For the first time Google has decided to throw us a bone of sorts if your site got impacted by the last June core update in 2019. Well its not really much but hey its something!
Their advice was cryptic which of course is not news to most of us. The initial message was that there is nothing to fix that since its a core update its not like a penalty and that there really is nothing to fix. So that is not much help to anyone. However there was mention of panda as well as the quality raters guidelines. So those are pretty good clues as to what the core update had an effect on. With in my own research after the june 2019 core update I found that people were talking about different things and that there was no consensus on what was effected was it on site signals or off site signals like links. It seems to us that it was both but the bigger factor being offsite
What To Look At If You Were Hit By The September 2019 Core Update
So what is Panda Anyways?
Nope not a cute little bear that eats eucalyptus leafs but rather a nightmare that started in 2011 for anyone that was pushing out low quality content that was just designed to rank and not much else. This was a common practice with affiliate site’s and a lot of low quality SEO work was done this way.
So how do you know if this is a problem with your site tanking?
- If you have low quality content meaning it is not useful to anyone and was just thrown up there to rank and not offer any useful information to the user.
- If your content is thin meaning you have lots of pages that have very little content on them. For example a page with an image and a paragraph of text. Right now google seems to favor long content which is content that is as long as 3000 words. So that’s a lot!
- Doing a content audit is a good idea when you have been hit and think that low quality content might be the problem. Easiest place to start is to take a look at google analytics and look at your main landing pages. This will tell you which pages are working for you. Use a crawler like Screaming Frog and crawl your website, then look at all the pages that you have and compare them to the ones that are lander’s and the ones that are not getting landed on. Then evaluate the pages that are not getting any traffic to them and either, combine several in to one useful piece of content or delete them all together and clean up all the dead thin content that way. Once that is done wait and see how the site does over the next 6 weeks. If you got it right you should start seeing and uptick in traffic again.
- The Take Away here is that you should produce quality content that is engaging and useful as well as unique to offer the user something that they can not find everywhere. Now most subjects are out there and talked about on the web so think more along the lines of how can I make this better and more useful to the end user.
Now Lets Talk Penguin
This algorithm was introduced in 2012 and its main purpose is to go after bad link building practices like link wheels and such. Pretty much low level spammy links as well as and overoptimization of anchor text. So if you are link building and are doing it in a way that is nefarious this was designed to catch you. Google does not want you building links rather you should be earning them naturally which is how we build links. Using outreach and offering value to other sites and visitors will get you links the right way! One of the bad parts of this algorithm is that you could have bad links pointing to you that you did not build but you just happened to acquire them or someone is building them to try and affect your site in a negative way. For this google has the link disavow tool which you can access thru search console. Penguin used to affect your whole site meaning if you had one page with bad links the whole site would loose trust in googles eyes and be affected negatively. They have since dialed this back some from what research has shown.
So What Do I Do If I Think Bad Links Are My Problem?
- Do a link audit – This can be quite pain staking if you have a lot of links. Also if you used a cheap link building service you will find lots of links that are spammy and those need to be removed or disavowed.
- What does a spammy link Look Like? These are links like comment spam which is just someone coming along on a blog post or a forum just for the purposes of getting a link. Also any link building tactic that is overused in a link profile can be an issue. So if all you ever do is get guest post and all your links are coming from guest post that is not natural and google will catch it. so sometimes what is not a spammy link can turn in to one if its overused.
- Remove Bad Links – Remove the bad links by reaching out to the website they are on or disavow them to let google know you do not want them to give you credit for these links. This is best done by someone that knows what they are doing because you could be getting rid of good links and further damage the site.
- Analyze Your Link Profile – Take a look at your overall link profile as well as the anchor text. If you have lots of links pointing to your site with the same anchor text that can be a problem. The idea is to have a natural looking link profile. So anchor text could be anything from a keyword to words like, site, click here or just the bare url itself.
What Does EAT Mean?
EAT stands for expertise, authority and trust and its the new buzz word around the seo world. Well not so new but its getting more and more attention paid to it.
This is tied in to googles quality raters guidelines which are actual guidelines given to actual people that go out and evaluate websites based on these rules and feed that info back in to google. This is something google has been doing for sometime. Its a good way to manually check their algorithm and make sure its preforming properly by giving quality results to users. I believe last I herd there were thousands of these folks employed by google doing this on a daily basis. So it would make sense that these guidelines would give some insight into what google expects from a site. If you want to take a look at googles quality raters guidelines we have a copy that we saved for you to look at also you can google it and find the latest one since they do change from time to time.
How Do You Build Up Your EAT?
- Quality Content
- Work on becoming a recognized authority in your industry
- Author bio’s for your content help especially if the author is known in the field.
- Work on building up your authority by adding a linkedin, a wikipedia page is helpful as well.
- Get quality sites linking to you with in your industry as well as any high authority sites that google recognizes like Forbes, NY Times things like that.
- Think quality and user experience at all times.
Take Away On This Google Fix Your Site Advice
So why did we say all this to you on how to fix any issues your site has with the latest June 2019 core update?
- The Panda as well as the Penguin algorithm are now baked directly in to the core algorithm so looking at them is an important clue to any issues a site might have.
- Looking at EAT is important since a lot of it is based on what google’s own quality raters guidelines and therefore gives great insight in to what they are looking for in a site.
- Take an honest look at your site and consider where you might have gone off the rails based on EAT / Panda / Penguin and you will find the necessary fix to get your site ranking once again! If its too much and you need an seo expert to help we are here to help you! Just contact us with the details and lets talk about getting you on the road to recovery.
