what to do to improve your site for E-A-T:

1. If selling products, make sure there isn’t any question as to their safety.

2. If reputation issues exist, you can attempt to increase the trust of your pages by making sure to have clear contact and customer service information on your “About us,” “Contact,” or “Customer Service” information pages (and make sure they’re prominent in your site’s navigation menu).

3. If your competitors have more/better reputation than you, you can work to improve the number of reviews of your business.

4. If you lack authority in your niche, you can build links back to your website from other sites to increase authority signals.

5. If you have a large number of negative reviews about you, attempt an outreach campaign to have them removed while simultaneously working to outweigh them with more positive reviews.

6. Make sure to maintain and edit your pages regularly and frequently. Google doesn’t want to present outdated content to users.

7. If you aren’t an expert in what your content is about, have experts make that content for you.

8. Include a biography of the writer on the page, and link it to a separate bio on a dedicated page, as well as linking to any other URLs that help to identify the writer as an expert. Avoid having anonymously posted content or anonymous owners for your site, make it clear who made the content.

9. You’ll also want to add any appropriate disclaimers.

2. Optimize & Improve Important Consumer Pages

“Your Money or Your Life” is a Google quality rating (section 2.3) of pages that dispense life-affecting advice, and those pages are held to the highest standard.

As Google explains it,

“Some types of pages could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users. We call such pages ‘Your Money or Your Life’ pages, or YMYL.”

The Data

While YMYL sites and pages were certainly impacted heavily by this update, many non-YMYL sites were impacted as well since E-A-T affects all pages.

Of the impacted sites that were submitted to us, most were in the health niche.

There were also sites that don’t fall under YMYL:

Barry Schwartz’s analysis of 300 sites found plenty of non-YMYL categories impacted as well:

Glenn Gabe’s analysis of 210 impacted sites similarly found a variety of non-YMYL categories impacted such as lyrics sites, e-commerce sites, gaming sites, and more.

Of course, the same steps to optimize for E-A-T apply to YMYL pages, but with some additional steps.

Here’s what to do for your YMYL pages:

1. Have experts make your content

The E-A-T and YMYL standards make it clear that Google wants to show users content written by qualified experts when that content’s topic is about:

• Medical information
• Financial advice
• Advice or information pages on any topic that can have a potential negative impact on a person’s health, happiness or wealth
• High-quality hobby pages

The scope of YMYL also includes legal content, such as blog posts by lawyers and law firms, as that can also have a great potential impact on someone’s life.

Expert writing might sound like a high standard, but you want to protect your site from algorithm updates over the long-term. Following Google’s standards is one of the safest ways to do so.

2. Follow YMYL standards for the following page types:

• Shopping or financial transaction pages: Make sure they’re secure.
• Pages that offer financial information, such as investment or tax information: Make sure they’re expertly written and contain any appropriate disclaimers.
• Pages that offer medical information about specific diseases or conditions or mental health: Should be expertly-written, backed up with research, and updated regularly.
• Pages that offer legal information about topics like child support, divorce, creating a will, becoming a citizen: Should also be written by an expert, provide reference for the laws they refer to, as well as any disclaimers.
• Any page that has the potential to be dangerous or detrimental if it possessed low levels of E-A-T (parenting advice, for example): Again, try to make sure an expert is writing these pages and if possible, that they have the credentials to back it up.

3. Additional Factors to Improve for the Medic Update

While the E-A-T and YMYL guidelines are helpful for meeting Google’s standards, they’re affected by a lot of sub-factors.

Since Google’s long-term focus for its algorithm is to provide a great user experience, you might not be surprised to find that the factors associated with ranking changes are ones that affect UX directly.

Here are those additional factors to check on and optimize if needed:

Content Length: The Data

Content-length relative to other related ranking content showed a strong correlation in CanIRank’s study of 100 Medic-impacted sites:

Source

Content Length: What to Do
If the ranking content provides a short and simple answer, such as an answer to “When is the next eclipse?” then make your content short and simple as well. If the content that’s ranking is in-depth, make your content in-depth.

In other words: match the intent of the search query in terms of WHAT and HOW MUCH information users are looking for.

Content Quality:

Content quality as a factor can be somewhat subjective, and it contains its own sub-factors like relevance, quality of writing, meeting search intent, and presenting the content well visually.

Charles Floate observed that poor content quality on a site such as “small” or low-quality pieces was a big factor tied to overall site quality (and thus UX).

