May 2022 Broad Core Algorithm Update

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I am Michael and he is- Arthur. Very good. You know your name. We're off to a good start. How are you going? I'm good. Can we start again?

ARTHUR: No, no, no. We're not starting again. That's a good start. I don't know. I really don't know what to say. I'm doing well. I am doing well. Okay. Well, I'm happy actually, because there was an algorithm update and none of our clients have been hit. that we know of. We know all of our clients.

MICHAEL: Yeah, we do. We've checked. They've all made it through unscathed so far. But the topic of this episode is the May Broadcore Algorithm Update. It's a pretty boring name, but that's what Google gives them now. Very boring names when they do admit that there's been an update.

ARTHUR: I wonder why they stopped giving them fun names like Panda and Penguin.

MICHAEL: I reckon it's because they know the SEO world goes berserk. And if they know that Panda is onsite, then they're going to be focusing onsite. If they know that Penguin's offsite, they're going to be focusing on their links. Whereas now it's just generic. And their advice is always, yeah, you know that we know that people that have had a drop will be upset about this, but don't change anything. Don't fix anything. It's not a penalty against you. There's nothing you can do. Just some sites are doing better now. That's their general advice. You know, they try and confuse the issue, I guess. But let's talk about the actual topic, which is the algorithm updates rolled out about a week ago.

ARTHUR: Yup.

MICHAEL: They normally say it takes one to two weeks to roll out. We'd see things instantly.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Within, within 24 hours, 24 to 48 hours. If you'd been, you'd know if you'd been hit.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But what does happen sometimes is they tweak things or roll things back or adjust stuff here and there. So I guess that one week to two week line is probably good in that you shouldn't be immediately rushing and changing things on your site.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Don't panic. A lot of people panic and start, you know, rocking the boat too much and disavowing links and redoing the whole site. Yep, only to find they've made things worse.

MICHAEL: Yep. So sit there, let the dust settle as we always like to say. Not always easy when you've had a drop in traffic, but it is the best course of action. Hmm. But, um, I guess we've, we've been doing a bit of reading and a bit of analysis and we have some comments around the things that seem to have happened or that we've been seeing, uh, out there, you know, I guess, common things that sites that have been hit have common things that sites that have done well have again, this is not, um, be your end or scientific analysis because this update is still rolling out.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's still very, very, very early days. And, you know, usually it takes a couple of weeks to people to investigate and, you know, test different things and try to, I guess, reverse engineer what Google has done. Um, but yeah, it's still, you know, like you said, it's been less than a week since it started rolling out. So people are scrambling, trying to figure it out, including us.

MICHAEL: So 8th of June is the two week period. So from then on, what is, you'll be expecting to see a lot more commentary, but, um, here's what we've been seeing. First thing, featured snippets. They seem to have been hit in this update. You know, there's lots of sites out there that are losing a hundred percent of their featured snippets. Have you seen that at all with any clients?

ARTHUR: Not with our clients, no.

MICHAEL: Yeah. What I've seen it on a lot is affiliate sites. Well, let's step, let's step back. Affiliate sites seem to be in Google's crosshairs. They're obsessed with trying to take out affiliate sites. They don't like people making money off affiliate. Only they should be the ones that get to make money off people searching for things. It seems typical Google, typical Google. So they're, they're really going after affiliate sites, sites that have product reviews, um, any sort of site that might be maybe only promoting one product as opposed to multiple products or really thin content. They're trying to hit them. So with this featured snippets hit. We think that Google have basically been trying to hit like, you know, really trashy affiliate sites with thin content, weak reviews. And this update has just been really aggressive and it's gone and hit like, you know, legitimate informational sites that were having featured snippets in the past have been caught up in this.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, makes sense. But what do you think it would be targeting that if it's looking at affiliate sites, is it looking at PBNs and poor quality links or content or both?

MICHAEL: That's what it's done in the past. Like the product reviews update, for example, like if an affiliate site is just pushing one product and not giving any other options, they went after that. So there's, you know, back in November and sort of since then there's been More attacks on affiliate sites, but I guess featured snippets is another area where Affiliate sites like to try and draw their traffic from if you can get the featured snippet You're going to get a lot of traffic as well from people clicking through to the site Yeah, so this algorithm update seemingly is really aggressively going after featured snippets There's plenty of like, you know, just legitimate blogs or informational sites that normally get featured snippets that seem to have been caught up in it so, um That's the sort of thing that typically will be tweaked or dialed back a bit, you know, as the update rolls out or as, as things go on, they might make it less aggressive and some of these sites might start to get their featured snippets back. But we, we have been seeing, you know, sites losing all of their featured snippets related to this update. Um, another thing actually at the start, we probably should have said as well, right? This, this update came out 25th of May, but the SERPs were starting to act up a bit like in the week or so leading up to that. So it looks like they've been testing it all.

ARTHUR: Yeah. A number of sites have mentioned throughout May that there's been small unconfirmed updates. Um, I've noticed some client sites, you know, improve some drops slightly, Yep.

