March 5th 2024 Google Core and Spam Updates

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to episode 80 of SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordsforpeopleusedcom. These solutions find the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer at SEO and I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years, built sites from the Grand Oak Port Sites and Sold Sites in large exits Made to show you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Speaker 1: 0:23

Today I'm going to talk about the March 5th 2024 Google Core and spam updates. Unless you've been living under a rock or been completely offline for the last week or so, then you'll probably be aware that Google launched on the 5th of March, two major updates. There might as well be a 24 core update and a new spam update. Now I've been in SEO for a long time, as always mentioned, and this is the biggest sort of changes that I've seen since Penguin and Panda over 12 years ago now. This is probably the biggest changes I've ever seen Google make, and it's sent shockwaves through the SEO and the website building ecosphere. Now, before we dive into it, if you've been affected, I just want to sort of reiterate advice I always give to people who've been affected by core updates is to just don't panic and don't make any rash judgments. We're still in the middle of these updates. They're going to take I think I said the spam update might take a couple of weeks to roll out and the core update might take four weeks or more to roll out, and they said there's going to be lots of fluctuations during this time. They're obviously experimenting with the knobs on the dials. They're turning the knobs and deciding how these changes are going to roll through and I think they're obviously going to be making some sort of alterations as they go through.

Speaker 1: 2:05

First of all, don't panic. There's no point trying to diagnose what's got wrong halfway through an update. You haven't got enough data just looking at your own site. You need to see exactly how it rolls through, exactly how it affects a whole bunch of sites and see how it's affected other people. It's only as people start to collect more and more data as to the type of sites that have been hit and the commonalities they've got in common that you'll be able to get any idea of what's happened. So the first thing is don't make any changes, because all you're going to do is make it harder to work out what has or hasn't worked, because you might make changes and things get worse. What's that? Because of the changes you made, or would it have got even worse if you hadn't made those changes? You don't know, we might make a change and you think things get better, but it might be that those changes had nothing to do with that improvement. You've really, I would just say don't do anything, especially nothing drastic right now, because it's just too early. I know it's painful. I have been there in the past.

Speaker 1: 3:07

I've talked several times on this podcast and I've got whole episodes about where we got hit by pandering penguin and how devastating that was. We lost 90% of our overall traffic, almost all of our Google traffic on Royal Banquet at UK by penguin and that was very painful. It was sort of a business threatening, life-threatening event. But we did sort it out. We did make changes. We did learn what the penguin and penguin and panda were actually targeting. We made changes to our site and over time we recovered. And we recovered way to levels of traffic way more than we had before. Penguin and panda. It can be fixed, you can recover site, but it doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen if you're just sort of making random attempts to make fixes. We only got somewhere with Royal Banquet at UK, when we found out what the real issues were and fixed them.

Speaker 1: 4:15

Right now, my whole lot of advice is A don't do anything. B try not to stress too much about it. I know that's hard to say, especially if you think big hits in income, but fundamentally, you can't do anything about it. Right now. You've just got to take a deep breath and sort of remove yourself mentally from the situation and say, right, okay, we just have to wait for these updates to roll through and then we'll see what we're going to do next. So then, with that said, let's have a look at what Google is saying about these two updates and what they're trying to achieve.

Speaker 1: 4:53

Now. The core update, the wording of they've given all the information around that which, to be fair to them, is more than they have previously given on most core updates is that it's really seems to be mainly around helpful content again, but instead of previously, the helpful content classifier was something that seemed to apply to whole sites based on helpful content. Whether a site was helpful or not, they now seem to be. It looks like they're trying to make it move to a page level classifier, meaning that if you've got a helpful page on an otherwise unhelpful site, it still might get a chance to rank. Or they do say that if you've got a site that is incredibly unhelpful, then you might still find all content is classified as unhelpful on that site. But it looks like they're trying to move it slightly away from a complete slap on a site. Whether that will actually play out for anyone yet it's hard to tell, but that seems to what they're saying, and they also are now saying it's not just one classifier, there's a whole load of individual classifiers that are being rolled into this. So they're obviously making changes around that, possibly in response to some of the feedback that people have been giving them recently over about how their previous helpful content updates have worked. But yeah, it seems to be very much around the whole concept of helpful content on the core.

Speaker 1: 6:22

Now the one that is probably getting more actual, more things talked about at the moment is their do spam policies as part of their spam update. Now there's three on these. There's the expired domain abuse. They said they're gonna take action on people who are buying expired domain names to repurpose them to manipulate search rankings. So that's generally people who'll buy a site with lots of links on whatever the subject is, and then they'll turn it into a site on a completely different subject. So, yeah, they might take a medical site, as they say, and convert it into a casino related site, hoping to get traffic based on the link profile and the authoritative link profile that the previous ownership built up. Now I can see why they want to do that, because it is a thing that people have been using for a long time, but I've not seen a huge amount yet of people talking about they've had trouble because they've been using expired domains. So how big an issue that one is, yet it's hard to tell.

