Office Hour #16 - August Core Update, Ranking Bug and More

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Okay, good morning everyone. This is Office Hour episode 16. This is Akshita, my colleague, and this is Niladri.

We both run the marketing team at Synup along with a few other people. So let's jump right into it without wasting too much time. Updates related to the SEO industry that happened over the last couple of weeks.
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There was a lot of discussion about August core updates going on with Google. It looks like this has become a quarterly affair rather than a half-year or an annual affair. At times their updates are going on on a monthly basis.

So what did we notice? A lot of upheaval in ranking over the past three weeks as we are tracking it. The August core update has significantly impacted rankings across the board, especially for larger sites since the rollout began. Some sites had good news to offer because many of them got hit by the helpful content update back in September last year.

There were some instances of ranking improvement for those websites. They saw potentially traffic coming in, but immediately the day after there were a lot of reversals in ranking as well. We are going through the mess as well.

We have been tracking a bunch of websites including our own and saw a lot of ups and downs in ranking. Google did advise that you need to wait for the full effects of the update to roll out, but early signs have been observed already. There are websites that were showing that they are showing some recovery.

As I mentioned, there have been improvements in ranking, but it's uncertain even now if this reversal in ranking and improvement is here to stay or not. Many in the industry shared charts and graphs showing increases in ranking for certain sites though specific sites were not named, but one specifically, Glenn Gabe, you might know him already. He's been tracking a handful of sites.

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He's tracking 400 sites that were impacted by September 2023. A helpful content update about 70 on those showed signs of recovery. Again, when Google starts giving, it keeps on giving.

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What coincided with the helpful content update and the recent code update was a ranking bug that Google reported on August 15th. We saw a lot of sites get messed up. There were a couple of sites I was tracking.

One of them lost 58% of their traffic. It just dropped off the face of earth. I'm assuming it was primarily because of the ranking bug that was reported by Google on August 15th.

Though they have claimed to have fixed the issues after a few days, I still see many websites impacted by it that have not recovered. Though I have not seen a lot of websites in the local ecosystem that have been affected by either the ranking bug or the code updates, it's primarily affecting a lot of large sites, agency sites, content websites, et cetera. Keep a tab of the dates.

We'll be sharing the links where you can pack these updates or bugs that Google sends out messages for or tweets for and see if it coincides with any dips in ranking or visibility or traffic that you were seeing with larger sites that you might be handling. There was another update that Google sent out recently regarding usage of OG or Open Graph tabs. Google has updated its developer documentation to include the OG title meta tag that is typically used for social sharing will now be used as a title link in Google search results.

This means Google will display the OG title as the title tag in search results if they feel like it. If you are implementing Open Graph tags on your website or on your client website, I think it's a good time to go back and review them once to make sure that they're just not optimized for social sharing. They're also optimized for Google search results and click-through rate.

If Google randomly picks up the tag and chooses the title on your website that may impact your CTR as well. We use OG tags along with lots of other schema based on the page content. If you're interested in learning more about schema, I can send over documentation and I might have shared some during our earlier events already.

Let us jump right into the tips of the week. Again, everything that we're talking about will be video recording, transcript, notes, decks, links will all be shared so you do not need to take down notes at all during the event. Akshata usually sends them out within 24 to 48 hours every week.

Yes, after we do the event. Okay, tips of the week. We write a lot of content for our own website.

We consult for a lot of companies who are trying to gain momentum in the content game. They're trying to improve their SEO, their website SEO, etc. There's a certain trend that I started noticing over the past several months where Google indexing has been impacted.

We came across instances where we deployed a huge amount of local landing pages for brick and mortar store companies or ATM machines or BAMs who have like 5,000, 10,000 or some of those crypto ATMs has like 20,000 branches and we noticed indexation issues. Google indexing has primarily been impacted by two ongoing trends. One is the web is in essence shrinking and the need to crawl big content platforms like Reddit, TikTok, YouTube to train AI models and AI's impact on poor redundant content has been, I say big.

Okay, it basically has changed the dynamics of web content quality. There is an inverse relationship between the number of index pages and organic traffic where the more pages does not necessarily result in better performance of your website if they do not meet Google's quality expectations. Okay, Google has changed how it treats domains starting around the last quarter of 2023.

They basically want you to prove quality before they index content. Domains that have too many low quality, low impact content may only see partial indexing. They will have indexation issues or there are times pages will take a very, very long time, significantly longer than usual to index that in turn will reduce organic traffic.

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So Google's focus primarily is to increase or improve its operational efficiency as revenue starts dropping. It primarily has led to partial indexing problems across a variety of websites that I have come across. I've seen local websites where we used to deploy like 10,000 pages and within a month, month and a half or two months those local pages would be indexed and I'm not talking about service area pages.