MICHAEL: So it was a bit volatile before that. And it always used to be the case many years ago that if you, if your site suddenly started getting heaps of traffic from Google out of nowhere, you're going to get hit by a penalty or algorithm update. You knew the update was coming. Um, everyone sort of knew this update was coming just cause there hadn't been one since November. But, um, the fact that the SERPs started going a bit haywire in the couple of weeks leading up to it is pretty, I guess, good signal that this update was coming. It was being tested and probably something to look out for in the future. You know, if there's chaotic SERPs or heaps of traffic suddenly going to your site, keep calm and carry on, but there could be an update coming. Anyway, coming back to all of our snippet chat, so featured snippets have been hit, but what we've also seen is that there's been a bit of an increase in the FAQ snippets. So for people that don't know what that is, it's in the search results itself, your page shows, and then beneath it there's some questions and answers from your site that are expandable. and then get the answer right there in the search results. Just makes your search result listing take up more real estate in the SERPs. We're seeing that there's been an increase in FAQ snippets showing. So, you know, you might have lost your featured snippets, but if you are ranking organically, you can have your FAQ snippets showing. So what does this mean? Well, at the moment don't do anything, just sit tight, wait for the dust to settle. But there could be opportunity there and marking up pages with FAQ schema data, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah, definitely. And I was going back to what you were saying just now, like what would the best advice be to someone who thinks that they have been hit by an update?

MICHAEL: What would it?

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, what would you recommend people do? Like, obviously we don't,

MICHAEL: We've got a whole episode on this from like a couple of episodes. Yeah. Diagnosing a massive drop in traffic. I know what we recorded it before we had that break when we moved podcast studios. So I'm going to forgive you for forgetting it, but we've done so many episodes now.

ARTHUR: It's hard to remember what we've spoken about.

MICHAEL: Yeah. You know what? I can't, I can't tell you the number off the top of my head, but it was one, it was a recent episode, but one that we recorded a while ago in, you know, real time. So go listen to that one, but what would I say? Check analytics, check Ahrefs, see that you really have lost traffic. Don't go and change anything, but try and get some ideas around the types of pages that have lost traffic. If maybe your blogs had heaps of featured snippets before and they didn't, and you've lost all the traffic to your blog, but your category pages where you generate all your revenue are doing well still, then you haven't really been hit, have you? like I guess. Yeah. Like, you know, unless you care only about traffic, but if you're, if you're looking at like metrics, like leads and that sort of stuff, then make sure that they haven't been hit. Um, and outside of that, go listen to that episode that we did a while ago. And, um, I will, yeah, you should listen to it. I definitely will. But, um, I think, I think there's going to be opportunity to mark up your pages with, um, FAQ schema data more to try and capitalize on potentially Google favoring, or at least showing that stuff more now. Um, so don't do it now, but let's say mid June once the dust has settled, you can do it.

ARTHUR: I mean, it's probably still best practice to do it anyway. Yeah, absolutely.

MICHAEL: Regardless, you should have it marked up. Yeah. Like if you, a common thing in SEO might be on your page, you put FAQs just to get more SEO copy into the page. Like I know we have that on a whole bunch of our service pages. You can go and mark all of that up so that Google can easily figure out what the questions and answers are. There is a way to do it where you can basically just use a plugin. It's called schema builder in Chrome. You can go into that. that extension. It's an extension in Chrome. You can open it up when you're on a page and you can basically get it to generate the schema code for all of the questions and answers on that page. And then you can copy and paste that code straight into the page. So you can do it via WordPress backend or tag manager, something like that. Really handy, very handy, very quick. So check that plugin out and see if I'm only after the dust has settled though, as we're saying, don't do anything yet, but later this month, check out schema builder in Chrome. Have a play around with FAQ schema if you don't already have it on your site All right, I feel I've been ranting a little bit. What else have we seen?

ARTHUR: Yeah, so when I was looking through Twitter, someone mentioned, I can't remember what the Twitter handle is now. Blasphemy. Blasphemy, yeah. Well, I might go through my history later. We can add it in the notes, but video instead of text. So, you know, TikTok grew 99% and YouTube grew 25% from already dominant position. And now, you know, Google's preferencing videos again.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like Google already super favorite YouTube results. It even favored like informational sites with YouTube videos embedded in them have always tended to do well.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, it depended on the query, but then you'd get that YouTube video where already cut to the exact moment that you need to start watching from, which is super handy. Cause if you search for something like, how do I fix something on a car, a specific model. Yeah. I don't know if it was through AI or someone's, you know, marked it up, but it would be starting video from that moment, you know, like a minute 30, a minute 25 in.

MICHAEL: It would be the AI, like they, like when we upload YouTube videos, the caption generation on it is flawless pretty much. So they would just know exactly what's being said in every video. And then. Scary. The algorithms are going hard and figuring out where to show which part of the video to show for a query. But that 25% increase for YouTube in terms of visibility is huge because they already were smashing it and TikTok doubling. It sort of just says that video is more and more and more important in everything when it comes to online advertising, which definitely, yeah, things like our performance max in, in Google ads is hungry for content. It's hungry for video. Your Facebook ads are hungry for video people, people hungry.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I watch a lot of YouTube content. I'm sure you do. I'm sure everyone does. So yeah, it's a lot more engaging than text. So it makes sense.