FabAtHome.org was the example site Floate provided that tanked due to its poor overall quality:

Source

CanIRank similarly found that gainers in rankings had the typical hallmarks of quality content:

Source

Content Quality: What to Do

Make sure you have the following:

• Expertly-written content
• Plentiful visual elements of images, videos, and/or illustrations
• Structured content in the form of: tables of contents, headers, bullet points, pull quotes, and metadata
• A good number of dofollow outbound links (external links) to high quality, relevant sources for reference
• Author Bio or Author Markup to link a real person to the page

About Page: The Data

Sites lacking an about page or having a low-quality about page were found to be negatively impacted by Charles Floate and Dale Davies, while sites with a high quality about page were found to gain by CanIRank:

Source

About Page: What to Do
Making your about page really thorough and providing value with the content on it or the content it links to can help. You can emphasize credentials, authority, history, and expertise more greatly in order to improve the quality of about pages in terms of E-A-T.

Mobile Experience: The Data

Well-designed mobile sites saw a rankings increase, which is really not that surprising. A large part of user experience is making your site and its content easily accessible on mobile:

Source

Mobile Experience: What to Do

Check that your site can pass Google’s mobile friendliness test. Make sure your content has a user-friendly design in terms of font, contrast, content visibility, and touch target size, regardless of the device it’s being viewed on.

Ad Experience: The Data

Deceptive ads that were easy to confuse with content, excessive ads on the site, and the presence of autoplay video ads were shown to be a strong factor associated with rankings drops:

Source

On the flip side, sites that provided a good ad experience by cutting down on their ad placement and making it clear what content was advertorial saw gains:

Source

Here is another site that was advised by Glenn Gabe to cut down heavily on its ads prior to the update, and gained once the update hit:

Source

Ad Experience: What to Do

Make sure ads on your site are easy to identify without them being confused for regular content, and that your site’s content is more prominent than the ads.

If your site earns revenue through ad placement, consider cutting down on the real estate given to ads so that you can get more traffic to fewer ads as opposed to less traffic to many ads!

Design: The Data

The design of a site affects a lot of other factors that determine its user-friendliness. Such as accessibility, bounce rate, links, engagement, and brand metrics.

A well-designed site brings a lot of advantages with it, both directly and indirectly. A brand that cares enough to design its site well might also be more likely to invest in quality content, SEO work, outreach and other things that help a site to rank.

According to CanIrank, some of the gaining sites had “incredibly usable, elegant, and modern user interfaces:”

Source

Google crawls pages according to its Page layout algorithm, which is what detects things such as excessive or above-the-fold ads, how a site looks on different screen resolutions, or if content is difficult to find for another design reason.

Design: What to Do

Make sure your site has a user-friendly design, meaning visitors enjoy interacting with it and can get as much information from it as possible in the shortest amount of time. This includes design elements such as:

• Plenty of white space
• Use of structured data, such as headlines, bullets, tables, blockquotes, and numbered lists
• Other non-text visual elements: images, videos, color blocks
• An eye-friendly color scheme
• Easily clickable targets, such as buttons

4. Technical SEO Factors Affected by the Medic Update

There are a lot of technical SEO factors that come into play for Google’s algorithm.

Sites with better on-page and off-page SEO generally gained, while sites with poorer stats declined.

Here are the factors that were reported in the wake of the Medic update:

Keyword Use: The Data

In an attempt to quantify what technical factors are most important, Barry Schwartz ran a comparison of sites through Cora, a technical SEO data tool.

Here is Schwartz’s Cora-plotted data:

Source

He found that:

• Keywords weren’t found frequently enough in the different areas of content and HTML of sites that were negatively impacted
• Keywords were found more frequently in those areas for sites that gained

Keyword Use: What to Do

• Perform good keyword research, and intentionally incorporate main keywords and LSI keywords within content, title tags, and meta descriptions
• Generally optimize your site’s on-page SEO

Inbound Link Trust: The Data
Schwartz’s analysis also found that sites with a poor backlink profile declined, while sites with a good backlink profile gained.

CanIRank similarly found that sites in the heavily-hit health niche that gained had earned a decent number of links from mainstream, high TrustRank websites:

Source

Sites that went down in their rankings tended to be part of a network that had a good number of links from each other, but fewer links from those mainstream, high TrustRank websites.

Inbound Link Trust: What to Do

• Improve the quantity and quality of links pointing to you through content marketing, link building, and brand development for a healthier backlink profile
• Set up social profiles associated with your website and brand to increase link trust

Site Speed: The Data

This factor showed less significant correlation, but it is an important technical factor. Site speed helps the user experience on your site, and in the past speed has been discussed as a ranking factor by Google.

