As I write this in early July 2019, the Google update that took place in late June has rolled through and the dust seems to have settled.
It’s always dangerous to make assumptions regarding any Google update within the first few days, such are the many and various ways every element of an update interacts with itself.
It is always the case that the full impact of a Google update can take at least a week, often several weeks to unfold.
During this interim period, it’s a brave SEO professional who would make any conclusions.
What has the Google update meant for rankings?
More Video
Above the fold in commercial or news searches we are seeing more space allocated for video results.
Analysis shows that videos now appear above the fold in 61.1% of desktop searches.
https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
Almost two thirds.
We all know what this means. If you use a tool such as SEO Autopilot then the smart thing to do would be to create a promotional video, link to your website on the top line of the description and promote your brand clearly in the video. You can easily grab yourself the video promotion diagram from those included within SEO Autopilot’s linking diagram library, and promote the video
The added advantage is that these links are not to your site so cannot harm your site if you are a little “overzealous”.
How to thrive!
Create a short promotional video, link it to your website in the description and promote it with the SEO Autopilot video promotion linking diagram. Use video capture software or even PowerPoint or one of the free equivalents.
These can output their presentations directly to a video file format to load directly to YouTube. There is no reason not to take advantage of the video evolution. Remember to power this video with links though
Links from low quality news sites devalued
This latest Google update is not alone in removing as much prominence as possible from what it considers low quality news sites. Hate bait or click bait, fake news sites have been hit hard. SEO Roundtable suggest that this purge has seen as many as 60% of low-quality news sites removed from the top 50 of SERPS in the last 3 weeks alone.
This isn’t surprising as governments worldwide are demanding that fake news is not promoted and threatening legal action against sites that do not remove them quickly
That’s a massive change.
These links sites often allow comments. Many do not control links in comment boxes. Some use social media or chat media plugins such as Disqus or a Facebook comments plugin. You know the sort of site I mean.
If you have links from these and rely on them as part of your mix, then their authority and prominence is being shattered. Let’s face it, many of these sites make dropping links so easy that this issue will affect many SEO professionals.
How to thrive!
Replace these low-quality links on spam news sites with high authority links using SEO Autopilot. Choose one of the many diagrams suitable for your site. Remember to take your overall link situation and site age into account when choosing the appropriate linking diagram. Then, with decent quality content and a natural pace, create replacement links of a higher quality.
Don’t forget to index these links. Perhaps with Colinkri or similar.
Aggregator Sites Benefit
Some of you may remember back to 2010 and 2011 when directory sites, bookmarking sites and all other forms of aggregator sites were hammered by a Google update.
To be fair, back then, user uploaded indexer platforms were ten-a-penny. From WIKI sites, bookmarking platforms and user created directories, there were a flood of literally millions of these sites. Google hammered them after about a year. They took some of the big boys like Yell with them
Well now some of these aggregator sites are back and in some local markets they seem to dominate SERPs ahead of individual local business sites.
However, some analysis shows why this is happening, and in this case, it isn’t the backlinks that are the cause, it is the content in the business sites.
Local business sites are failing largely because the content on them is poor.
Simple as that.
Often thin, with main landing pages with less than 100 words of written content. Hosted without the expected security, rarely if ever updated and often on old and failed platforms that may have been hacked or at least be full of vulnerabilities.
You can bet Google is measuring user experience on some of these sites. I would link a few, but that would not be fair. To see some just type in a search like “Plumber” and a location and see for yourself. Those that have fallen off page one are generally old and contain old, thin content and without the level of visible security a visitor likes to see when interacting with a business.
How to thrive!
If you have been beaten by a directory or aggregator site recently, then the best idea is to fix your own sites content and security. Make sure you have a valid SSL certificate. That your website is up to date. If it is HTML run it through a compliance test like this one (Free)
https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
If you are using a CMS like WordPress make sure it is up to date. Check that it hasn’t already been hacked. Ensure it is responsive and make a content plan. Refresh any thin content and add more as appropriate
This is where some linking juice from SEO Autopilot might come in. New content is far more effective when powered up with high quality authority links.
Deep linking – linking to internal URL’s in your website – is best practice. I suggest a modest linking diagram from those offered by SEO Autopilot
Conclusion
This latest Google update is a mixed bag. It changes several areas in SERPs and the changes it makes are drastic.
However, as usual it presents opportunities for the canny SEO specialist. Follow the tips above and come out of this latest Google update with an even batter ranking position than you started.