Are you a digital marketing professional? Perhaps you’re an SEO writer or work in link building or other SEO areas. It can be an exciting career, full of fun tasks, puzzles to solve and helping businesses rank higher on the almighty Google. Marketing can be a rewarding profession as you can help people sell products and services that they’re passionate about and believe in. Part of this means staying up to date with the latest trends in the search engine space. And in March, Google had a massive update called a “Core Update”. This is when they release a sweeping revision to their algorithm and the way the search engine functions. But what do you need to know as a marketer about this latest update? This helpful article will tell you, so continue reading to learn more.
Aiming to Reduce “Unhelpful” Content
The large driver of this update was to reduce the amount of unhelpful content by 40%. There have been significant changes to the algorithm to improve search result quality and remove spam from results pages. Poor-quality content will now rank lower or not at all. The update will also target content abuse, site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse.
Deindexation
Indexation is the term used to describe the list of search results available on a search engine, like an index in a physical book. Deindexation is when Google obliterates websites from the search results pages. As a result of this latest Core update, some websites deemed low-quality, unhelpful, irrelevant or to have poor user experience are thoroughly scrubbed from Google’s index.
This is part of that 40% drive that we mentioned above. Also, any website found to violate Google’s strict guidelines or that uses black hat SEO tactics will find it deindexed instead of just penalized, as it was in the past.
The big thing about this course of action is that deindexation used to be a manual task Google staff had to carry out, and now it’s part of the Core algorithm. This means that these dodgy sites will be automatically deindexed unless they undertake a severe content and user experience refresh. It may be worth performing a site audit of all the websites you manage, build, or utilize for clients to ensure that they are safe and can continue to rank on Google.
No Websites Are Safe
Even older websites that have survived prior Core updates with no penalty are not safe from Google’s warpath, if they are out of date, have poor user experience or low-quality content, they’re also at risk of deindexation. If you have a client’s website that is touch-dated, now is the time to talk to them about a content and UX refresh. This should have been identified in your website audit that we suggested above.
AI Content in the Firing Line
One interesting development that has arisen from the latest Core update is how smaller, largely AI-generated sites are coming under scrutiny. Google has refined its ability to detect AI-generated content, and they’re even going after small fry in this space. This is pretty significant news, as some marketers can try to cut corners using AI, as can some content writers.
If you are using AI on a small scale, it is worth ensuring that you’re editing the content to maintain a human voice, flow, and tone. There are some useful tools you can use to achieve this, but an experienced content editor should be able to do this, too. Does your agency have one?
New Spam Policy
As part of the Core update, Google is updating spam policies to remove generic, spammy content that might only be published to build links or rankings. Content is king, as always. Ensure that the content you’re writing for the client is authentic, well-written, well-researched, and properly edited.
Site Reputation Abuse Crackdown
Google is cracking down on the issue of site reputation abuse, which is when trusted websites host low-quality, third-party content to take advantage of the hosting site’s strong reputation.
Google has provided the following example of this issue:
“For example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site. Such content ranking highly in Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.”
Google will now deem such content as spam if it’s produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of the website owner to ensure relevance and quality.
What Can Marketers Do?
If you’re a digital marketer, your job is to ensure that you are employing ethical SEO and link-building practices. This means that your outreach should be targeted at authoritative sites that directly relate to the link you’re inserting. So, inserting a link to fitness supplements on a fitness blog is fine, but inserting that same link into a housekeeping blog probably isn’t. If you’re an Australia-based business, then work with an Australian link building service who can create content for local and relevant websites.
In terms of content writing, as we mentioned above, ensure that your in-house or freelance writers are producing high-quality, well-researched and written blogs and website content that delivers useful information to a reader, first and foremost.
This helpful article has covered what digital marketers need to know about the latest Google Core Update and how they can keep their clients’ websites ranking on search engine results pages and avoid deindexation.
