Google Dropped ANOTHER Big Algorithm Update

Key Takeaways

foreign back to the exposure ninja podcast for myself just personal and the wonderful Tim Cameron kitchen we have quite a bit to talk about today but I think our main focus is going to be this Google broad Court update now Tim is the pro I think he's seen many many years of big Google updates and big Google updates that just so happened to destroy people's websites and their SEO but I'd say those days are a little bit behind us aren't they now Tim what are your thoughts on this on this most recent update yes I think it's it's still relatively early days I think there was some initial noise around uh Friday before last maybe and I think we're about a week into the coverage of it so it's fairly early um to know what sort of sites are being impacted and what sort of um ranking factors but I think any time there's a Google broadcast update there's a lot of fear there's a lot of panic uh sometimes hysteria people wondering do I need to bin my website do I need to take a brand new approach are my rankings down because of the update are they down because of other reasons so I do think it's a good time to just explore the fundamentals of maybe what a broadcore update is and how we should all approach them what do you reckon Jess yeah I absolutely agree I think um the way that Google does that updates now tends to be they're making changes all the time little changes and then they do these big updates but they're not as detrimental as they used to be in the past so yeah no need to panic no need to freak out but there may be some areas that we see some Industries and whatnot that see more of an impact some types of websites some types of content that seem more of a impact so just yeah it really really depends yeah and these are the broadcast updates are these larger scale updates as you say that typically happen maybe twice a year um and excuse me I'm gonna cop Google doesn't come out with like a press release without saying here's what we're now rewarding and here's what we're punishing so it's kind of up to the SEO community and most of the tools also have a bit of a take on this so they'll have a look at the sites that have seen gains and they'll release data around which Industries have been particularly affected it's all too early for any of that so right now we're in the sort of rampant speculation stage where some people are saying this is It's All About penalizing AI content or it's all about you know whatever um it's really too early to know but I think if you notice a drop during a core update that drop tends to be fairly obvious and it tends to happen sort of within a day or so so if it's a gradual decline that isn't usually something that is uh sort of consistent with the broad core update impact um but if you do see a big impact you know I think it's always worth revisiting the first principles of SEO Google's official advice in all these sorts of situations is make sure that you're creating the best content possible for users not search engines because that's what we want to reward and it's really frustrating to hear that every single time because you're like well I am and yet I've seen a drop in broadcast um my personal take is that we don't necessarily want to just be relying on Broad Court updates to steer our direction we actually want to be going to the sort of the source which for me is the search quality writer guidelines and if you there's a video on our YouTube channel about the search quality rater guidelines and this document that Google releases which it very very rarely updates but um the search quality writer guidelines are where Google wants the algorithm to go this is essentially the training for the people that train the algorithm so if we make a site that does well with the uh the search quality rater guideline criteria then we can assume that further broad core updates will only reward our website and the big thing that has changed recently in those search quality rated guide that's probably the only big thing that's changed recently is Google explicitly laying out its desire to reward content that demonstrates first-hand experience of what it's talking about so this would be you know review sites that have actually used the product rather than review sites which review Things based on just aggregating other reviews online or um I don't know any any site really if you're writing content on your website and you don't have experience or the person who's writing it doesn't have experience are they tapping into someone else in the businesses experience in order to make that content you know genuinely authoritative and whether or not this broadcast update is going to reflect Google's push into rewarding experience content I don't know but we would expect subsequent broadcore updates to do that because the search quality writer guide search quality raters these are I think there's around 10 000 of them around the world they are rating Google search results based on the criteria that the search quality rating guidelines um layout and then the you know Google's algorithms are sort of refined and fine-tuned over time based on the ratings that these search quality raters give so we can expect to see the criteria from the search quality rate of guidelines over time uh be more and more visible in in Google search results so that's the thing I would be focusing on more than anything because I think that's the thing where a lot of the websites that you're seeing ranking at the moment are really not meeting that experience criteria in the search quality rate of guidelines so whether it happens in the August broad core update or whether it happens in the future I think that's the main sort of uh the source of um of of movement that we're going to see over the next few years yeah absolutely and if you're not kind of familiar with the search those search guidelines one of the most important things is EE 80 which um we've discussed a lot and if you're connected to content or SEO or have done any research like this you probably