These are actual brick and mortar businesses that have multiple locations. But over the past several months I have seen we are combating indexation issues. The bar for the quality of content has increased because anyone with access to AI thinks that they can generate content on the fly and flooding the website with content like never before.

Google also optimizes its AI models based on the content that we have generated. So domain quality primarily has been defined by three factors that you should take note of. One is UX, user experience, content quality, including gain of information.

Basically, what am I gaining from your content piece that I'm not gaining elsewhere. So take a look at those top 10 pieces that's ranking well before you try and write down your own piece and see how you can differentiate. Cover the topics that most of them are covering but also provide your perspective or the business's perspective if you're optimizing on behalf of a business and technical conditions.

If you see a sudden spike in index pages, it often indicates there is a technical issue like duplicate content which in turn can lead to reduction in organic traffic by Google. I personally do not practice programmatic SEO but I've seen a lot of programmatic SEO content related websites that are going live. Larger sites are doing it and getting away with it because they can because they have the domain authority to do it.

Now the key is to create a system that tracks page level metrics. This is where your GSC data and importing that information comes into effect. So if you're managing a large site, if it's your agency site or a client site, GSC is not going to be optimal.

I think the UI itself in Google Search Console gives you like 30-35% of the data. You have to extract that information via a third-party tool or even a big query to make a meaningful impact and bring you that information meaningfully. Again, the number of pages increasing but significantly over a short period of time and your traffic not keeping up with it is a good indicator to see there's a problem.

There's a certain metric that we started tracking for several months now. There's inverse bounce rate, conversions, clicks to rank ratio. Sometimes we use third-party SEO editor score for page level metrics and we also track scroll depth again using third-party tools.

There have been companies where we have noticed that they saw traffic increase by reducing the number of low-quality pages. So as an SEO, what can we do to improve this indexation and identify low-quality pages? This is something that we do from time to time. Every three to six months, we basically go back and look at the content that we have deployed in the past year or so or the past several months or from beginning of time to date and try and filter that information in GSC, find out in pages that have less than 100 impressions and one or two clicks over a period of six months.

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That's a good indication that content is just not performing. So there are two ways of dealing with it. First, I try to look at if the content is good enough, if there has been qualitative input while writing the content.

If it's not good enough, then I try to look at is it important for the customers that we are catering to and if answers to both the questions are no, we basically de-index the content. We don't necessarily delete the content, we just put it in a market as no index because again, I don't want to deal with internal linking issues and stuff like that. But if I see that content is important, it provides meaningful context to the user and there's a way for me to improve the content, we go back and rewrite it.

Now, you can do the same but be careful especially if you're tracking and working with larger websites, do not de-index a whole bunch of content like 20% of your old content at one go. That in turn sends a negative signal to Google that you are doing it just for SEO. Do it in tranches, maybe 3% of the pages that are not performing, we can then remove the lowest converting ones or the ones that are receiving the lowest impressions, get rid of them first.

Wait for a few weeks for them to track the impact of it and then tackle the next set of pages. About indexation issues, you cannot guarantee indexation especially if you're working with a business that has like 5,000 or 10,000 locations, branches etc and you have to deploy pages overnight. There is very little you can do to guarantee that okay, all 10,000 pages will be indexed within a specific span of time.

I think the way you can go forward is using a third-party tool like Omega Index that I frequently use for some of my projects. Try and get those indexed. Usually see a 50% to 60% success rate using Omega Index.

At times, it's lower depending on the quality of the website I'm working with. Some of these tools have been shared during our previous sessions already but if you need more information, just holler at me and I'll send you the details along with the notes. Secondly, there's still a lot of ongoing chatter in the Google forum about video verifications.

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Key things that come up frequently, first is videos won't upload. I've said this before, you try it out two to three times and if the video still doesn't go through and you followed all the specs provided by Google, just don't waste time going to the forum and asking questions or going to Twitter and asking questions trying to find an answer. It's not there.

Just reach out to the business team for help. Okay, create a ticket and they will reach out to you to try and fix the problem on your behalf. There are several clients that I come across that say that I do not want to do video verification.

Give me an alternative option. If video verification has been displayed on screen for a specific client or a location or a business, it's not possible to get an alternative option anymore. I think postal verification has gone out of norm completely.

I have not seen a postal verification option in any of the locations I verified in the last five to six months. I don't even remember the last time I saw a postal verification option. And there's a new scheme that I came across the other day that has no more ways to verify.

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So I like that notification because it's direct. So all you need to do is go and contact support. If you have come across any sort of any other problems apart from these while doing video verifications, please let me know.

I'm always eager to learn more about it. Another tip of the week. I go and extract a lot of information from our platform trying to find out how people are using it.

