Never get hit by a Google algorithm update

Key Takeaways

if you're new to blogging it can feel like the sky is falling all the time you go to search engine journal or Moz and you see the things that that they're writing about oh there's an update that hit this or this person lost half of their traffic well it's just not the real normal experience of a blogger to see wild fluctuations in traffic in fact almost a decade into blogging and a lot of that time full-time I've never been hit by a Google penalty and I'm not saying that it never will happen I'm I'm not impervious to - changes in technology in Google I make tons of mistakes like everybody else all I'm the reason that I say that is that you just shouldn't expect that things are gonna go crazy and feel afraid of starting an online business because of it that's just not the normal case for a blogger ya fears the number one thing that holds people back but if we can understand what it is that Google is actually trying to do we can get a pretty clear picture of where they're going and we can be prepared for that in fact Google gives us that every time they always tell us what to do and if we listen we won't be penalized by algorithm updates so let's take a little bit of a look at the history of some of these algorithm updates over the last few years that have been big ones that have hurt a lot of people and by a lot it's still a very small fraction of the Internet but it hurts some people quite a bit so a lot of this data is coming from Moz com they have a great timeline that you can look at of when the updates were the first one we're going to talk about is Panda this is February 23 2011 people still talk about this a lot almost a decade later and this hit thin content and leaked link wheels you know a 300 word blog post a simple forum that had one response that wasn't that good just very thin content and people were doing tricky link exchange things between their own websites and stuff and they got hit yep the next one was April 24th 2012 this one was called penguin it was another huge one and this one hit keyword stuffing was a big one and over optimization so people that were kind of trying to trick Google trying to get their rankings higher just by stuffing their keyword over and over and over again in an article well google got wise to that in August 2013 we saw a move starting a move towards semantic search so if you wrote a blog post on Ford f-150 accessories and the search was for cool f150 mods well you could still show up for that same search result because Google got better at understanding the user intent of those words and not the specific keywords that they typed in one year later Google started giving just a slight preference to secure sites so having that SSL does make a little bit of a difference but even today it's still only kind of a slight preference in 2014 and 2015 we saw first a change to pipe to pirate sites we saw the pirate update where things that were taken copyright from other web sites stealing blog posts and things like that those web sites were hurt and then we also had mobilegeddon where if you hadn't mobile optimized your website you also dropped in the rankings for mobile searches right also in 2015 we saw rankbrain this is a big one this is where Google started to look at the way that users behave on the website how long they spend on the website do they quickly leave and go look somewhere else do they click through all of that sort of user interaction data started to be a big ranking factor for google yep and then we saw the snippet length increase in 2017 and again it was like this guy is falling Google's not going to link below they're just going to show the content right on the page and guess what everything was fine in fact if you're doing your content well now you can rake twice on the same search page it is fantastic and they've later changed that shortened to back up and change different things but snippets really started to come on the scene more and more that year yep and then in March 2018 the slowest mobile sites especially but the slowest web sites got a little bit of a hit to their rankings and when we say that we're we're not saying that faster web sites always rank higher than slightly slower web sites it was more like 10 - the bottom 20% or so of web sites the slowest websites on the they got hit in the rankings the rest of us are doing pretty well so big key learning there just don't be the slowest and that brings us up to now August 1 2018 there was this update we heard a lot of buzz about it this happens you know a couple times a year that will they will make more major one and this one appears to have hit more than what we call why myl websites your money your life is what Google calls this and you know if I google something like heart attack symptoms you know my left arm is numb and I think I might be having a heart attack Google doesn't want to even take a chance of sending me to Bob's blog who's going to tell me to go smell some peppermint oil and go to sleep for the night they want to send me to the renowned cardiologist who will give me reliable information about that if I'm moving my 401 K you know left a company I'm moving my 401 K Google wants to make sure that I go to a tax accountant who knows the answer to that question because Google can't read the text and know if that's right they're not comparing your post to to you know the tax code they just want to make sure you're an authority on that topic so that you probably have the information right so if you're writing about your money or your life kind of content those websites were especially hit if you have just no authority to be writing about those kind of topics so what does that mean for us it means we needed to reevaluate we're not really writing about those topics but it's something we said you know even if we're writing about a hobby like campers or or dirt bikes um we should at least have an about page it may be wise to write two or three guest posts on other blogs just so our name is known as in the industry maybe to publish an e-book that we have on the website put it up on Amazon so people say we have a book on this topic things like that just make some very basic adjustments to make sure we have authority now again none of our websites were hit by this we're not writing about any kind of medical stuff on our websites but it's something to be aware of that Google is starting to value this so you can see what we're doing we're seeing what changes have happened and we're just trying to say what does this mean what is Google trying to do for the users that we can help to make sure it happens and I think that's the important thing for us to to look at as we look at this timeline you saw in the early days Google was just trying to wipe out the really spammy stuff links then content exactly and today Google is more focused