Nick Seitzinger

A few thoughts on Google core updates based on 15 yrs of studying and advising on Google algorithm/system changes. 1) In most cases, if a site is going to be impacted, the brunt of the impact is felt a day or two into the update. Here is an example of a site affected by the March Core update. 2) Not sure if it was the update or something else? Check other traffic sources like Bing and direct. If those are wildly down as well, you may have something else going on. 3) If affected, it's not a penalty. It's not because you've built unnatural links. It's not because you've broken Google's guidelines. It's not because you have technical issues with your site. You are not going to fix this with a technical audit. 4) Core updates represent Google improving their algorithms and systems to better present helpful and reliable results. If your site did not do well following a core update, it means that Google's systems feel that other sites' content is better to put in front of searchers. 5) How do you know what it is that Google's algorithms changed to make them prefer other sites over yours? There's no way to know for sure. Here's what I do. I look for examples of keywords that dropped in rankings. Then I use @ahrefs keyword tool to find which competitors improved. Then, I put myself in the shoes of a searcher and ask: -What is their main reason for going to this page? - Why would the page Google elevated be better to meet that need? Searchers tend to skim and want fast answers. Often I find that content that suffers has loads of words that searchers just skip over until they find the part that truly answers their question. That is the "main content". Your goal should be to make the main content incredibly helpful and also, easy to find. I compare pages using the criteria Google says to consider here: developers.google.com/search… There's a lot you can do with this info. Here's a workbook I created that gives you many exercises you can go through to figure out what & how to improve. mariehaynes.com/product/crea… You can use Claude/ChatGPT to some extent to compare pages, but really, you really need to do this manually. There are components of page experience that a text based AI tool won't be able to compare. Sometimes you'll find things that can be improved. Perhaps you can be more clear and concise in how you meet searcher need. Perhaps you can add better supporting references. Or maybe you can work on adding more truly original, helpful insight - based on your experience - and removing pages that are simply regurgitating what everyone else says. But sometimes the issue is not fixable. For example, if you're a blog writing about a topic and you're being consistently outranked by real world businesses who advise people on that topic in real life, that's going to be hard to remedy. 6) What about E-E-A-T? Yes, core updates assess E-E-A-T. But know that E-E-A-T is not as simple as just having author bios. It's so much more. E-E-A-T represents signals Google can use to determine your authenticity. Don't worry about understanding E-E-A-T. Instead, focus on the helpful content questions. Reputation is key - not necessarily reviews, but really having evidence that people on the web consider your site as one of the go-to places for your topic. Popularity - being known as a topic expert - is important. I think the most important of the helpful content questions is this: ◾️Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? Hope this helps! And I wish you the best of luck with your rankings! (Which reminds me...I need to do another podcast on core updates!)

New from Google: "We're reducing the visibility of FAQ rich results, and limiting How-To rich results to desktop devices." Finishes rolling out globally, to all languages next week. FAQ rich results will only be shown for "well-known, authoritative government and health websites."