May 2020 Algo Thoughts

May 2020 update; initial thoughts after the first 10 days.

After 10 days of checking sites, monitoring competitors and giving the latest algo time to kick in, this is just a quick summary of what I've found. I've bounced these ideas off @WebMinati too, and as he agrees these are just thoughts, not defined answers.

This doesn't target any specific niches, unlike the EAT and YMYL updates previously.
What is clear though this is a sitewide algo, not targetting specific pages, keywords or even onpage.

Announced May 4th and people saw changes within 3-4 days.

Huge sites weren't affected. Wikipedia etc, not just the Amazons etc type sites.
https://gyazo.com/b8eb6d8d00bc01e7b1ff9163197891d7

Forbes
https://gyazo.com/f2643d0155da265824fd22453f4a80c6


The Wirecutter

https://gyazo.com/3074bdad950ec3ff27fc15bfaca59f76

NYT

https://gyazo.com/ab134408007555de557acd127c776360


It looks like affiliate sites were hit, especially smaller sites.

Even some of the huge affiliate sites were hit it seems.

It seems thin content sites improved where they have solid backlinks. Think Yell.com here.

https://gyazo.com/b786d29a65da19cfa747962357baa79f


Tiered link building saw positive results, as did contextual links.

Page 1 number of images is down - By this, it's the number of images on sites that were ranking on page 1.

EMDs and PMDs seem to have survived and actually have done better a little.

Maybe this is about user experience?
We know that site speed, mobile visibility etc is becoming more & more important.
Check your site using Chrome Lighthouse Page Speed.
Especially check performance and accessibility aspects.

Mueller shared a statement on Twitter recently:
It was something that’s seldom heard in the SEO world: “Ranking isn’t always the goal.”


Funny how Google were immune from the update. They actually improved around the same time as this rolled out.


I've seen research by a couple of really great SEO guys who have spent days on end checking thousands of sites and tens of thousands of keywords. Their findings have dug deeper into these ideas.


As I say, this is what my impressions are of this algo. So trying to bounce ideas , not saying ' this is the reason '. But it shows that you need to keep tracking, monitoring and adapting with SEO.

Will be helpful in bringing life back life to affected sites.

Could the trick here be that is to clone the affliate links and then hit it some backlinks so the site automatically improves and rises up in the serps

It's a head scratcher, that's for sure! I'm leaning towards the algo being tweaked to use new factors to determine whether or not a page answers the search query ie; google has got better (or trying too) at distinguishing between the level of expertise the author has on the subject.

But as said, it's all conjecture at the moment.

I am really liking MH's explanation about the FP content. It makes sense since most content we get is usually in the form of research or informational topics and does not sound unique and from real expertise or experience.
https://www.mariehaynes.com/may-2020-core-google-update/

I don't know if this new update is the responsable for this but i noticed that i get more visitors from english speaking countries compared to the first week of the month.
Anyone noticed something similar?

It's time to stop creating low value sites and think bigger. Authority sites are the way to go

The Google SEO Madness is Huge!

Guys, Google is not a life insurance.

So, just digest the suckdates, I mean updates, and do the needed.

Crying doesn't help, when you picked a broken boat.

Google owns your traffic/customer, and they will do whatever the fuck they want.

There was an interesting observation by the guys over at Serpwoo.com.

They noticed that keywords with 50K search volume or less had the most volatility. Keywords with 1K search volume or less were even more noticeable.

Some other observations:

- Bunch of the local sites I track were widely fluctuating (small gains or losses, followed by rollbacks within the next couple days), which could explain the volatility in the lower volume search keywords.
- Lots of link pruning/devalues by Google with this update. Low level links that were passing juice got the kibosh.
- A lot of the drops I've seen were in the -1/5 range. Not significant in the sense of ranking, but huge in correlation between top positions and traffic
- A handful of the websites I saw take a hit, had really bad page load speeds (most had no other noticeable issues).

It's funny, even the quality sites seem to take a hit once per year with these core updates, but if your website has some authority, most of the time you'll see a net gain on the year. Seems like Google is always trying to walk that line between authority and relevancy. While authority/trustworthiness is a huge part of the algorithm, they can't leave out the little guys, or newer(ish) websites. So, it seems they are always trying to juggle authority vs mid-tier higher quality content/relevant websites. Hence, why you see a lot of volatility throughout the year even with higher authority websites.

I noticed that some not optimized (as we thought earlier) pages without keywords like "buy" etc. got better ranking...
Question-answer content style is more welcomed by google.
Also the context of links has become more and more important. I have many links in English but my website is in German and now I see suggestion to translate it from English in the snippet.

Me too had the gut feeling of this update is a site wide update. All of my posts have lost their rankings.

OK, I've spent the day setting up a test for what I'm calling "Global EAT".

Rather than looking for an expired domain for a new niche I'm targeting, I found the .com of a brand/personality with years of online media information and strong niche association. 1000's of mentions on some of the biggest sites on the planet, not links.

From the very start I'm going to make sure everything indicates "expert". No traditional links will be built for 12 months to keep the test consistent. The site is now up, and need to crack on with content.

Content strategy is also going to be different than usual. With emphasis on personalizing the beginning of each article with a bit of story telling. Where I was, what I felt, which problem I had that required a solution, what my friends advised me to do.... You get the idea. A real situation!

So an update to this.

This is very short, as I don't have time to really dig into these sites.

There were some big sites hit and some were hit hard.

10% drop in keywords hurts anyone. 25 % drop in traffic hurts everyone

All these seem to have in common that they are not niche specific, but just general review sites.



10Beasts lost over 10 % of traffic too, but had a very small increase in keywords.



Best Advisor as an example has lost daily, hundreds of keywords dropping from position 1 to out of the top 100.

There was no clear pattern, as these were branded keywords, review, best etc etc.