would have heard about it before and that's including experience expertise Authority and trust there we go I knew I knew all of them um in your you know on your website in your content so that you know your content is coming from a place of actually knowing and actually understanding these things and from a position of expertise rather than just being created by anyone or create by AI so that's another thing to keep in mind pretty much every single time one of these big algorithm updates happens the main thing that tends to come out from Google a while later is that they say just make good content for humans like nearly every single time that's the takeaway so I'd say if you do kind of see anything um you know any drops just double check that content and make sure make sure that it's it is the best quality it can be we've had a question on our live stream asking if we can quickly summarize the update for anybody who's arrived late this um podcast recording will remain available on this YouTube channel once we've done so you can watch it again or um tomorrow it will be uploaded to our podcast platforms which is like Spotify Apple podcast pretty much anywhere you listen to your podcast so if you were like oh I'd prefer to listen to this on the commute tomorrow you can do that so there's plenty plenty of options for you but unless you have anything else to add to that Tim I think we will jump onto the news that has come out from Tick Tock I did think it was Tick Tock next do you have anything else to add on the broadcore update no only other than um there's a Twitter account from systrix that's worth following it's like a SEO sort of monitoring um tool and it has a big database of ranking movements and things like that so early signs from sister says that this is a relatively small um update I don't think Google publishes in in the olden days they used to publish in the olden days like five years ago they used to say we've you know we've released the broadcast update and it's impacting 65 of websites or something they don't do that anymore so I don't think they give any sort of insight into how widespread this is but it seems to be relatively small um and uh yeah but the the news for someone who's tuned in late is just follow the search quality rate of guidelines go where the puck is going don't try to be too reactive and to what's happening with this particular update or that particular update not least because it's very difficult to isolate any ranking factors or weightings that have changed from update to update because these are you know these are complex sets of systems that have lots of interdependencies and actually the reality is that probably no one in Google knows fully what this broadcore update is designed to wait uh differently to the last one yeah he's very hard for them to kind of put together a document and say this is what this is who it will impact this is what is changing because I don't think they even even fully know that until it's rolled out um but yeah we've got some news about Tick Tock which is very interesting Tick Tock is going to be launching some search ads which if you don't know if you're like me and you kind of just use your Tick Tock view page and you just scroll through there's actually also a search function which it seems that young people are actually using tiktok a lot to make searches which is really really interesting um and I've noticed as well when you use tick tock and you like look at the bottom of a video sometimes it will show you a suggested search related to that video potentially to find out more information sometimes I'll see a gossip video and I won't have got the first half of the gossip and then when I go to the comments I see that the top search or on the video the search is for the other half of the gossip you know it's quite quite funny but a lot of people are using it to search for products to search for advice pretty much anything that you would search for on Google young people are using to serve search on Tick Tock which is amazing which is why Tick Tock has decided to add ads to this search now the way that they're being run is different to what you would think of as search ads or anything of like Google so when somebody makes a search the ad will appear as part of sort of the organic search results in the videos that appear and if you click on it and scroll it'll scroll you through the same results or if you click on a video above it and then scroll through it I believe it will appear in that list as well when you're kind of scrolling through going from video to video um something quite interesting about it is that it will just take an existing video from your Tick Tock account already and use that I think you say which videos you want but it has to already be uploaded to your account and you can't I think Tim did a deep dive and found out that you can't actually Target specific keywords which is very very interesting I don't know if you have a bit more to share on that Tim yeah I mean it's just so I understand just so that when you search on Tick Tock you get like a grid on your videos yeah I think it's like a two by two grid that you can scroll through and then some of these are going to be sponsored yeah yes that's exactly it so yeah it doesn't appear that you can Target certain videos you also sorry certain keywords you also can't as you say Target certain uh you know you can't create a search based ad Tick Tock is going to draw from your existing ad creative and choose what it shows which I hope that that's version one of this because I think that if you're building an if you're building creative for a search versus building creative for an interruption type thing like you just want to stop someone scroll on a for you page you're actually creating a very very different ad or you're creating a very different piece of creative right if I'm searching for best tennis racket I pretty much want like a whole bunch of tennis rackets in front of me and then someone's saying I'm gonna you know show you which is the best one of these or