Speaker 1: 7:33

The next one, the scale content abuse. That is the one where we are seeing probably the most movement at the moment. Now, the scale content abuse is where, in their words they say scale content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. The abuse of practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it's created. Now here they're talking about automatically generated content.

Speaker 1: 8:05

Now, I think when this first came out, lots of people were thinking this was going to hit programmatic SEO. That's where people use templated pages and a database full of content to create pages based on that content. So it could be like, say, for example, like Airbnb, where they've got templated pages and these pages change for locations and types of properties all around the world. But this, based on a small number of templates, doesn't seem to be, from what I can see, that it's hitting those kind of sites. It really, at the moment, seems to be targeted against AI AI content and pure AI content, where there's little human effort has gone into it and there's a lot of automation.

Speaker 1: 8:52

Now this one is one that they seem to be going in on hard. Now. There've been lots and lots of reports of people online. It's not just algorithmic here. There's been lots of manual penalties issued. So as this update came out, lots of people started getting emails from Google search console saying you've been hit by a manual penalty for various different kinds of spam, and there's a whole load of AI sites that were just de-indexed, completely taken out of Google's index overnight. Now some of them have since come back, but with much reduced rankings. So they hit really hard on that, and they've also hit lots of SEO influencers who were promoting the use of AI content. The most notable one that I've seen is probably Julian Goldie, who had lots and lots of content online about how he was creating pages using chat, gbt, scaling lots of AI content and he was putting lots of case studies up with URLs. They've all been killed. His own website was completely de-indexed and although it is now re-indexed, it is not ranking for anything. If you search for his name, julian Goldie, you get like his LinkedIn, his YouTube, his Twitter, but you just don't see his own site. And there's several other cases like that. Jackie Chao is another one who's been personally targeted, who, again, was someone who was promoting how much money he was making on using various schemes.

Speaker 1: 10:29

Now, I'm not a judgmental person. I don't have an ethical stance on this. I think if people want to go against Google's guidelines and find the holes and do the black cat stuff, that's absolutely fine. I've got no issue with that. I mean, back in the day I say I've been hit by those penalties because I was abusing those rules. Back in the past with Penguin, we were buying links, we were buying all sorts of links and we got hit for it. We took the risk and we got hit. We took our medicine and for me. That was a turning point for me where I decided for my own sites I wanted longevity, so I decided for me it's not worth the hassle of using techniques that are against Google's guidelines because I know that one day they will come and get if I do that. So for me that was a case where I just changed because once bit and twice shy, as they say. But it doesn't mean that I think that people who do black cat stuff are bad not at all. That's their choice.

Speaker 1: 11:34

What I do have slight issues with is probably people who promote techniques without explaining to people what the risks are. You know, if you're gonna tell someone to do something because it works, that's one thing, but if you don't tell them what the risks are, then that's slightly misleading. So people who know what they're doing, understand the risks and do what they want, that's fine. I have no issue with that. I do have a bit of an issue with people who are telling people to do stuff without explaining the risks, or at least in some way explaining the risks, because it's important that people make decisions and choices with their eyes wide open, knowing what the risks and rewards are. Now, does this stance make me a Google apologist? I don't think so, because I think yeah.

Speaker 1: 12:24

I would agree with many people who said has Google got too much control over traffic on the web? Yes, you know, 66% of all outbound clicks, you know, traffic generation is from Google. This was from SparkTorio's report that they put out the other day. You know, if you want to generate traffic online, then if you don't want to deal with Google, then that's. You know, that's two thirds of traffic that you're not going to miss out on, and all the other third is completely mixed up amongst a whole bunch of providers. So you've got to manage so many different ecosystems to try and get that traffic. You know, if you want to get traffic online, then Google is still the place to go, and that does bring a lot of power to Google.

Speaker 1: 13:04

But what I am is I'm a realist, because I can sit here and rant and rave about all the things Google are doing wrong and why it's not fair and all these things, but it's not going to change anything. It's certainly not in the short term, certainly not for me, which is why, you know, I'm a realist and I work in the ecosystem that we've got. So that's why, for my terms, I now do stuff which people would college it. I actually got called a white hat the other day. Hello, gareth, if you're listening, and probably to many people, I might seem that, but that doesn't mean that I don't have any appreciation of how the black cat stuff works, and I haven't tried it in the past because clearly I did. But for me, the longevity is the issue. And, yeah, I know people say, oh, you should do it because it works. Well, yes, it does work, but it only worked to a certain point and that's like what people are finding out now.