Site Speed: What to Do

Check on your site’s speed and improve it if necessary.

You can boost your site speed in a few ways:

• Find a faster hosting service for your site
• Compress images and larger files before uploading them to your site
• Use a mobile-friendly theme
• Removing spaces or unnecessary characters in your backend code
• Create caches of your site on Content Distribution Networks (CDN’s)

How Can You Optimize Your Content to Avoid Being Hit by Future Google Updates?

The temptation to reduce a Google update to a set of targeted factors or niche categories is best avoided. As mentioned above, there are over 200 factors that Google looks at, and a broad core update is aimed at improving the overall quality of search results by definition.

The signs point to websites needing better content in order to improve their rankings:

Why? Because from everything that’s been observed about it, “Medic” addressed the things Google has been telling us to do for years. There really is nothing new to see here. If you hadn’t switched before to improving the quality and EAT of your content, this is your wakeup call. https://t.co/bgXiuPQaKP

— Mark Traphagen (@marktraphagen) August 22, 2018

“Better” has a loose meaning that can apply to everything from better matching query intent, lengthening or shortening the article, and including further topical keywords, among other factors.

When Google released the Panda update in 2011, it targeted sites with low-quality content. The widespread advice to avoid being hit by the Panda update was to improve content quality and clean up low quality or duplicate content. Not much has changed: Google still values “quality content” that meets their guidelines.

Hopefully, this article has given you a more nuanced view beyond simply “better content” and “less low-quality content” that you can take action on in order to ensure that your content lines up with what Google wants to see.

Conclusion

Clarity on why rankings change when Google performs an algorithm update (and what to do to make sure yours increase) is beneficial to anyone who wants their site to rank.

If you have any questions or comments about the Medic update, or maintaining your rankings in general, leave them in the comments below!

The post Google’s Medic Update: How To Fix Your Website If You Were Hit appeared first on The HOTH.

Google announced the release of a broad core algorithm update on August 1, 2018.

These algorithm updates get released and announced several times per year, though there are other updates that may not always get announced. Here’s everything we know about this most recent update so far:

The update was announced via Google’s Danny Sullivan on the Google SearchLiaison Twitter Account.

This week we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains the same as in March, as we covered here: https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoX

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) August 1, 2018

The natural questions that SEOs are asking now are: “What changed?” and “What should I adjust?”

When pressed for details regarding what webmasters should do to avoid negative effects from the update, Sullivan suggested reading Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines.

Want to do better with a broad change? Have great content. Yeah, the same boring answer. But if you want a better idea of what we consider great content, read our raters guidelines. That's like almost 200 pages of things to consider: https://t.co/pO3AHxFVrV

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 1, 2018

This reflects the same statement made by Google for their March and April broad core algorithm updates:

Each day, Google usually releases one or more changes designed to improve our results. Some are focused around specific improvements. Some are broad changes. Last week, we released a broad core algorithm update. We do these routinely several times per year.

As with any update, some sites may note drops or gains. There’s nothing wrong with pages that may now perform less well. Instead, it’s that changes to our systems are benefiting pages that were previously under-rewarded.

There’s no “fix” for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.

In other words, Since this is a “broad” update, there isn’t anything specifically targeted that SEO’s should adjust. A broad core algorithm update like this is a refinement by Google intended to improve the search results for better quality in general.

The bottom line about this update is: Check your rankings to see whether or not they were affected. There is no specific “fix” if your website was negatively impacted, rather, you can try to improve your content according to Google’s guidelines.

We always wait to collect data before giving advice. Be wary of changing anything rapidly as sometimes updates take days or weeks to roll out.

That being said, here are some observations that have been reported by SEO expert Marie Haynes about this update:

1. There isn’t currently a strong consensus about which rankings were affected. Some SEOs reported local rankings going up and organic rankings going down, while other SEOs reported the opposite.

2. That being said, it does indeed seem to be a big update, not impacting all sites but having a large effect on the sites that were impacted.

Apparently, many large chains with multiple locations across the country have dropped in rankings in favor of smaller, locally based businesses.

3. Since both organic results and local results (map listings) seem to have been affected, this indicates a change to both of the organic and local ranking algorithms.

4. YMYL pages (“your money or your life”) seem to have been affected. These are web pages dispensing medical or financial advice. Google wants to make sure it’s only ranking pages written by experts so that no one gets harmful advice.

Here is the section detailing how the algorithm trearts YMYL pages from Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines. Notice how the emphasis is on pages that “potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.”