we're going to testify now which is the best whereas in a for you page setting that's not necessarily what you might want you might want to see someone who's doing like some massive crazy smashes and then they're measuring their power and saying this racket provides loads of power and then you might go and buy it so I think there's actually a very different need in the creative for search versus Interruption so I'm a little bit concerned that at the moment it just looks like tick tock's gonna serve whatever they choose um you're right you can't Target keywords you can add negatives though so you can you know like Google ads where you can have a you know you can have broad keywords that you're targeting we want to advertise anything around tennis rackets but then you'd add negative keywords which would be like okay we don't want to advertise against cheap tennis rackets or free tennis rackets or Worse tennis rackets right because yeah that's funny because I'm gonna be asked so you can add negatives um and I think what you will probably do because Tick Tock will give you a list of the Search terms your ads are showing up against so what you could do is what we do on Google ads which is you sort of fine tune your keyword targeting by going through that search query report and adding any that aren't relevant as negatives so it feels like a fairly sort of uh I don't know what the word is basic uh search ad offering I guess we're comparing it against Google ads which you know search ads have been around for I don't know 20 years so it's going to be understandable that it's not as advanced um but I I really do hope that they give creators the opportunity to specify we want this ad to show against these keywords because otherwise I think that is really going to impact the performance of these search ads I I don't know what your thoughts are there and Jess yeah so something that's really interesting about Tick Tock is that they seem to test features and then grow them from there so for instance I've really watched like the e-commerce side of tick tock grow and change to the point that now Tick Tock is like we're not going to allow external links anymore because we want all the purchasing to be done through our own e-commerce platform which is just so fascinating I think there's a lot of people who are doing affiliate marketing and whatnot who are going to be quite disappointed um but it just shows that they've kind of the way they've kind of built things up and I think we're going to see the same thing with these ads so I would definitely say if you your audience skews younger and you know you're you've got good reach on Tick Tock I think this is a really really fantastic opportunity like I would definitely say you know test it out see how it goes and I think it could be really really helpful now in the past I have noticed that Tick Tock ads have been a little bit more on the expensive side but it could be that their results are absolutely fantastic you know you have a really laser focused audience who is spending more time on that platform than any other platform so I think it's um it's definitely worth taking a look at and I think um yeah I think it's going to be really interesting to see how the results that people get once it's finally sort of being used more I'm excited yeah yeah I agree I think it's really exciting there's also an implication for Google perspectives which is Google's sort of response to people using Tick Tock as a search engine where you'll be able to choose the perspective filter and then in your search results in Mobile in the US at the moment but eventually everywhere you'll be able to see user generated content primarily forums and short form video including vertical video like YouTube shorts and tick tocks you'll be able to see these in the search results so let's say that you were searching for something like best tennis racket and you wanted to look at people's opinions on this rather than you know besttennisrackets.com forward slash best tennis rackets 2023 hyper optimized for that affiliate Revenue if you just wanted to see like what are some average people saying on their tick tocks about what the best tennis racket is you might go to the perspectives Tab and this is you know this is potentially a model that Google could use there as well where they would be giving advertisers the ability to advertise against perspective so it will be super interesting to see how this works I guess the fact that it is a brand new ad offering means that there aren't going to be too many advertisers bidding for search ads so it's probably you know a good time to get lower cpcs even if they do increase over time um yeah let's let's see where this goes I think like you say it's really exciting to see how Tick Tock is evolving their commercial the commercial side of things and allowing creators to monetize of course you're going to need good ad creative to work here this isn't something that you can just wash out a couple of lines of copy for you're gonna need a decent uh Tick Tock to work for this if it's going to generate you any Revenue at all and that I think that's a skill set that a lot of businesses don't currently have a lot of agencies don't currently have to be fair no and the thing is as well with Tick Tock is that you want to go for that user generated content feel it's you can't just repurpose your shiny ad that you've used on a different platform I mean I would say with any social media platforms and vertical video I think that you know user generated content is the way forward and if you are looking at this these search ads and feeling like oh it just feels a bit much for me right now there's no harm in doing sponsored posts that will appear within people's view Pages or I've noticed a real trend of people sponsoring smaller created creators on Tick Tock sending them free products and just saying hey could you try this out and review it like I I've mentioned this one before but um I was getting advertised a bodysuit on Tick Tock and I was getting like maybe four videos in