A recent appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcast provides a great explanation of how classifiers, confidence levels, and precision work with machine learning algorithms. He also covered how adjusting confidence can impact the amount of collateral damage occurring when updates roll out. And if you swap “Social” for “Search”, Zuckerberg could be … Read more
The end of 2024 was a crazy time SEO-wise with Google pushing multiple major updates at the end of the year (and throughout the holiday shopping season). First, we had the November 2024 core update, which rolled out on November 11th and took over three weeks to complete. Then we had one week off before … Read more
It’s not like all urls on a site suddenly become low quality overnight… It’s a site-level adjustment that can impact rankings across an entire site. Update: November 19, 2024: Google just updated its “Guide to Search ranking systems” page to include a paragraph right up top about using site-wide signals and classifiers. You can read … Read more
Update: I heard from Google’s Danny Sullivan and he confirmed that Google is not testing its ‘Site reputation abuse’ algorithm at this time. So the drops are from other changes that Google is pushing that must be impacting those affiliate directories strongly. Update 2: I just received a response from Google after following up to … Read more
In an effort to keep users on their sites, some publishers have hijacked the browser back button by providing a feed of articles that drives users to more publisher content, including sponsored content and ads. That’s versus allowing them to return to the sites they visited from… Disabling, or hijacking the back button, is a … Read more
In May of 2023 Google wrote a blog post where it explained it was planning to update its systems to surface “hidden gems”, or content written from a “personal or expert point of view”. We eagerly awaited that update when the ‘fall of insane updates’ arrived including three core updates, a massive helpful content update, … Read more
Google began enforcing its site reputation abuse spam policy on May 7, 2024 after announcing the policy two months earlier (when the March 2024 core update rolled out). At that time, we didn’t know if enforcement would be handled via manual actions, an algorithm update, or a combination of both. It ended up being just … Read more
This is my second post in a series about the March 2024 broad core update. Again, it was a huge update with many moving parts, so I wanted to cover several interesting things that went on versus writing just one post. For this post, I’m going to cover a very interesting case study that underscores … Read more
I cover the old HCU(X) classifier, site-level quality algorithms, the counterbalancing of systems, and how the transition has been as smooth as a bed of razor blades… This is the first post in a series about the March 2024 broad core update. The update was one of the largest and most complex core updates Google … Read more
Update March 20, 2024: Helpful content system baked into core ranking systems.The March 2024 core update rolled out alongside a spam update on March 5, 2024, and Google announced the helpful content system is now part of Google’s core ranking systems. That means there will not be additional helpful content updates (and the way the … Read more
As I’ve been helping companies that were heavily impacted by the “2023 Fall of Insane Algorithm Updates”, I have once again heard from several site owners that had their highest levels of traffic right before getting hammered. I’ll cover more about that soon, but it’s something I have seen for a long time. And now … Read more
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