MICHAEL: Yep. So I guess that's a broader strategic point around digital advertising is video is important, but we are seeing after this update, even more of a favour to video. Again, it's only early days. So these are just the initial things that we've seen, you know, Google hates affiliate sites and they're trying to take them out all the time. We know that. Featured snippets have seemingly been hit, but FAQ snippets are doing a bit better. We're seeing video sites doing well. And one week into this update, they're the main points. So I guess, do Google's really regular, annoying algorithm updates even improve the search results at the end of the day? What do you reckon?

ARTHUR: No. Look, I think it's reading different forums and other people's perspectives and Twitter and, you know, people seem to agree that these updates don't improve the actual search results. If anything, they just shake them up. And like we were talking previously off air, you know, it's all about trying to drive people into Google ads. It's what we think is happening anyway.

MICHAEL: Yeah. The cynic in us would say Google or Alphabet, the parent company, their share prices dropped 22% so far this year. And they've seen like, I don't know if you've seen, but Snapchat lost like 50% of its value in a day. Meta has been smashed. So they've seen that blood bath. So they're very incentivized to push more spend towards Google ads, particularly like with CPCs and the cost of advertising, just getting higher and higher and higher. They're really getting as much money out of it as they can. So doing something like this to shake things up can drive a lot more revenue in their ads business. So that's the cynic in us would say that that's why they do these updates. They're not necessarily making the search results better.

ARTHUR: Cause you know, and you know, what's funny, like if you pick a query and you'll find that there's always the top, you know, half dozen people competing for that keyword. And whenever there's an update, it's still the same half dozen. It's just they've kind of flipped. Moved around, yeah. Yeah, so the ones that were in position six and seven are now in position one and vice versa. Is that providing a better search result to the end user? No, it's the same thing. It's just moved them around.

MICHAEL: And there's tons of dodgy link building, exact match anchor text, private blog networks. You see it out there. The site's ranking. They come through the update unscathed. if they really were doing everything they said they did in there, there'll be no affiliate sites at all. Yeah, probably. Yeah. Like a lot of, and see the thing is like purely beautiful, perfect unadulterated white hat sites also get smashed in these updates.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And they don't rank a lot of the time because they're not doing link building.

MICHAEL: Yep. And that's why Google's advice is there's nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. You know, they haven't done anything wrong. It's just that maybe some other sites are doing a bit better. So they're deliberately vague with it because we feel it's a propaganda campaign. They're trying to confuse things. They're trying to encourage more AdWords spam. But the best advice, as we say, is to continue doing this. First and foremost, don't change anything at the moment. Wait for the dust to settle. But then as a general strategy, it's what we always bang on about on this show. It's making sure your content matches search intent and it aligns with your business objective. So the content on your site is going after the keywords that are important to you. And then the content on that site matches that search intent. The content needs to be engaging for a human to read, enjoyable, not just junk. Your website needs to be fast and well-structured so Google can move through it and find everything. And then you need to build strong links to your domain. 80-20 SEO, as we spoke about in the past. Exactly. And there will be ups and downs, keywords won't stay in position one all of the time. There'll be a bit of a roller coaster of visibility. But that general approach is the best way to continue to have success. Excuse me. It depends how much you like Google. Like I know in the SEO world, you never know, but it's the best way to have success with your organic campaign long-term.

ARTHUR: Just on, I guess, the topic of updates, when I haven't seen a client or website be penalized as in removed completely from the search results in a while. That doesn't happen. No, it doesn't happen because I remember, I guess this is going way back and, you know, whenever there's an algorithm update, it kind of reminds me of when I first started doing SEO in 2013, as Penguin was rolling out and just remembering everyone in the team, you know, scrambling with all the links that they built from dodgy. I did air quotations there, not that anyone will know on microphone, but,

MICHAEL: The links we used to build back in 2012 were dodgy. Very dodgy.

ARTHUR: And that's what worked. And it worked. But what happened was sites were actually completely wiped out of the search results. And then you had to go and basically beg Google to re-index you and have you appear again.

MICHAEL: So that was a classic manual penalty. But again, that's why Google says with these updates, you haven't done anything wrong. Even if you have their general advice is it's not because of anything you're doing. It's because other sites are just doing things better, but then they go and show junk in the search results anyway, so again It's just very murky Deliberately we feel yeah All right, cool. Well, that's about it for this week. As we said, there's going to be more that comes out soon, but that's a little taste tester of what's going on with this update. So is there anything else you wanted to add before I give our trusty outro?

ARTHUR: Short and sweet to the point. Yep.

MICHAEL: I like it. Cool. Well, it has been an algorithm update, so it might not be happy SEOing. It will be calm and collected SEOing this week, right?

ARTHUR: Keep calm and keep SEOing.

MICHAEL: That's it. See you later.

ARTHUR: Bye.

INTRO: Thanks for listening to The SEO Show. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We'll see you in the next episode.