Many website owners feel like they are on a roller-coaster ride at the moment. Site owners who track their ranking in Google may see ranking going down and up, up and down or, for the unluckiest, down, down and down again. Meanwhile Google is not telling us about ongoing updates nor explaining precisely what has been causing the record turbulence in search results for the past 3 months. Worse, the teams at Google that we rely on to give us information on updates are teasing us with false update news or a “Yes We Have No Bananas” answer to questions about updates (clarification below).
RankRanger - Google Desktop SERP Fluctuations: last 30 Days</a>" width="1200" height="720" srcset="https://www.seopress.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/01-rankranger-google-desktop-serp-fluctuations-last-30-days.png 1200w, https://www.seopress.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/01-rankranger-google-desktop-serp-fluctuations-last-30-days-768x461.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" />More unconfirmed Google updates again
As we also reported in May and in June of this year, SERP tracking tools show all the signs of major updates happening to Google’s search algorithms yet there is no official communication from Google of any such update. The RankRanger tool (shown above) showed massive volatility in search results from July 14th to July 20th and then relative calm until the end of the month. The SEMRush Sensor tool (shown below), however, is showing continuing volatility at a very high range.
Another tool, CognitiveSEO’s Signals, shows a similar result to RankRanger for July 2023 with less volatility from July 21st. In their long-range view, going back to 2020, we can see that the period from May to July 2023 has marked the most intense period of fluctuations in search results it has ever recorded!
On July 14th, Barry Schwartz tweeted (can we still say “tweeted” now that Twitter is called X?) “Do you think Google confirm a future search algorithm update” to which the Google Search Liaison account (ran by Google’s Danny Sullivan) replied “Yes, there’s always another core update in the banana stand — and we announce these. We didn’t make pages about the core, spam, product and helpful content systems that regularly update for no reason. They link into the search status board to keep people informed”. This, plus a previous exchange between the same to people (on July 11th Danny replied to Barry that a Core Update was “coming in”), meant that we expected confirmation of a new updates in July, but 2 weeks later the Search Status Board report still remains empty. The last confirmed update was the April 2023 Reviews Update.
This is what made is think of the song “Yes! We Have No Bananas”😊
Top 3 Google SEO Google Updates
On July 18th, at the peak of volatility in search results, John Mueller teased suffering web site owners with a video entitled “Top 3 Google SEO Google Updates”. Rather than explaining what was causing the big changes in Google ranking since July 14th, John presented some more mundane changes at Google from the past months:
- Core Web Vitals – dropping mobile friendliness and the future addition of INP
- Google Search Console – update to rich snippet testing
- Google Search labs – available for testing search features like SGE – Search Generative Experience
This followed on from the Google Search News July ’23 video released on July 5th. This presented news covered in previous months on changes to Core Web Vitals, best practice for news websites, Search Labs, Google SGE, spam reporting and recent changes to Google Search Console.
Become a Google Quality Rater
Moving away from unconfirmed updates but going to the heart of what Core Updates may be about, Cyrus Shepard published an article on a really interesting experience he had as a Google Search Quality Rater. In his article, I Secretly Worked As A Google Search Quality Rater (You Can Too), he gave details of how he became a quality rater at Google for $15/hour and learnt how Google manually rates the quality of search results.
While negotiating around a Non-Disclosure Agreement, Cyrus explains the procedure to become a Google Quality Rater and the great training he got doing it. He says it gave him a much better understanding of how Google sees content, user intent and web page quality. After reading it, you may be tempted to join him.
Update on site names
On Friday July 28th Google announced new changes to the recent site names feature. Site names are a new feature in search results in English, French, German, and Japanese showing as a standard feature above the URL snippet, blue page title links and description.
Until the update Site Names were determined at the domain level. This meant that sites using subdomains, like developpers.google.com, could not have a unique site name. This has now been changed (as the illustration above shows). Google’s method for deciding site name have not been revealed, but they say that the strongest signal a site owner can give is to use the Website structured data schema.
Using WordPress and SEOPress the Website structured data is configured with the Site title value as defined in SEO > Titles & Meta page.
Google Q2 earnings call
On July 25th, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke during the Q2 2023 Earnings Call on the Alphabet Investor relations YouTube channel. Marie Haynes, a great resource for Google update news, followed the call and gave a detailed account in her article Google’s Vision for Search in 2023 and Beyond – Analysis of the Q2 2023 Earnings Call. Her key takeaways (dealt with more detail in her full article) are:
- Google is committed to evolving search with AI models like PaLM and the upcoming Gemini. Sundar Pichai indicated this will lead to major innovations in search.
- The Search Generative Experience (SGE) powered by AI is not just an experiment – Pichai made it clear Google plans to integrate it deeply into search.
- Google sees big potential in multimodal search combining text and images, especially with Google Lens integrated into tools like Bard.
- YouTube Shorts engagement continues to rapidly grow, which I see as an opportunity for SEO’s to focus on in the future.
New anti-AI rules for Google Merchant Center
On July 28th, Barry Schwartz published an article on SEORoundtable about the New Google Merchant Center Policy and the fact that Google now says that AI-generated customer reviews are against is policies and should be marked as “spam”.
This is only of direct importance for eCommerce site owners who use Google Merchant Center (which is used primarily to publish Google Shopping campaigns in Google Ads). However, it has a wider significance for us all, because it is the first case of Google saying that AI-generated content is specifically bad and it suggests that it is capable of detecting it programmatically.
Previous communication from Google about AI content is that it would not be targeting, favoring or penalizing AI content at all, but continuing to analyze content based on its usefulness. Logic deems that a customer review on an eCommerce site cannot be machine generated, but this can also be applied to other types of content published on the web. In Google’s description of the Review Updates (applied to reviews of products, services, destinations, games, movies or other topics) it says that “The reviews system aims to better reward high quality reviews, which is content that provides insightful analysis and original research and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.” Can we also imagine that Google thinks that experts or enthusiasts must be human too?
This leads back to the introduction to this month’s news. Could current turbulence in Google search results be linked back to the April 2023 Reviews Update that we are pointed back to on the Search Status Dashboard? Could this update have implemented a system that is changing search results regularly without human intervention to better reward high quality reviews?
Hopefully Google will tell us more in August!