We had this recipe where we added an option to add UTM parameters to the end of your website URL for GPB and other directories. I still see a lot of people not utilizing it, maybe because a lot of people do not understand the value of it. It's a simple code that you'll find on this deck that you can add at the end of your website URL in GBP.

There's a reason why we do it. Once you add it, you can actually track keywords and impressions on Search Console. Most people add it so that it improves their reporting via Google Analytics.

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But I primarily add it because I can get a lot of page level keyword insight and impression information directly from my GHC. Remember that most people who come to your GBP profile or your client's Google My Business profile do not even interact with it. They don't go to their website.

They get that information, they decide to call or do business or drive to the business. So whatever additional information I haven't understood which package level is included in. Just drop in your email to Apsita.

I will send you the information with the guide. Sorry, I just saw your message. You will find it under recipes.

You can add a UTM param. But we will send you the information after the call. So what do you do? So add this UTM param to your appendix at the end of your Google Business profile website URL.

That way, it is like the website URL request in our UTM source equals to Google etc. etc. Once you do that, wait for a few weeks.

Go into Google Search Console. Log into your Google Search Console GHC, filter by page and then look for the queries and impressions. You can do that for any existing page on your website and you can do that for GBP as well.

Based on the queries for which you are getting impression but not in a place, you can basically use it in a variety of ways. You can first start, see if they are relatable or not. If they are relevant to your business, start adding them to your rank tracking tool so they can track ranking for any improvements you make.

You can enhance your content or decide to build new content to target those queries. I consider them a gold mine. I use some of them to run our payrack campaigns as well if they are relevant.

You can even greatly enhance your client-side reporting by giving them the direct information. GHC is a gold mine for information if you use it in a particular way. Try it out.

Got it, Victoria. That's it. I might make an additional video sometime if I find a client-side that's ready to do this and ready to share the GHC with me.

I will create a short video of what I'm looking at. Maybe I will do a short video with a sample of one of our own listings soon and share it in this group. Okay, helpful tools for this week.

A lot of people are involved in extracting information related to knowledge graph while doing entity SEO. I came across this little extraction tool. Sorry, the message at the top is random information.

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David shared this free tool that will allow you to extract Google knowledge graph data that can help you do some brand marketing and entity-based SEO for free. Just go to his link. You can get the GHC, sorry, Google Sheet link once you sign up and use it for free.

I think he's still giving it away for free. So, hurry till it's still free. Another tool that I came across, we used to use a helper reporter tool a lot.

Then helper reporter got productized and got very popular, famous. They started charging a lot more money and I was looking for alternatives to help a reporter because I wanted to see if there's a way for me to build branded backlinks. Branded backlinks, what I mean is links that link to my external companies that link to my website using my brand name that is signed up.

So, if you're trying to build links for larger agencies or for your own website or your agency website or for larger clients that has a somewhat of a brand presence, you can go to this website called feature.com. It works kind of similar to Harrow when you provide information to journalists who reach out for quotes. With the free account, you can answer up to three questions every month, but they do have an upgrade option where you can respond to unlimited questions for 49.75. I think it's a steal of a deal if you know what you're doing. And you can get some branded links from some really great websites like I'm talking about the likes of GoDaddy, Upspot, Freedom, etc.

There's like six. I've been digging into it for the last one week. I'm probably going to upgrade it to a paid account this week and get some links for China.

So, try it out. It's a great little tool. I think there is a service that complements this.

I can't for the life of me remember that or recall that information right now, but I'll send it after the call. I think there was like backlink.ai is something they have rolled up a service on top of this where you can use AI to respond to a lot of them. But I prefer responding to them individually because there are some of the sites that I understand.

I understand the context very well. For example, there's this question from Upspot. To those experienced in issuing RFPs, what are your best tips for getting the best responses and streaming the process when issuing RFPs? I'm sure there's a content writer trying to write a piece on that for Upspot.

And if your answer gets selected, you get a link back to your website or a URL of your choosing. So, happy hunting. That's all for me for today.

Open to any questions you may have. Thanks a lot, Neil. I think that was a great session.

And yeah, a lot is unfolding with Google. And like Neil said, it's something that we've been discussing internally as well. And yeah, let's see how that goes.

We might be discussing it in a few upcoming sessions as well. That being said, we might be taking a long break next month. It's like a very tightly packed month for us here at Synup, but we'll be gathering all the insights we can for the next month and probably see you very soon, early in October, I think.

I'll update you. We'll try to do a video in between, Ashuta, and share it with the team. We'll be sharing all the updates via other formats and we'll keep in touch with you.

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And yeah, no need to take notes. If you have any questions, we can take them now. I think that's it.

We can wrap it up. Okay. Thanks, everyone.

Have a great rest of the week. Bye-bye.