“Trust-worthy” pages are referred to as EAT pages (experience-authority-trust) and indicate the quality of the page to Google. So YMYL sites in niches like diet, nutrition and medical device have reported being impacted more highly by the update.

Here Are Some Observations You Reported to Us

In our form below, we asked what changes you may have noticed. Let’s see if they line up with the other effects being reported as this update continues to roll out.

Who saw an increase in their traffic/rankings?

Niche: E-cig and Vapes

One user reported, “Big big jumps in rankings” for their eCommerce store selling vape juice. The SEO activity they were engaged in was toxic link disavows while focusing heavily on their blog content.

Niche: Server Hosting Service

This user saw their rankings jump up and down quite a bit. Saying, “We do work on OffPage SEO with different channels and could see instant up and down results for targeted keywords on SERP with-in a day or two.”

While other websites filled out our form from a variety of niches including law and supplements, not all of them filled out the form with their observations (they just left their URL). We think those sites went down in their rankings, but can’t be sure without the users’ description.

Who saw a decrease in traffic/rankings? (Hint: Mostly sites with medical-related content.)

Niche: Women’s Health

This site that had been mainly doing On-page SEO reported, “Nearly half of my keywords on page 2 are now on page 3. Also noticed a 40% drop in traffic.”

Niche: Keto Dieting

Other sites in this niche saw drops, as well. This one reported, “Major drop in rankings and Google traffic halved. I know Google says it is about relevance, but my content is good and very much liked by my readers.” This user also observed, “The sites replacing my site are the big authority and e-commerce sites and big magazine type sites.”

Rather than relevance, the factor seems to be the entity putting out the article. Google may be looking for content geared toward health to be written by health and medical professionals. Or if not that, then content about health written by authority websites rather than niche ones.

Niche: Gifts for Medical Professionals

One user reported a “Sudden fall of all the main articles which were ranking. So I went from 50 visitors per day in July to 8 visitors per day 2 days ago. Now visitors are coming back slowly.”

This site recommends medical devices, which falls under the YMYL type websites that have been hit by this algorithm. So the reported effects for this user line up with the general reports that are coming out.

Niche: Health and Nutrition Blog 1

This user reported a “30% drop” in their rankings even though the only SEO they’re doing is organic content (no SEO tricks). This is another example that lines up with the YMYL type sites that reported drops.

Niche: Health and Nutrition Blog 2

Another user managing a site that dispensed nutritional advice for treating disease saw a massive hit. They reported, “My website has dropped from 15k visitors daily to 8k.”

They were doing nothing too crazy, just content creation and some backlinks here and there making this another confirmation that Google doesn’t want just anybody giving health advice.

Niche: Health and Nutrition Blog 3

Another blog reported, “Many rankings dropping massively. A few went back up, but generally, it has a strong down-trend. I lost a third of traffic.”

There seems to be a trend with these reports, doesn’t there? Note that the 2 previous examples of health and nutrition blogs that got hit were in 2 different languages, and this one is in a 3rd language still. So the topic of the site seems to be the factor.

Niche: Home Medical Equipment

An eCommerce site supplying home medical equipment for the elderly and disabled reported, “Massive drops on every search query. Other websites which we have never seen before are outranking us.”

One thing these anecdotal examples help confirm is that some of the sites noticing the biggest impact are in the medical niche. If they don’t meet Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines for a certain reason, there is a good chance they were hit.

What should you do to avoid being hit by this broad core update?

Based on the reports we’ve gotten, it sounds like if your site deals with medical or nutrition-focused content, there is a good chance it will have been hit by this update.

It seems like the algorithm is favoring authority sites or actual experts, but in general, those experts are often writing on behalf of those same authority sites.

So what should you do to make sure the impacts are lessened as much as possible?

You may not like the answer, but since this is a broad update, you should continue following SEO best practices as much as you can.

This includes:

1. Updating or removing low-quality content on your website
2. Check the Google Search Console for reported errors to fix
3. Fix SEO-killing broken links, images, and media files
4. Focus on building your site’s authority as a brand (Google gives preference to brands that get more search queries than their competition).

If your website was hit by the Medic update, check out this guide to learn how to fix it.

The post What You Need to Know about Google’s August 2018 Broad Core Algorithm Update appeared first on The HOTH.

With this new ranking factor, Google is sending a big message that it cares much more about keeping users “happy” with search results and is turning up the dial on user experience versus traditional signals like links and content.

