Google update again?!

Gravity88m said:
Unfortunately, I cant confirm that. I improved my pagespeed to 400ms since nov 2018 (made wordpress to static html). I returned to the php-based wordpress 8 weeks ago and now i got 2000ms as before. I didnt saw a change in serps neither after the speed-improvement nor after the return to the slower version.
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That is a bummer, hope it comes back soon for you.

blinggam said:
Sorry to tell you, but the March 12 update had zero to do about site speed. It was about links.

Your site recovered because they recently, within the past week rolled back at least 50% of the March 12 update. You just happened to be one of the SERPs that got rolled back.
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Do you have any links which discuss the 50% rollback?
 
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bartosimpsonio said:
What, specifically, about links? Penguin like?
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No, they gave links more priority, as they had before Medic. Medic is/was a content algorithm (it tried/tries to correlate on page factors from the top X results, and find the “odd man out”. In doing so, it’s goal is to prevent generic Indian content from ranking based on links alone. There is also an element of user-engagement in Medic) . In a way you could “the AI discovered links are a better ranking signal than content, just as the founders of Google did 20 years ago”.

But they’ve seemingly kneecapped the AI now and forced it to remove some priority from links. The March 12 update wasn’t fully rolled back, it’s just that they slightly lessened the priority of links again.

March 12 was all about domain authority, NOT MOZ. Google domain authority. It was a “brand” update in many respects, but not only brands won, many BH sites also increased in rank.
 
fasttrak said:
That is a bummer, hope it comes back soon for you.



Do you have any links which discuss the 50% rollback?
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Who needs links when you track / operate in the most competitive SERPs online and are able to see what the updates are about by just some rudimentary analysis?

The so-called SEO gurus are generally people who don’t even do SEO. They aren’t going to be stating accurate information most of the time.
 
blinggam said:
No, they gave links more priority, as they had before Medic. Medic is/was a content algorithm (it tried/tries to correlate on page factors from the top X results, and find the “odd man out”. In doing so, it’s goal is to prevent generic Indian content from ranking based on links alone. There is also an element of user-engagement in Medic) . In a way you could “the AI discovered links are a better ranking signal than content, just as the founders of Google did 20 years ago”.

But they’ve seemingly kneecapped the AI now and forced it to remove some priority from links. The March 12 update wasn’t fully rolled back, it’s just that they slightly lessened the priority of links again.

March 12 was all about domain authority, NOT MOZ. Google domain authority. It was a “brand” update in many respects, but not only brands won, many BH sites also increased in rank.
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The more I do my analysis, the more I have come to the same conclusion. Pages that come from domains with higher authority seem to be ranking higher.

can you mention a niche that you are not involved in, but you are looking close to see such evidence? for example: best diet, best earphone, etc.
 
blinggam said:
Who needs links when you track / operate in the most competitive SERPs online and are able to see what the updates are about by just some rudimentary analysis?
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Or perhaps you are basing that statement on others getting unnatural links penalties, as per this thread and broad brushing the entire update, with a few random facts.

I'll take yout word for that then.
 
It's very fascinating. Since the medic update last year, it has popped in a couple of people in this thread who knows what the update was about.

Some dude claimed he knew Google people who confirmed that it was all about links, another knew it was about anchor texts and now one guy knows it's about content.

I'm not bashing you @blinggam, but is there any proof that what you are saying is correct? Anything you could share?
 
Something I noticed. Since March it seems aged domains gets a boost in the serps. Example? Three of my PBN sites from 2017 started to rank higher than some of my money (created January 2019), even I didn't built a single link to those PBN sites. Before they were somewhere on Page 6-8, but suddenly they started to go to page 1/2. Not sure what this is about, but seems "trust" over backlinks to me.
 
blinggam said:
No, they gave links more priority, as they had before Medic. Medic is/was a content algorithm (it tried/tries to correlate on page factors from the top X results, and find the “odd man out”. In doing so, it’s goal is to prevent generic Indian content from ranking based on links alone. There is also an element of user-engagement in Medic) . In a way you could “the AI discovered links are a better ranking signal than content, just as the founders of Google did 20 years ago”.

But they’ve seemingly kneecapped the AI now and forced it to remove some priority from links. The March 12 update wasn’t fully rolled back, it’s just that they slightly lessened the priority of links again.