Speaker 1: 14:03

This is, you know, for those of us who've been in SEO long enough and have been through Penguin, panda and plenty of other core updates, we've seen this before and we know this will happen again. So, while this is like earth shattering update now for many people, there will be more in the future. I think this one is unusual because of how hard they've gone on the manual penalty side. I think they're definitely trying to send a signal. I think there is an issue that I think they're trying to take control of the narrative again, and that is by hitting those people while making a big noise about how successful they've been, by breaking Google's guidelines. Now, again, just to stress, these people have broken the guidelines. It's not a legal thing, you know, it's completely up to them to do it, but I think Google probably felt the narrative from their perspective was going too far one way and that this is them bringing it back.

Speaker 1: 15:03

And you know it's been interesting seeing people who have been hit talking about it. There has been some contrition in some places, and you know people saying that they're expecting to be at some point. So, yeah, now this is like the chickens coming home to Rooster, I suppose, really. But that's not me crowing about it, because I don't think, you know, it's fair. I think it's just people getting to that point and seeing that this will happen. I think some people haven't been around long enough to see that it ever would happen. But this is Google, basically, yeah, having their say, I think, and yeah, is it right that Google have this power? You know they are a monopoly, I agree. Yeah, it's wrong. But what can we do individually? Right now, all we can do is look after ourselves.

Speaker 1: 15:49

And then the final part of the puzzle is the site reputation abuse, which is part of the spam update, but this is a bit that's been announced but hasn't yet been implemented. Now this is taking action against what's more commonly known as parasite SEO. So that is where people are either doing straight deals with some places like Outlook, india and others and a lot of newspaper websites where you can buy subfolders and it's expensive you're talking for or, if I figure, some's a month to have access to publisher-owned content on a big newspaper site or a big website with lots of authority and you're piggybacking off their authority to get rankings and creating affiliate content and things like that. Or the other one is to use sites like Reddit and put content on there which you then piggyback off Reddit's reputation to rank threads that you then put your content on, which is harder to do because Reddit will try and shut you down, but obviously it's much cheaper to do if you can get away with it. Now this is something that Google has said they are going to crack down on and they have given site owners a two month window to sort this out, and so when they mean sort that out, they mean either no index those areas so that people still want to have those on their site they can do that, but they've got to be removed from Google's index or to remove them all together or to change their editorial policies so that people can't just publish without going through editorial oversight. So that's one where if someone says to you Parasite SEO is still working, yeah, that's because they haven't actually penalized it yet. They've announced they're going to. And the reason I think they've done this is because, yeah, I don't think they want to knock big publishers out of their index straight away. If you were expecting to go online of the news and expecting news publications, you would expect in your wherever you live, and then they weren't there, then you would be annoyed at Google. So I think that's just. This is one of the things where these sites are a bit too big not to be there, so they give them time to sort it out. Be interesting to see what actually happens when that deadline hits and what happens to sites that don't do anything about it. Time will tell. But if someone says to you, parasite SEO is still going strong, it's not been hit yet, that's because Google haven't hit that yet. That is them saying they're going to in the future. Okay, so we've seen what they're trying to hit, what we actually seen. What results are we seeing? What are people saying online about this?

Speaker 1: 18:41

Now, at a personal level, I've not seen any major changes, either up or down, apart from one site which is sort of a test experimental site that I have, which is targets India and is in Hindi, and then that is Hindi translate, machine translated from English content that has just taken a right nose dive Now it's not a site that's monetized, it's not a site that I've actually paid any attention to. When we created it two, three years ago, and I've actually forgotten, it was all in Hindi. So when I went to look at it to see what I could, if there's any clue on there as to why that one had gone down, it was like oh yeah, it's in Hindi and we machine translated that content. So that is probably the reason that that one has gone. I would say because I imagined that I've seen three years ago machine translation was probably not as good any of them, as good as it is now, and it's probably not the greatest Hindi you know grammatically and linguistically. So I think that's why that one went.

Speaker 1: 19:46

All my other sites we've seen a little bit of positive in some, a little bit of negative in others, things that could just be the kind of changes that I'd see otherwise. So I mean I feel very lucky so far and I don't want to say that we're going to be fine all the way through because it's just too early to say, but from my own perspective it's been touch wood Okay so far. I have seen we spoke about earlier there's been some sites that have just been completely wiped out, lots of people talking publicly about how they've been hit. I've also seen a very large ranking rent website network being completely killed in the rankings, not the index. They're all still indexed, but I'm talking here 600 plus sites. I'm not gonna name them so I don't out people. But yeah, there's definitely been a hit on some of those ranking rent type websites which, again, I mean you can see from those. I mean their aim is to rank for particular sort of keywords, trades, professions in certain areas, and they're trying to grab in that search traffic and then obviously trying to resell those leads onto people. Google's obviously decided they don't like that. But yeah, other than me noticing that, I've not heard anyone else talk about ranking rent. So whether it's their targeted ranking rent in particular or just whether that network was doing something that Google didn't different, google didn't like, I don't know, but definitely I've seen that one go.