a row at some points of just girls trying on this bodysuit with like hashtag ad or sponsored posts like in there in their video um there's lipstick that I keep getting advertised about constantly and I see quite a lot of people you know I've seen some videos with like one or two views popping up you know like I've definitely noticed a trend on Tick Tock as well where I'm getting like even smaller accounts are appearing um so there's a lot of opportunities I would definitely say test it out give it a go and if you find that this kind of tick tock marketing is good for you then the search ads options could be good for you as well yeah that's all I have to say on Tick Tock for the moment I mean one more thing on Tick Tock more generally I think what you've just said there is is is so incredible we have never seen a a digital or any platform which is so good at identifying buyer intent even before the buyer knows or has expressed explicitly their intent to purchase it's so good at identifying interests and oh yeah it's it's only going to get better as the amount of data it can feed on increases which is a virtuous cycle that it seems to be you know running into now so whilst I'm a bit skeptical about you know Tick Tock being in control of the positive keywords that you're targeting and the art creative that you can show I mean to be fair if you're gonna let if you're gonna trust your advertising performance to anyone who's creating an algorithm you know take you could do worse than Tick Tock they've got some decent track record that for you pages is an engineering Marvel that Rivals anything that's been built in the physical world I think yeah yeah absolutely and just for reference I brought the bodysuit that I kept getting advertised to and I there you go I brought a dupe as in like an alternative version of the lipstick I was being advertised here because it was a bit too high of a price point for me and the reason I bought it from the other place is because they had a big banner on their website saying Tick Tock has spoken here's the dupe and I was like cool I'll buy that one instead you know because I knew exactly what they were talking about they were aware of the trends and what was popular and they they played into it so you can actually piggyback on the back of other advertisers if you have a better offering so that's a that's another thing as well ladies and gentlemen yeah we got them we have we have talking of offerings there has been a tool that has appeared from um is it Hub staff it's HubSpot Hub sport sorry please SAS companies diversify your names thank you yeah from HubSpot um which was flagged to us and basically it's a brand development tool if you would like to call it that um which was this is kind of just sort of a funny one to discuss I think Tim might be able to share his screen as well if you wouldn't mind um so HubSpot have released this branding tool where you can input a little bit of information about your business and it will make recommendations for you but including like your logo the colors you can use the text you can use in your logo but it doesn't really do that it offers you a few sort of stock type Graphics then it offers you every single color it doesn't even make really specific recommendations then it offers you every single font so none of them are really actually tailored to your business in my opinion yeah I mean we've we've looked at hubspot's marketing strategy before and said it's incredible because on the one hand it seems to be so broad that it almost appears untargeted right they want to rank for email signatures in the hope that somebody downloads an email signature template and is a decision maker for a CRM and goes on to buy HubSpot which you're like that this is a leap of faith but it seems to be working on balance but this tool that they've released I like Dale said in the thing it's awful I I would go a step further and say this is possibly one of the worst and most useless digital products I've ever seen I don't think I've ever met anyone who has such low standards for their life or business that they would even consider this worth the six clicks it takes to get the result it is it is Dreadful and I think we're gonna see a lot of this right this is their sort of generative AI hey we could knock up this quick genitive AI tool and go super viral but the output is garbage so but it doesn't feel like generative AI it just feels like they've got a load of images that are based on the keyword that you've typed in for your industry like like for instance you did exactly the same thing as me right you you put an exposure ninja and all the icons are basically I don't know if you can go back to that that initial page Tim where it gives you the option to pick your I can click through here oh you can click through there as well excellent but none of those have even included the ninja element which I would have thought if it was generative generative AI it would have grabbed onto that ninja word and tried to make something with Ninja and marketing and it just hasn't even tried it literally just gives you this the images that would appear if you typed marketing into canva for instance or type marketing into any stock graphic tool it's giving you those options then like I said it gives you a bunch of color options but it seems like here it actually gives you a full palette I I didn't get all the way through it um but you know it kind of is which sounds a bit sounds a bit awful but um are you saying you left the process after two clicks right yeah I did yeah I got to the I got to the text right and then I just sort of got bored because I was like this I feel I was like I've seen enough I I feel like I can form an opinion already I I formed an opinion initially on the um on the icons we've had a comment saying I guess it's for the people who find canva too high learning curve maybe which it could be but that's really unfortunate it almost feels like they're taking advantage of people maybe if you type in like a totally different business like if you're a