Not All Sites Will Recover from Google Updates
It’s no secret Google has released a lot of Algorithm Updates recently.
- Currently, they’re rolling out (March 13, 2025 – this is expected to be finished around the end of the month)
- Content Spam Update, yes another one to specifically target worthless AI content (December 2024)
- Site Reputation Abuse – even though it appears sites like Forbes is at it again with parasite SEO (November 2024)
- Helpful Content Update (August 2024)
- Explicit Fake Content Update, aimed to target deepfakes (July 2024)
- Content Spam Update (June 2024)
- AI Generated Summaries (AI Overviews) (May 2024)
- Site Reputation Abuse – first attempt at combating parasite SEO (May 2024)
- Spam & Manipulative Content Update (March 2024)
In a normal year, there’s usually 2ish large algorithm updates. However, in the age of AI – Google is telling us to expect algorithm updates to be more frequent. So make sure you monitor stats carefully on all of your sites.
Sites Should Not Expect to Recover Fully
Danny Sullivan, a Google Search Advocate, gave us some insights from his Twitter thread when he discussed:
- There will be a series of updates to “better surface relevant, satisfying content [from creators] throughout the year”
- However, he added “With the important caveat that this doesn’t mean all sites will go back up to wherever they were if they are down from a previous peak”
- “Some sites with great content and hearts in the right place still don’t provide a satisfying page experience”
What Have We Found In Early Testing
I bold-faced that last bullet to reiterate ranking goes beyond having great content. Even a site that ranked great, like Retro Dodo got hammered from recent updates. However, I bolded that bullet-point because it gives us a little insight on why certain optimizations SEOs (including me) have tested are working favorably to recover rankings. Additionally, following what’s happening in lawsuits against Google has also helped us discover more insights to how their algorithm works.
Please take this next bit of information with a grain of salt because it’s small sample size of us who have tested it. And for more context, about a dozen or so SEOs and I participate in a biweekly SEO mastermind where we share our SEO discoveries.
Remember, a good page experience goes beyond CWV, and page load speeds (both of which are important), and accounts for a lot of other User Experience signals. What we have found to be incredibly effective are the following:
- Title Tags (aka Meta Titles)
- Header Structure (cascading / follows logical hierarchy)
- Optimized Headers
- Specifically H1 Differentiated from Title Tag
- Cleaning Up Internal Linking
In addition to “internal linking” strategies, all of us also did a lot of content hygiene, such as:
- Removed old-outdated content
- Updated/improved thin content (and if we couldn’t we moved it to another page, or just deleted it)
- Canonicalized pages that were alike / competed for the same terms (but the pages being compared were important)
- Noindex tag (content we still wanted crawled, but didn’t want in search result)
Experienced SEOs are probably saying “Those things listed above are just ‘best practices’ for SEO.” Do you know what – you’re right, but I’m not arguing that, and simply stating it for those who don’t understand that. Moreover, with the many options we have in our tool-belt for optimization strategies, sometimes these basic things get overlooked because those other optimizations were bringing us more improvement at the moment. And, this is why it’s important to be dynamic with your strategies instead of being fixated on the “plan” you originally laid out.
If you’re new to SEO Start Here:
If you’re feeling lost, and have questions – don’t hesitate to reach out to me via our contact page, or by connecting with me via LinkedIn.