Speaker 1: 21:25

There are plenty of people who are saying that their AI content has been hit. So there definitely is AI content being hit, whether it's all manual actions or whether it's algorithmic. It looks like a mix of the two, I think. For all that, some people say that Google can't spot AI content. I can spot AI content when I read it. Now, if humans can start to spot it because, especially if you just take chat GPT out of the box, it becomes it's got a style that you start to notice Google would have been able to machine learn that style and be able to hit it. And so, while some people might say that their AI content is fine, those probably people who are very heavily editing it, probably doing a lot more work than just taking it straight out of the box and not taking the easy option of AI. So they may be using AI, but I doubt it's just written straight out. Will Google be able to hit all AI content? Probably not, but I'm sure they'll be able to get a good chunk of it. Likewise, they might also be a few false positives where people who aren't using AI might have been flagged as AI. That is a risk with any machine learning algorithm that get false positives. So there could be some people like that, but definitely I think they are hitting AI and we are.

Speaker 1: 22:47

Obviously you hear less of these people, but there are some who are seeing positives. But people who get positive increases in traffic don't tend to come online and start wailing about how they've been hit. I understand anyone if you come online and you're feeling bad and you just want to vent. I'm not knocking you for doing that. It's something I would probably do too. But those who are seeing big positives are less likely to come online and say something. It's the same with reviews on restaurant reviews and all sorts of reviews. People are much more likely to leave negative reviews when they've had a bad experience than to leave a good review when they've had a positive experience. It's just human nature that you're more likely to complain than to praise.

Speaker 1: 23:29

So it's hard to see, but I have been seeing, especially the past day or so, more people have been hit by the helpful content update back in September time starting to show upticks in the past day or so, and especially some of those are people who had seen further drops last week and now all of us isn't seeing a little bit of an uptick Now. They're not back to necessarily where they were previously, but the needles, the graphs, turn around. It's pointing upwards now and this could be Google just playing with those dials and thinking maybe we pushed it too far this week. Let's just dial it back a bit and push it the other way. So we're definitely seeing all those kind of movements, but I'm sure there's more to come. So if you've been hit or not hit, or if you're seeing positives, don't necessarily bank on that situation staying the same. There's still a lot that can change over the next sort of three weeks or so. So you've just got a hold. Like I said at the start, you've just got to hold tight and not do anything drastic, because if you do, then it's gonna be really hard to come back later and work out what's gone on. Now.

Speaker 1: 24:35

Before I finish, I'm just gonna give one little bit of praise to Google in this, and that is that they have actually been a lot more open this time about what the core update and the spam update are actually targeting. So they're giving a slight more clue than normal as to what's actually going on and it does seem to be actually playing out in the way they've said Before, core updates have just said it's a core update our core systems without really giving any information about what they're after. And again, the past spam updates have never always said what types of spam they're actually going after. Now, again, I mean I think they've given the extra time information on the parasite stuff that they're targeting, again that's. I mean, it's not unknown that they've given advanced warning on things before, but this is on a spam.

Speaker 1: 25:30

One like this is, I think, it's the first that I can think of. So their communication is much improved and I think that's fair enough to say thank you to them for that, because it does help especially stop some of the misinformation and false information that can come out from people in terms of what they think it is. Here we've got a real kind of big clue as to what's going on and we can tie that back to actual results that we're seeing and seeing why people have been hit. And also, when the robots are complete, they've announced they're going to open up a form so that people can provide feedback on any specific issues they've had. So I have actually seen them do this in the past. It was a long time ago, I think it was around Penguin, or maybe Panda, where they wanted to get feedback from people on whether they thought sites have been hit appropriately or inappropriately. So the fact they're doing this again and opening up for feedback means it sounds like there's been some kind of change in Google in terms of realizing that they need to give out more information and also be more open to receiving feedback. So time will tell what they do with that feedback, but at least it's a positive sign that maybe some things are moving in it and it's certainly in the right direction for that.

Speaker 1: 26:49

Okay, so that's the overview, where we are at the time of recording, and today, as I record this, it's Tuesday, the 12th of March. So a week in to the update, I will put more podcasts out as more information comes out, as we get more examples of who are the winners and losers are. So do listen out for those and I know this has been a long one for me, heading towards half an hour. I don't normally do podcasts this long, but again, there's just so much new stuff here and so much has been going on that I think it's important to give you every bit of information I've got. So thanks for listening all this way through and I'll be back with you soon.

Speaker 1: 27:28

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Get an instant hit of more SEO tips and find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at kiehwaspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.