SEO NEWS: Google Bugs? — Jordan Koene // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “This past week and weekend, there were a couple of bugs that were noticed or recognized as updates but really were bugs in Google and like genuine issues, not necessarily algorithm update oradjustments to the way that algorithms make decisions in the SERP but fundamental bugs and flaws that got fixed.” -Jordan

• “The big problems were there was a ton of volatility in the rankings noticing the same domains or similar domains showing up, noticing the same links even, in some cases showing up and that ultimately impacted where the other results are showing up. It also impacted the positioning of different features or elements in the SERPs.” -Jordan

• “What actually misfired here is a little bit unknown. Google isnt particularly forthcoming with their mistakes and in telling everybody whats going on but theres a couple of interesting things that came out of this. One of them is that a lot of large domains were really showing up here especially like news, media, articles were really recognized as some of the ones that jumped to the top here.” -Jordan

• “Ultimately, one of the theories behind this bug is that there must be some way that Google is dealing with the results around domain authorityand how they, for lack of better terminology, suppress that authority for certain high profile domains or links that may have some strong relevancy across particular keywords and how they suppress that to ensure that there isnt the same domain showing upor a highly relevant and authoritative domain showing up very frequently in the results.” -Jordan

• “Theres a variety of different tweets around the way that they fixed this and then also theres subsequent multiple issues here that took place over the course of the weeks. There was an indexing failure issue that happened a few weeks before, there was a SERP and results issue that happened this past weekend.” -Jordan

• “In summary format, Google basically came out to say that this is complicated stuff and theres a lot of things that are going on it and mistakes can happen. I think that to your point there are existing monitoring systems today in the SEO community that help us identify these.” -Jordan

• “In this particular scenario, it seems like Googlefelt like it was best to come out and state that a mistake happened versus sweeping it under the rug and just letting the industry coin it a random algorithm update.” -Jordan

• “Basically we are looking at how Google is ingesting the data, how is it rendering, how is it extracting certain data points like structure data, metadata, and determining these elements for signaling. That is the indexing process. This was the first issue that was promptly fixed.” -Jordan

• “The other issue was more around the actual SERP results and the fluctuations that ultimately really drove a lot more volatility and rocked a lot of people because the SEO community was thinking this was some major update.” -Jordan

• “They are not necessarily the same thing and just to make things more complicated here, I do believe that these two failures or bugs are connected to one another because this indexing process happens first. This is the way that Google identifies and defines the data points that they want to use to provide rankings and then later on in the week, you see these adjustments in rankings, these fluctuations that probably connects to the index problem that happened earlier in the week.” -Jordan

• “I do believe that theres a connection between the indexation process and then the ranking results process and the volatility that we saw in the past week are just two bugs that hit Google back to back.” -Jordan

• “I think that this is small potatoes. I dont think this is the first time that this happened or the last time its going to happen but what I really do appreciate about this is that they came out and say that it was a bug as it makes Google look more human. Secondly, I do believe that theres agood chance that Google is probably going to learn from this and avoid issues like this in the future.” -Jordan

• “Its all about personalization and Google has been going on in this direction for a long, long time but its a much more direct and very forward way of saying, hey look, this is something that youve looked at. Its part of your activity and we noticed it and you may want to revisit some of these pages.” -Jordan

• “Ultimately, the biggest benefit to SEOs right now is understanding how branding plays into SEO and in being relevant in personalization, thats one component. The other component here is that its just a constant threat to the newcomer or any challenger who is trying to rise in the search results because quite frankly, personalization is, in many cases and in my opinion, going to be in the favor of the incumbent whos had great search results and visits from those search results in the past.” -Jordan

• “If you are already at the top of those search results, chances are you are going to be the item that is clicked and the next time somebody comes back theres more real estate thats taken up by the incumbent as opposed to the challenger brand.” -Ben