A quick thread for those experiencing traffic drops in the last month.

So many sites are seeing significant declines in Google rankings and traffic.

If you submitted your site for me to test my tool, first, ty! But secondly, I want to share why I have put the tool on hold... In building the tool, I realized it doesn't matter whether we can determine if it is the Helpful Content Update, the Link Spam update or one of these random blips (Feb 4, 18, etc.)

The advice is the same...learn to create the most helpful content possible.

Google has published a new guide to their ranking systems‼️

Oh wow...this is really good.

developers.google.com/search/blog/20…

Here's my summary (live blogging as I read it because I'm so excited🤓)
👇 SEOs have new terminology to use when talking about Google updates:

There will be updates (like we had the page experience update or the helpful content update) but...

Google will now talk about "systems"...
👇

Did you know Google updated their search quality evaluator guidelines this week?

We pay attention to these because they can give us clues as to what Google wants to accomplish with their search algorithms.

Here are five things I found interesting with this revision.
👇 1) YMYL is now more clearly defined.

Understanding this is important because Google says in their guide to how they fight disinformation that they give more weight to their understanding of EAT for YMYL topics.

Hello everyone! Today for #learnSEO I’m going to share a long thread to summarize the important bits from my SMX advanced talk - Using a knowledge of semantic search to improve E-A-T.

I learned so much in creating this talk!
👇 Did you know that Google says that “assessing your own content in terms of E-A-T criteria may help it align with signals that Google uses to rank content?”

#learnSEO

Here are some of the sites we monitor that did well following the May core update and the tremors that followed. A little thread with what these sites cover and why they may have done well.
1/7 First, a medical advice site.
➡️Written by a doctor who is very well known.
➡️Pages are well structured with headings - easy to skim
➡️Does a very good job of answering the questions a searcher would have for each topic
2/7

Q5 Theory time!

What do *you* think Google changed in their algorithms with this update? I have a tinfoil hat available if needed😂.

#LearnSEO A5 Google tells us what should focus on in regards to core updates here:

developers.google.com/search/blog/20…

1⃣Focus on content.
2⃣Understand how raters assess E-A-T to look for areas to improve.
#LearnSEO

Q4:
If your traffic or rankings declined following this update, it may not be because of the update! What are some common *other* reasons for losses to be seen?

#LearnSEO A4 There are lots of possible reasons for traffic/rankings to drop. Ranking changes happen daily. It could just be that a competitor has stepped up their game.

If you made technical changes recently, look to those first.

Funny story:

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1461048764454551553?s=20&t=zCfyQPtxBLiZxiQNit45Iw

#LearnSEO

Q1 What does a core update hit look like?

If you feel you have been negatively affected by this update, can you share screenshots of analytics/GSC or even rank tracking data (anonymized) in this thread?

I’ll share some examples from MHC data as well.
#LearnSEO A1 @JohnMu said in our recent @buildwithduda talk that when Google runs an update, they “reprocess urls on a website and then apply the new settings”. So as Google recrawls your site, you will feel the effects.


1/2

Hi everyone and welcome to another #LearnSEO! Google launched a core update last week and I wasn’t even on vacation😂

Today we’re going to discuss: How to determine if you’ve been impacted by a Google core update. It’s early yet to give our thoughts on what changed with this update. The @mhc_inc team and I are analyzing SERP changes, sites and client data and will be publishing our thoughts (in newsletter and also on the web + some tweets) soon.

Now, for today’s chat…
#Learn SEO

Confused about what E-A-T is and how to improve it? Here are some of the examples in the QRG that talk about E-A-T.

First, a news article.
The website has won awards and is known for their investigative journalism. Next, an official organization. Known to be trustworthy.

This content may look boring, but the QRG says, "The page displays the clock information in a clear,
easy-to-read format."

New from @Olaf_Kopp, and very important for all SEOs to read - Entities and E-A-T.

Here's a 🧵 summary.

searchengineland.com/entities-eat-a…
1/20 Look at all of these innovations!

Hummingbird made semantic search possible - understanding entities & relationships.

Rankbrain, BERT, etc all help Google understand semantics of language.

MUM will take this even further.

Google is organizing content around entities.
2/20

I had a conversation with the AI about Google's algorithms.

I asked if paid links help in SEO. It seemed confused.

🧵 Oh, Google's guidelines? Tell me more. Why should I follow them?

#LearnSEO is going to be different this week. Here's a long thread with my thoughts on

➡️entities
➡️semantic search
➡️E-A-T
➡️content quality

There will be some questions in the thread, but this isn’t a typical Q1/A1 chat. I don’t claim to have all the answers here, but want to generate discussion. My opinion is that SEOs who understand semantic search have a big advantage. We should not overlook it!

Here's a thread on what I learned from @sistrix's research on the winners and losers of Q1.

Wikipedia saw big gains - ranking for more keywords and also improved rankings for existing ones.

sistrix.com/blog/indexwatc… Tidal .com seeing big gains, presumed to be from new content or competitors losing.

Q5 While not mentioned in Callum’s article (will be in part 2), it’s worth discussing the product reviews update. The most recent release was March 23. Did you see sites affected? What have you seen?

#learnseo A5 We had several clients with nice improvements. Here are two:

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1508878373262704648?s=20&t=Kus0xvr1Ou6H0_lbnvO2bg

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1511392311057526794?s=20&t=Kus0xvr1Ou6H0_lbnvO2bg

#learnseo

Q4 Have you worked on a site negatively impacted by a core update? What types of improvements did you make? Were you able to recover the site?

#learnseo A4 While not every site that is negatively impacted by a core update can recover, many can. In some cases improving EAT helps. Google has put a big emphasis on content as well.

Google’s advice: Focus on Content and E-A-T
#learnseo

Q3 E-A-T is not an algorithm, but assessing your content in terms of what Google has described as E-A-T may help it rank better.

Have you had success in improving E-A-T? What did you do?
#learnSEO A3 We have had great success in helping sites improve by working on E-A-T: Adding expert authors if appropriate, cultivating good reviews, schema to improve entity understanding, mentions in authoritative places and more.

What we do:

mariehaynes.com/resources/eat/

#learnseo

OK, Q1 for #learnseo!
Have you had sites impacted by Google’s Penguin algorithm in the past? What happened? A1 Trying to understand Penguin is what propelled my career in SEO. I did not have sites hit, but I helped a lot of sites recover.

Hard to believe Penguin was launched 10 years ago!
#learnseo

Welcome to another #learnseo chat! Today we are going to be talking about some of the major algorithms that Google uses in search.

I thought it would be fun to do some polls in this one!

We will be discussing @mrcallumscott‘s article published this week...
#learnseo Here is the article:
mariehaynes.com/resources/goog…

#learnseo

Here is another site that is doing well with this latest product reviews update. They are an affiliate site. They saw nice gains with Nov core and a slight increase again with the March PRU.
🧵1/6 Organic traffic is up 9%. But when you look at just pages with the word “best” in them, those ones are up 18%.

🧵2/6

SEL published my article with my thoughts on using the disavow tool after 10 yrs working w sites w manual actions and link quality problems.

If you build links or have done so in the past, this is for you!

I get to 🧵 summarize my own article today☺️

1/13 In the article, I divide links into three categories.

2/13