During recent psychographic testing with the search quality rating team, one particular website variant increased levels of serotonin, the “happiness” hormone, by a whopping 343%, leading search quality raters to grade a website much higher.

Google has taken these tests into account and now is heavily relying on the presence of this factor to skyrocket a website’s ranking.

What was the magical variant?

The studies prove that literally just integrating cat pictures into your website was the single differential that performed well across the board in all demographics.

“I thought it was ridiculous at first, but as an SEO and conversion rate optimization specialist, I’m a data-driven marketer – I had to test, and the results blew me away.” Says Allison Marrow, senior search director at Settle SEO.

“By simply incorporating pictures of kittens in our client’s websites, our dwell time shot up, our CTRs, our rankings, and most importantly, sales increased more than 90% in less than 30 days”

In fact, no other user-rating test scored anywhere near as high as placing cute kittens on pages.

Now the SEO game has shifted to rewarding those who can simply get the most natural, cutest, most engaging cat photos.

By placing pictures of cats on websites, webmasters are experiencing massive jumps in rankings and search traffic.

Data Behind The Algorithm Change

UX (or user experience) metrics are gaining momentum as a ranking factor in the search results, as the importance of traditional ranking signals like on page optimization and link based signals are declining over time.

Search Analyst Dean Mardaw of Engetix SEO explains “When users find something they like on a page, they tend to stay on the page longer. This is called dwell time and is becoming an important part of the ranking equation. Embedding cat video, or even crudely photoshopping a picture of a kitten onto your product pages has shown to keep people on your page 283% longer!”

This all makes sense, as the internet is just turning their love for cats. Looking at Google trends, people searching for cats is at an all time high.

Industry Reaction

The response from the industry has been mixed, with some SEO firms quickly embracing the change, and others paralyzed in shock and disbelief.

“It’s so simple, I can’t believe no one saw this coming. The trend line for people searching for cat pictures and videos is insane, why not hop on the train?” said Amanda Hunter, senior CRO specialist for Webnetics SEO.

“Most people have been very negative about the update, but I think it’s important to keep a good paw-sitive attitude about it all”

Julia Cieutat from The HOTH X Managed SEO team also provided an update, “We started picking up the trend months ago as a joke, but it turns out our pet care facilities were ranking unusually easily.”

“The reality is nobody really wants to hear about your products or service any more. They just want more cats, and now we have the data to prove it.”

Others weren’t so happy about the update:

“This is a complete cat-astrophe” says Lisa Dunning, senior SEO specialist at a local agency.

News Breaks, Overnight Millionaires Made

Bonnie Lyon, owner of www.purr-paws-stock-photography.com, became an overnight millionaire as thousands of users flocked to purchase stock photos of cats to incorporate on their own websites.

“I couldn’t believe it. People need these cat pictures, and now I’m RICH AS F!!!!”

However, SEO veterans are warning against using the same pictures as everyone else. “You definitely don’t want to get yourself into a situation of dupli-cat content.”

Shifting Algorithm, Shifting Jobs

As the news came out, many agencies quickly shifted entire teams from content strategy and link outreach to simply cat photography.

“I’ve been in this industry for 10 years, I have ranked some of the most competitive terms online with strategic link acquisition programs, and now I’m basically a glorified cat shit scooper just to keep my job”

The popular SEO tool Ahrefs is reportedly frantically working to create image detection software to crawl and analyze cat pictures. The rumored name for the tool is the “Catgap Analysis” and while it’s in beta, users attest the tool litter-ally scoops through pages to find the cat media.

Joe Cardelli from The Belford Agency warns that this change may not be as simple as it seems. “Google is really looking for a natural amount of cats on your website. If you over-do it, you may be penalized from over-optimization. You have to get your ratios purrfect.”

Further Demographic Testing

The news came as a blow to dog lovers across the SEO community as cats are getting so much attention. But all hope is not lost as further testing continues.

Jim Kurzweil, a director at a large SEO agency chimed in on how “man’s best friend” has been fairing in new tests:

“Cats perform well across the board, however dogs actually are crushing it in in certain verticals like motorcycles, chainsaws, and hair loss creams. The CTRs are through the woof!”

The Future Of SEO

What will come of the SEO industry as these radical shifts roll out?

“This isn’t the first Google animal update” said Kurzweil, “We’ve dealt with Penguins and Pandas before… but if you want to survive this, you have to get started… right MEOW.”

Happy April Fools!

The post Shocking New Google Ranking Factor Revealed, Entire SEO Industry Transforms Overnight appeared first on The HOTH.