is most focused on the user experience giving them more as reliable information as they can and making sure that the user has the experience that they're looking for if Google can do that then Google have done its job and they're gonna keep pushing in that direction now how are we supposed to know what Google is going to do how are we supposed to know what what is gonna penalize your site and what's gonna help our site rank really well in the future well as Google has done in the past they're actually giving us the map except they've given us probably the best map they ever have too good of a map and that's the problem so hey they have this document it's 200 pages long that they wrote for their their quality checkers they go to websites and actually literally yeah over 6 million manual what's the word actions actions that they've taken on websites to adjust where they fall in the rankings based upon these things in the 200 page document and now they've made that available to all of us yeah exactly so it leaked online first one of the quality checkers leaked it and then Google just said you know what everybody should just see this you should just know how to make a better website and we've gone through that document line by line we know what's in there and we want to share that with you in a way that's gonna make it easier for you to actually implement on your website so on August 29th at noon Mountain time we're gonna host a webinar on YouTube live where you can show up and you're gonna listen to us talk about step by step what you should do to make sure that your website is not hit by future algorithm updates and to sign up for that webinar go to income school comm slash webinar register there obviously you don't need a register to see us on YouTube live but by registering you'll get the reminder to remind you of when that's going to be as well as a document we're gonna put together that simplifies the 200 page document where you'll only get that of your edges exactly and we're going to give you more of a step-by-step action plan for how you can help future-proof your website and we'll also link to that 200 page document if you have some really boring life that you want to read it to on our page you're gonna get that in the description of this video so 2019 what algorithm updates do we expect to see yeah well we've seen a trend in just greater use of artificial intelligence Google has their AI Apple has Siri Amazon has Alexa and they're they're trying to provide answers to questions solutions to problems just in a real quick fast way well Google is doing that as well with their snippets winning this snippet is going to get more and more important obviously if somebody just wants the quick answer and they get that in a snippet they may not read the article but that's going to happen anyway there's no getting around that but by winning the snippet when somebody reads that and gets the answer but they want more information there too likelihood that they'll click on the snippet itself as the first article that they go read is fairly high mm-hmm yeah so to be clear the snippet you know appears in position 0 and then you still have all whatever ten races rankings there so you the quality of your page ranks in the top ten but if you just have the best two sentence summary bang you get the snippet and sometimes we've seen plenty of our posts that get position zero the snippet and position one you just fill the search engine rigging it's it's what does that tell the user is it is for this question this is the website yeah this is where I need to go and look we recently released a new video in project 24 then just nipped its new problem is a how to win the snippet it's just killer helpful content because again if you can win that position zero and then position one or equal position two by having that position zero you're kind of the default one yeah we got some ninja tips in that other I think probably my favorite training in all of project 24 like snippets are only getting and that snippet optimization video is awesome in that course I'm happy about alright next is video if you are ignoring video the Train is taken off right now there's never been a better time to be getting involved in video it's not a replacement for text people have read for thousands of years and will continue to will continue to do so but video is showing up on search engine results more and more and so if you're completely ignoring that train you're missing a huge opportunity yep the next one is the user experience we've talked about that a little bit as we talked about the the different updates Google's made over time having the best user experience possible is only going to help your rankings more and more as you go forward Google cares about how people behave when they go to your website if you have not answered the question that somebody's looking for at the very beginning of your post people will bounce people think that oh I should bury the answer further down so they'll stay on my page longer that is wrong what do you do when you go to a webpage it brother what do you do when you google something and you know this article is like oh and then this is my question you click on it you read like four paragraphs and they're not even close to answering the question how to hear you're gone that's wait that's what you probably do that's what I do so put the answer at the beginning and then give people a reason to stay format your article in a way that it's easy to scan through and find the information people are looking for the better experience you give to users the better you will rank on Google because of how people will behave on your website yep and the last one is speed it's been a factor for a long time but you can only see it getting more of a factor as more people are searching just on mobile and as some pages are getting faster and faster amp is something that we've definitely been watching carefully and seeing we've decided that it's not the right time for our websites because it does hurt ad earnings big time but the technology is getting more and more promising and so again it's something that we watch right now we just make sure that our page is loading in about the top 20% of all the search engine results and we feel confident with that but it's one that we continue watch see if we need to implement the new technology or things as we go and if you want to make your website faster you've got to check out our video it's just a 30 minute exact step-by-step do this to your WordPress website and I guarantee if you implement those things you will be in the top 20 percent in terms of page speed on your websites and I want to clarify something the video isn't even 30 minutes long the whole process to speed up your site yeah will only take you about 30 minutes yeah it's just Adsit yeah won't cost you anything it's easy to do