March 12 was all about domain authority, NOT MOZ. Google domain authority. It was a “brand” update in many respects, but not only brands won, many BH sites also increased in rank.
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This is probably the best analysis I've read anywhere about the March update.

Most guru blogs are 100% bullshit and stuffing just to rank for "March update".
 
one thing we got to remember, having authoritative site, means getting some authoritative backlinks. so you cannot really separate authority and backlinks... still, I do agree that it seems that google is giving more credit to a site's authority vs what it used to give.
 
nakamura said:
Something I noticed. Since March it seems aged domains gets a boost in the serps. Example? Three of my PBN sites from 2017 started to rank higher than some of my money (created January 2019), even I didn't built a single link to those PBN sites. Before they were somewhere on Page 6-8, but suddenly they started to go to page 1/2. Not sure what this is about, but seems "trust" over backlinks to me.
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The opposite here.
5 years old site tanked.
6 months site 2nd page.
 
Zbigniew said:
It's very fascinating. Since the medic update last year, it has popped in a couple of people in this thread who knows what the update was about.

Some dude claimed he knew Google people who confirmed that it was all about links, another knew it was about anchor texts and now one guy knows it's about content.

I'm not bashing you @blinggam, but is there any proof that what you are saying is correct? Anything you could share?
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After Medic was launched, I used a custom content analysis script I had made, and compared my content to the top competitors.

I optimized my content by adding more similar densities, LSI, and “context words”. After doing so, the site went from #15 (pre-Medic) #44 (post-Medic) -> #10 and fully recovered from Medic even higher than it was before.

Sadly, on the March update, the site dropped to #30. After analyzing many competitors and talking to many high level SEO friends, we all came to the conclusion that the March update lowered the impact of on-page factors while increasing the value of links.

My personal theory is that people had learned to game the content algorithm by using tools like Cora and Google wanted to strip some of that power away.

I’m not saying that simply the person with the most PBN links win, I’m saying Google increased the value of links they deem to be “good” during the March update and lowered the value of on page content correlations.

I would now argue that this has been rolled back by ~50%, to where content is a bit more of a priority than pre-March, and links are a bit less.

—————-

Let’s take a health site I have. This site was #1 before Medic. After, it went to N/A. It has 100% health-TF PBN links with a few exact anchors.

I don’t focus in this niche anymore so I didn’t even bother trying to recover it.

After March update, it went from N/A -> #6. After “last” update in April, which is when I’m stating they partially lowered he signals on links, it went #6 -> #15.

—————-

I have been analyzing updates and managing many many sites for 7+ years. Admittedly, I can’t say with 100% confidence I know exactly what Medic targeted.

However, I can say with some confidence that (in my opinion) Medic is essentially a machine learning/AI correlations algorithm that attempts to rank “high EAT” sites higher by finding correlations between sites that are scored higher by quality raters. It just so happens that these content signals were seemingly high on the first correlation dump.

There’s new data coming in all the time, hence why we are in a never ending update cycle. Hence why John M said “the Internet is always changing”. Code language for there’s always new data coming in, and refreshes to signals happening based on what the data shows.

If my theory is true, they found some sort of previously unidentifiable link correlation and increased the weight in March, only to see that perhaps it performed a bit worse and now they’re testing different weights. When I’m talking about what changed, I’m speaking from a “broad view”. There are hundreds of signals, if they change a signal for links, it doesn’t have to mean “any/all” links, it could mean any subsection of links (for example, relevant links), etc.

If you read the quality rater guidelines, they directly say they want the algorithm to eventually be able to rank sites that the quality raters rate highly, higher in the SERPs. Why not find correlations between those sites and increase the weight of signals that match those correlations? That’s how, with unlimited processing power, you’d achieve what they are trying to achieve.
 
I discovered that my pages with relevant backlinks pointing to them are ranking way better than others.
 
blinggam said:
After Medic was launched, .
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Thanks for the reply man, a very good and informative post! I will make sure to read it once more tonight.

tenor.gif
 
blinggam said:
If my theory is true, they found some sort of previously unidentifiable link correlation and increased the weight in March, only to see that perhaps it performed a bit worse and now they’re testing different weights.
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100% agree with this

I think there's something wrong with the March update. I'm seeing some SERPs that remind me of Altavista.
 
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