Been Awhile...

I've been busy...real busy.

Snowboarding in pow for 5/6 days, consulting sessions, big custom link orders, helping some people with disavows and lots of shit posting on the bird app.

Not sure if you noticed but the SEO community been kind of riled up the last few days.

Big ass update...the biggest I've seen since Penguin in April, 2012.

Before you ask me what I think, I'll tell you.

The bigger the update...the more revisions it'll have, the more rollbacks we'll see, the harder it is to see any signals through the noise.

So don't ask me my opinion, we're WEEKS away from the dust even settling where the data will be consistent enough to produce decent hypothesis from (but we can start leaning NOW).

Anybody telling you they have this shit figured out today should be widely ignored...sort of like the current generation of SEO influencer types.

 

Holy shit they are a cringe-laden wankfest.

Not sure if you noticed but in 2023, Google started running a Core update and then 1-3 weeks later they ran a much more heavily discussed 'named update'.

Core on March 15th, Reviews Update on April 23rd.

Core on August 22nd, Helpful Content on September 14th.

Core on November 2nd, Reviews on Nov 8th.

And now, Core AND Spam on March 6th.

The timeline is accelerating...

It's really quite brilliant by them, get everyone to focus on their content and reviews and spam while ignoring Core...which has both Panda and Fred rolled into it now.

And it's really quite obvious...if you're paying attention...Google doesn't want your content competing for clicks anymore.

Reviews, Helpful, Reviews, Spam (AI variety).

All based on pushing YOUR content out of the SERPs so they can better control click distribution.

They don't want people landing on YOUR review site to make buying decisions, they want them in Google Shopping.

Or on Youtube, where they can monetize UGC for more revenue.

And if they HAVE to display info/review content in the SERPs, it's going to be on a big ass authority (para) site.

Or in more UGC...

 

Don't believe me?

Watch this, I can do this all day for terms that used to pop 7-8 placements on page 1 from the 'info/review' bucket...now it's 1-2 max.

https://www.loom.com/share/a9a6557de7d848419c562185504553b5?sid=b4fce420-e585-41c5-9f5d-dbf741421cfa

 

So...update frequency is increasing.

Google is making it clear what type of content they DON'T want to serve as results anymore...

What to do?

Study the SERPs.

You'll learn more right now (all the times but especially during a big update) by studying what Google is providing as results than you will reading emails, X tweets, blog posts, recovery guides, gumroad ebooks...anything less than taking a refresher over at BlueHatSEO.

It costs you nothing but time to Google terms and pay attention to what they're showing us.

Focus on terms of varied intent. Take notes.

You're looking for patterns now and eventually, finding the edges.

The leverage points.

It won't stay like this but if you start tracking what you're seeing now and can compare it to what you're seeing in three weeks...you are going to be so far ahead of the average SEO it won't even be funny.

And there are a LOT of average fucking SEOs in this industry...the shit coming out of their mouth the last few days, good Lord.

Average is probably too kind tbh but I'll save that derision for later.

You're here now and you have an opportunity to learn more over the next month than you have in years (OGs who have seen it all before withstanding, you guys are just nodding your heads in agreement), maybe in your entire SEO career.

Take advantage of that opportunity.

It won't come around that often...12 years since Penguin next month.

These big updates are different beasts, enjoy it!

All the best,

Grind

P.S. How'd I do? Some shit got slapped, duh. If you're testing, you're pushing boundaries. Push boundaries, updates won't treat you kindly.

All the sites I care about are fine, Core loves him some Natural Anchor Text as much as he dislikes you using exacts (long term...you can get away with it for awhile, how many sites wish they'd listened to me for the last couple years today?).

I've seen some natural variance on different projects where the T5 blasts hit and caused a dance, nothing significant, a page or 2.

I see that all the time when the anchors filter through and you get some alignment that temporarily causes a dance.

They'll be back higher but it'll probably take longer than normal because everything takes longer during updates as crawling and indexing slows down.

Business as usual...big task this weekend is pulling metrics on all inventory and reclassifying sites post update.

P.S.S As always, consulting and links that actually move the needle over at https://clients.grindstoneseo.com