#googlechanges

On a Google Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller answered the question of how to get a site that lost rankings back on track. Mueller responded that it’s not possible to give specific advice without reviewing the actual site. But he did offer some general tips for explaining what could be going on.

Question About Significant Changes

The person asking the question said there had been changes in the search results (SERPs) and wanted to know how to get the site ranking again.

“There seems to be a very significant change that took place on January 14th. My traffic and revenue have been negatively affected despite no penalty or notification of any problems. While I’m used to ebb and flow of traffic and revenue… are you able to give any advice on specific things to focus on to get back on track?”

January 14, 2020 Update?

John Mueller denied that any special update occurred on January 14th and offered a caveat.

“So first of all I’m not aware of anything specific that happened on January the 14th. So I don’t really know exactly what you’re pointing at there. I also don’t know your site so it’s really hard to say what might be involved there.”

Mueller Comments on Significant SERP Changes

Mueller now states that there are multiple reasons why search traffic may undergo significant changes, not all of them related to an update. So, he’s trying to get the publisher to step back and widen his perspective on the multiple reasons that can explain why search traffic patterns can vary significantly.

It’s Not Your Site, It’s the Searchers

This is Mueller’s response:

“In general I think there are a few things to keep in mind. On the one hand there are lots of sites in the search results so it’s never the case that everyone is demoted and like no longer visible in search because there are always sites that come up as well. It’s not that we don’t show anything in search. So these kinds of changes are generally pretty normal and they can come and go and that can be due to changes in our algorithms, they can be due to changes in the way that people search. So if a topic suddenly is no longer as interesting then maybe you’ll start to have less traffic for those kinds of queries just because it’s something that people don’t search for anymore.”

It is Your Site

Next Mueller suggested that the reason a site can lose traffic could be from a change in site quality (something the publisher changed on their website) or a change on Google’s side where they changed how they identify quality. This is Mueller’s response:

“It can also be due to changes in quality on the website or the perceived quality of a website based on our algorithms. But all of these things are really kind of hard to guess at without knowing your website.”

Takeaways

SERPs Change

The search results (SERPs) are in a state of change. Sometimes this could be because a competitor is becoming more active online. Sometimes it’s because there are new competitors. Don’t expect the search results to stay the same.

Searchers Change

If search habits change, then search traffic will change. In the offline world, for whatever reason, many supermarkets aren’t carrying soy milk but are stocked with multiple brands of oat milk. It’s possible that “traffic” to the supermarket for “soy milk” has declined. So they stopped carrying it. Here is a 12 month Google Trends graph showing the relative popularity of soy milk versus oat milk. As you can see, there has been an explosion of search activity for oat milk, double the the search trends for soy milk. The supermarket responded to consumer demand by providing more oat milk. Similarly, you should always try to keep an eye on consumer use of keywords. It could be that consumer popularity has changed. If tastes change then it may be time to update to what users are interested in. This can most definitely cause a negative change in search traffic.

Site Changes

Sometimes a change on your site can cause Google to understand it less. As a hypothetical example, if a business card site begins publishing marketing related content, it’s possible that Google might begin to see the site as being less authoritative about business cards.

Google Changes

Sometimes Google changes how it interprets search queries and web content. This is something that has constantly been changing for the past couple years (Rank Brain, BERT, etc.). Always check the search results to try to understand why the winners are winning and you are not. And don’t seize on the most obvious reasons as those could be red herrings.  

In early 2020, Google made a big update. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Public Search Liaison, tweeted about the update. He said, “We (Google) do updates all the time.” While it’s true that small changes happen throughout the year (Google made over 3,000 updates and changes to its search engine last year alone, wow), the recent update once again brought to light the fact that Google search engine also keeps constantly evolving.

As a business owner, you need to update your knowledge of how the search engine works by keeping up with Google changes. SEO in 2020 is going to be all about your site’s E-A-T, which stands for Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness. So for your content to have a high ranking in search you need to be an expert on the topic (think tons of relevant content), you need to be able to speak with authority (think well-researched content that adds value) and you need to be trustworthy (think backlinks and citations). Sounds easy, right? If the content on your site abides by these three rules, you have nothing to worry about.

While that’s easier said than done, the first time in the process is understanding the changes. Before you rush to work on your content, let’s understand Google Changes in 2020 and what you as a business owner need to know.

Changes in the Google search algorithm

Google’s search engine is constantly evolving and getting smarter. In late 2019, Google updated its algorithm based on BERT (or bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, phew now there’s a mouthful). BERT uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a massive data set to help understand what people are searching for. Where a few years ago it only caught keywords in search, today the search engine also understands relevancy. Each update and change makes the algorithm smarter. This is so that the search engine better understands the end user’s (your customers) search intent.

Pandu Nayak, Google VP of research, said “This is the single biggest … most positive change we’ve had in the last five years and perhaps one of the biggest since the beginning.”

What about ‘local’ and ‘near me’ searches?

Studies show that 92% of customers choose businesses on the first page of search results. Google said that the number of mobile searches checking for local businesses grew by over 250% between 2017 and 2019. According to Google changes in 2020, there are three factors that matter when it comes to ‘near me’ searches: distance, prominence, and relevance.

Reviews, reviews, reviews: No such thing as too many reviews

Reviews will continue to have an important influence on the ranking of the website. Businesses with positive reviews will continue to rank higher in regular and local searches. Websites that get reviews and comments will also rank higher in searches.

Think of the bigger Schema of things

We couldn’t resist the pun. Simply put, schema helps search engines understand what content is present on a page. SEO experts swear by Schema.org and your in-house SEO guy will agree that it is extremely helpful in getting those SEO results. Schema helps Google understand if there is a list or a survey or an image on a page so that it brings up the appropriate search results. On January 21, Google announced that starting from April 6, 2020, it will go all-in with Schema.org and will no longer support data-vocabulary markup (another type of code) for rich results.