Google Search is doing a lot of weird shit as of late. August had a significant core update, then september too and now October.
Every month they have this sort of very low budget "Google Search Direct" where a super creepy probably rapist tells you about what changed but barely explains anything at all.
![[Image: hqdefault.jpg]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RfrDCM69d5I/hqdefault.jpg)
The rest of the information you have to puzzle together from vague X posts or interviews with various Google employees.
There was also the HCU (helpful content update), and all these updates are absolutely hammering sites and putting random quora pages, Outlook India and reddit posts on top.
They are wiping out all the SEO spam sites though but not the hacked domains that redirect you to pornos. It's weird.
They've also greatly reduced the volume of indexing. Deciding that on certain topics they simply have enough results and don't need more of the same content.
What used to be 'Optimized' is now 'Over-Optimized' even some big name SEO gurus are giving up. Take the FAQs for example, those are being removed from the results for anything but government information or medical topics.
Overall I expect a lot of businesses who aren't on top of this losing a ton of traffic. Because they no longer remove only pages that are low quality, they simply remove entire sites now. For the first time though, I'm sort of winning at SEO(?) because most companies follow the same guidebook that used to work and it doesn't work anymore and I thrive in chaos like this.
I can put it up a blog post on our company site and it will rank #1 within a day or 2. But I also spend a day or 2 this week to fix 250 broken URLs or wrongly indexed pages. Imagine having to do that for a company the size of Nike or Microsoft. This update is absolute madness.
Seeing that your site is cratering is also more difficult than ever with Google Analytics 4, which mixes 'expected traffic' with actual results. So you can look at your results today and see 200 visitors and find out next month it was actually 2.
Every month they have this sort of very low budget "Google Search Direct" where a super creepy probably rapist tells you about what changed but barely explains anything at all.
The rest of the information you have to puzzle together from vague X posts or interviews with various Google employees.
There was also the HCU (helpful content update), and all these updates are absolutely hammering sites and putting random quora pages, Outlook India and reddit posts on top.
They are wiping out all the SEO spam sites though but not the hacked domains that redirect you to pornos. It's weird.
They've also greatly reduced the volume of indexing. Deciding that on certain topics they simply have enough results and don't need more of the same content.
What used to be 'Optimized' is now 'Over-Optimized' even some big name SEO gurus are giving up. Take the FAQs for example, those are being removed from the results for anything but government information or medical topics.
Overall I expect a lot of businesses who aren't on top of this losing a ton of traffic. Because they no longer remove only pages that are low quality, they simply remove entire sites now. For the first time though, I'm sort of winning at SEO(?) because most companies follow the same guidebook that used to work and it doesn't work anymore and I thrive in chaos like this.
I can put it up a blog post on our company site and it will rank #1 within a day or 2. But I also spend a day or 2 this week to fix 250 broken URLs or wrongly indexed pages. Imagine having to do that for a company the size of Nike or Microsoft. This update is absolute madness.
Seeing that your site is cratering is also more difficult than ever with Google Analytics 4, which mixes 'expected traffic' with actual results. So you can look at your results today and see 200 visitors and find out next month it was actually 2.
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