Mailbag: Google Update’s, Covid-19 SEO, Linkedin Delisted — Jordan Koene // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “Naturally as time progresses, we get a lot more information. One of the important things to start off with is, as of the time that we are recording this, its been announced that the update is complete and now we can see where the dust is settling.” -Jordan

• “Its time for a reality check that Google is updating for their purposes and SEOs are inherently going to be upset because their traffic is impacted, or most of them are.” -Ben

• “This update is really focused on what we call information retrieval so its really focused on the idea of how is Google obtaining different information and signals and then showcasing that in the search engine.” -Jordan

• “I think Google is getting better at communicating changes. Ive seen a lot of Twitter activities. Ive seen a pre-announcement style of informing the community. As communication evolves for Google around updates, so do the expectation.” -Jordan

• “Some of the bigger brands that are really hurt by this update include the social media profiles sites like Twitter and Facebook. We also saw a good collection of media sites get hurt by this update and its no surprise.” -Jordan

• “When you got this larger conglomerate media site to have aggregated content or syndicated content and you have social media sites that have user-generated content, what you end up seeing is a deterioration of the relevancy of that content to users expectations.” -Jordan

• “On the flip side, the winners have generally been in categories that are much more concrete with their content. Websites like Amazon and other retailers target was a huge winner.” -Jordan

• “What Google is trying to accomplish here is the ability to improve user experience in longtail queries. That is the concrete thing that Google is trying to solve for information retrieval, language relevance types updates.” -Jordan

• “Ultimately, where Google is going with this is how do we ensure that the diversity in selection in our search result has the most affinity with user expectation?” -Jordan

• “Most notably, the biggest set of changes has been around how Google is adapting the MyBusiness capabilities during this corona update. Everything from the ability to showcase if you have pick-up services, conveniently making changes for certain categories like restaurants and hotels.” -Jordan

• “LinkedIn, according to what we know, accidentally de-indexed a site from Google and this has happened before. This is not an uncommon event in our space and they since corrected that and theyre back in Google. This can happen from time to time.” -Jordan

• “To put it easily, this was a mistake and these are the mistakes that are avoidable versus the one that you learn from.” -Jordan

• “I have actually seen the way Google has transitioned through this COVID 19 scenario and the impact to marketing dollars and recognizing that they are not taking the approach of lets say, greed or growth. They have actually taken an approach that is focused on the user and user benefits.” -Jordan