SEARCHENGINES
Another Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On October 28th?
Some SEOs are noticing a possible Google search ranking algorithm update on or around October 28th where sites hit by the unconfirmed October 13ish update and even the October spam update (amongst others) are noticing big swings the other way in terms of their Google rankings and traffic.
Glenn Gabe shared a number of charts on Twitter documenting some large publishers based in the United Kingdom and beyond that showed big swings on October 28th, after being hit by previous updates. Here are those charts:
And here are some other sites seeing a lot of movement based on the 10/28 update. They were also heavily impacted by the September broad core update. I’m still digging in, but again, a BIG heads-up that something rolled out 10/28 that looks significant. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/TbG7gUs8Vr
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 31, 2022
And now I’m hearing from some impacted by the October Spam Update that are seeing reversals. Here is a site first impacted by the Sep broad core update, then tanked w/the spam update, but then started to recover with the 10/28 update. This is crazy stuff… pic.twitter.com/6z0KDbPPiV
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 31, 2022
Other SEOs also noted:
Yes if you’re OK with anonymised screenshots: pic.twitter.com/NVNdGlroux
— Barry Adams 📰 (@badams) October 31, 2022
Yeah I also notice a partial recovery for some French publishers.
— Kevin Monier (@Kevin_Monier) October 31, 2022
Seeing the same. Huge fluctuations https://t.co/3G2fM48tWF
— Taylor Kurtz (@RealTaylorKurtz) October 31, 2022
WSJ, CNN and Bloomberg, which all saw big declines during the Sept Core Update, appear to be bouncing back within the last few days. pic.twitter.com/1hXylwn7fd
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) October 31, 2022
The weird thing is that the overall chatter within the SEO community around October 28th was pretty light. I saw one mention of an update on October 28th in the WebmasterWorld forums and that is it. That SEO said “I saw some changes as well on the 28th, let’s wait a few days to see how it moves. It’s Halloween, so change of user behaviour.” You can tell by how they wrote behavior that they are based in the UK region. While a different WebmasterWorld thread has an SEO saying “After 40 days of torturous nonstop decline my oldest site suddenly showed some recovery today. It may be a temporary technical phenomenon and it may continue to slide for another month or forever. But the magnitude and instantaneous nature of this uptick is really stunning (for the size of the site). It erased 2 weeks of declines instantly.” Someone replied to that post agreeing, saying, “whatever Google released around 10/14 or 10/13 was seemingly reverted yesterday 10/29.” Another posted later Monday, “We had a decline on Friday and a very very big hit on Sunday. And today is worse.”
In the comments area here, there are some talking about changes around October 28th, for example, one said that he “lost traffic almost 90%, now my pages are not indexing with no reason. it’s been 3 days now.”
What about the tools?
RankRanger showed the most volatility on mobile out of all the tools on that date:
Mozcast was showing pretty warm weather:
Semrush showed a small spike on that date, note switching it to just UK results didn’t make it any more volatile:
SERPmetrics shows a blip:
Algoroo is calm:
Advanced Web Rankings spiked up a bit on the 28th but not huge:
Accuranker was calm:
CognitiveSEO was calm on October 28th:
SERPwoo shows more on that date:
So did any of you see anything on October 28th? Can you share?
Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages
I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.
In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”
John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”
Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.
Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.
Here are those new posts in context:
I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024
Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:
I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024
And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important
Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”
Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.
Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.
Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Core Update Flux, AdSense Ad Intent, California Link Tax & More
For the original iTunes version, click here.
The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google’s Danny Sullivan went on the defensive on search quality and forum listings in the search results. Google’s site reputation abuse spam policy will be fought both algorithmically and through manual actions. Google responded to The Verge mocking its search rankings over best printer. Google Search Console has a new unused ownership tokens page. Some sites may see the Google Indexing API work for a limited time on unsupported content types. And having two sites won’t result in your sites search ranking decline. BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will test Zstd compression soon. Google Search is testing thumbs-up and down buttons for product carousels. Google is testing new sitelinks designs. Google Notes on Search may not go away in May. Google Maps no longer supports draft reviews. Google Maps released a bunch of new maps, directions, travel and EV features. Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns now support AI image generation. Google Ads is testing a similar product carousel. Google Ads reminds advertisers that ad customizers are going away. Google Ads is testing a new horizontal ad card format. Google AdSense has these new ad intent formats. Google AdSense publishers are reporting lower RPM earnings since mid-February. Google threatens to drop links to California news publishers amongst link tax bill. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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