The December core update was a quick one, running from December 12-18, 2024. Following this,  Google launched a surprise spam update only days after the core update finished. It ran from December 19-26.  There are many comments on Barry Schwartz's article on the spam update with site owners reporting significant declines in traffic. Some are […]

Google recently held an event in which they invited a small group of website owners who had been impacted strongly by the helpful content system. I’ll recap some of the great blog posts and tweet threads written about this. Then, I’d like to think upon what we can learn from what Google representatives said. The […]

Did Google start to prioritize expertise over authority in September 2024? In this article, we'll look at sections of Forbes and CNN that saw traffic dips. In Glenn Gabe’s most recent article, he wrote about sites that were possible targets for abusing Google’s site reputation abuse policy were seeing declines. Google responded saying that this […]

Google's most recent earnings call was quite optimistic. Here are the bits I found most interesting. AI Overviews In 18 months they have reduced the costs for AIO's by 90%. Google is seeing strong engagement with AIO's. They are increasing overall search usage and satisfaction. People who use them come back to search more often. […]

Google has updated their documentation on their spam policies. This latest update to the spam guidelines has several changes I thought were interesting enough to write about. 1. Manipulation of search = spam Google added this to the beginning of their document:   It's no surprise that content designed to deceive users is spam, but this […]

Twiddlers are C++ code objects used in Google’s ranking algorithms that help Google re-order search results. They are used in a Google system called Superroot which is Google’s ranking framework. I came across this 2017 Google document on Twiddlers upon reading Mario Fischer’s excellent breakdown of what we can learn about how ranking works based […]

The December core update was a quick one, running from December 12-18, 2024. Following this,  Google launched a surprise spam update only days after the core update finished. It ran from December 19-26.  There are many comments on Barry Schwartz's article on the spam update with site owners reporting significant declines in traffic. Some are […]

Google recently held an event in which they invited a small group of website owners who had been impacted strongly by the helpful content system. I’ll recap some of the great blog posts and tweet threads written about this. Then, I’d like to think upon what we can learn from what Google representatives said. The […]

Did Google start to prioritize expertise over authority in September 2024? In this article, we'll look at sections of Forbes and CNN that saw traffic dips. In Glenn Gabe’s most recent article, he wrote about sites that were possible targets for abusing Google’s site reputation abuse policy were seeing declines. Google responded saying that this […]

Google's most recent earnings call was quite optimistic. Here are the bits I found most interesting. AI Overviews In 18 months they have reduced the costs for AIO's by 90%. Google is seeing strong engagement with AIO's. They are increasing overall search usage and satisfaction. People who use them come back to search more often. […]

Google has updated their documentation on their spam policies. This latest update to the spam guidelines has several changes I thought were interesting enough to write about. 1. Manipulation of search = spam Google added this to the beginning of their document:   It's no surprise that content designed to deceive users is spam, but this […]

Twiddlers are C++ code objects used in Google’s ranking algorithms that help Google re-order search results. They are used in a Google system called Superroot which is Google’s ranking framework. I came across this 2017 Google document on Twiddlers upon reading Mario Fischer’s excellent breakdown of what we can learn about how ranking works based […]