Winners / Losers — Tyson Stockton // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “This new Google core update is focused on a lot of relevancy. How Google is understanding the intent of the query and the content that follows.” -Tyson

• “As far as the algorithm update and relevancy of what people are looking for, a great example of this would be Spotify. Its still very dominant as a product.” -Tyson

• “In Spotify, we saw a huge decrease. They lost 33% of their visibility this week and the week before, 15%. Its the largest movement Ive seen in this domain for a very, very long time. Where they are losing rankings is largely around artists names or bands names.” -Tyson

• “In this sense, Google is interpreting the intent of those queries information about whats going on with the artist versus that where can I listen. So whats happening is, a lot of publishers have actually moved up since they have that relevancy with the artist.” -Tyson

• Worth noting is that one of the top winners over the last couple of weeks was Google.com. The root domain of Google jumped up 17% this week and another 15% the week before. Another winner that shot up last week was Pinterest.” -Tyson

• “Hopefully Google is pushing this update live to help consumers find more relevant information. On the flip side, Ill play devils advocate as well, if Google is going to push an algorithm change live that dramatically changes the prioritization and visibility of their own domains, maybe this is the best time to do it when people are a little pre-occupied with some other things.” -Ben

• “We also saw a movement in finance from this algorithm update. NerdWallettook a significant drop down in their overall visibility. Also, thebalance.comand CreditKarma all three of them saw almost a 10% to 34% decrease in their overall domain visibility.” -Tyson

• “We have also seen a rise in the niche articles that are very, very specific to users intent that are related to financial topics. So the historical contents about those big players which were broadly based on how to invest and different elements of investment have now become us having a piece of newer relevant information.” -Tyson

• “Specifically looking at the big ten e-commerce sites in the US, almost all of them have been up through this algorithm update.” -Tyson

• “The largest winner by far from this was Target. They have been having some strong performance and they inched up into that competitive third-tier space. Its Amazon at the top, Walmart in clear second, and then Target from this update had jumped up basically 20% points since last week and then another 10% the week before.” -Tyson

• “Recently, Amazon pulled out their PLAs. They want from being one of the largest spenders on PLAs to not now spending anything on PLAs. That actually drove down the CPC in the PLA space.” -Tyson

• “We could hypothesize why Amazon did that. I would lean into that Amazon knows that majority of its users are starting their product search within Amazon so whats the value of that ad spend. On the flip side of this, you have Google wantingto be more competitive in the space as they have been still falling behind in this head to head battle with Amazon.” -Tyson

• “Google awhile back has announced that the shopping tab or the product feed specific to the shopping segment of their site is nowfree for websites to upload their product feeds. From that, one of the benefits from the Google side is they have the PRPs of leveling the playing field for small businesses so they can get their product feeds in.” -Tyson

• “On the selfish side, they are also building out their inventory and by opening it up for free, theyre getting all these product feeds from merchants that are building their structure data around individual products which can then open different ways that they integrated into the SERP.” -Tyson