cake business or a pet business or a clothing business you might be able to get something a bit more interesting but let's say your brand is called like Dove clothing and you've typed in your your brand name of Dove clothing and then you've typed in your industry as clothing I think it would I don't think it will do anything related to the dove part and it will just give you pictures of t-shirts whereas I can imagine people would maybe want a picture of a dove let's say so I do think it could potentially be useful for people who are really just starting out who haven't even really done anything at all to do with their business yet like yeah it's it's um I think you bring generous to us I don't I'm not sure that there's any situation ever that this is even remotely useful potentially potentially it is it feels like it would it would take people a step back um whereas they could if if they didn't have this tool and actually had to go out there and potentially learn canva or do some creative thinking about what they wanted their logo to be rather than just picking from a bunch of icons I feel like that's going to give them really really impressive skills that will actually help them throughout their business whereas this kind of is just like oh just just it's really easy just skip that section whereas actually with any business if you're a business owner if you're a marketer I feel like you need to have an understanding of the design process you know and yeah anyway that's my that's my thoughts yeah I I think uh so I'm just watching this and thinking okay what are the lessons here how do I apply this the first thing I think is that your branding so this is an attempt to make a logo and brand colors and a sort of brand identity and that has the that piece of work has the ability to either get everyone in the business really excited about the potential for the company right this is when the the idea feels was real is where you have these things whether it's for a product or a new business or a business line or whatever it's when you have that brand guidelines that things feel real and we've done a lot of work over the last over this year on brand guidelines for different businesses and you can see when someone's eyes light up that you know we've we've nailed it they've got something that looks really cool we're all visual we all judge books by their covers and we judge Brands by the icons and the logos and this feels like such a Miss because it's completely standardizing that like if you were setting up 10 000 Drop Shipping Shopify stores programmatically per hour maybe maybe maybe you might risk one or two of them with this but if you have anything that you care about it's just not worth the risk but the other the other lesson I think you get from this is this tool presumably they've created this tool to be some sort of Link bait so they want to get inbound links or they want to run ads against it for logo design keywords or they want people to share it on social media or whatever and that's not going to work because it's rubbish and this idea that you can build a tool on your website for all of those things they're all very Noble aims and we'd agree with the desire behind all of them but really execution is absolutely everything it's not just enough to Bosh out some crappy calculator or some barely thought through junk and just hope that it works and gets links it won't right it needs to be good it needs to be thought through it needs to be tested and then the other I guess the other potential lesson is if you're competing against the HubSpot and feeling deflated because they have such massive budget and you're thinking how can we compete well they're spending are not insignificant amount of that budget on garbage like this so you don't have to compete on everything you only have to compete on the stuff that's working so underdogs of the world Rejoice this is what we're going up yeah rise up rise up take over HubSpot um no obviously yeah I think that's a really good point Tim like I do wonder what the thought process was behind this Brian creating this and whether they could have created something much better and much more effective that could have potentially you know helped their obviously they're trying to get these people right in their pipeline right from the very start and actually these people are probably going to be set back by these Dreadful logos um and you know may it may take them longer to reach the level where they need a CRM and go to hub's world so yeah it's very very interesting um definitely a choice definitely a choice um but yeah let us know if you're watching the podcast live let us know what you think about that in the comments we'd love to hear it or even if you're watching on on catch up um and if you're listening to it you can always leave us a review saying what on Earth happened with that HubSpot thing hilarious good good job Tim and Jess that's that's exactly the words you should use um podcast as always hit like And subscribe if you did you can also request a marketing View at the marketing review at exposureninja.com forward slash review where you can um you'll get a 15 minute review of your website and your marketing apologies for the cats automatic feeder going off in the background if you could hear that on the microphone because it was very loud about you um we're here every Tuesday chatting about marketing talking about um marketing news and anything that might impact you so um yeah come back next week we'll have even more stuff to talk about Annabelle says yeah we're still alive yes we are thank you only just still alive we're about to leave yeah we're yeah you we're about to die but if if you only just got here you can watch this video pretty much immediately after we finish streaming you can start it again from the start and watch it all the way through and get caught up on the Google algorithm updates the tragic tool from HubSpot and also tick tock's new advertising options in search Tim no cool we'll see you all next week say hello everyone bye thank you