Tips for Overcoming Shitstorm Caused by Recent Core Updates

Google's recent updates have ruined everything, and I wanted to share my thoughts as someone who's been in the SEO field since 2012. So, please don't focus on "newbie" status on my bhw account.

I've gained much knowledge from this forum. So I've chosen to post this information here rather than on my SEO agency's blog.

I noticed a frustrating issue with a client's website. I tried to use canonical URLs to redirect specific pages instead of 301 redirects, but Google disregarded this and indexed the pages anyway. Initially, I thought it was an isolated problem with that particular website, but I found the same issue on other client websites as well.

This might look like a minor issue, but the implications are more serious. If you use different URLs in canonical tags, to get rid of problems like duplicate content, Google might still index those pages. This can not only waste crawl budget but also dilute the distribution of link juice across your site.

To mitigate these problems, consider the following steps:

• Opt for 301 redirects over canonical URLs.
• Ensure a trailing slash ("/") is present at the end of your website URLs. If it's missing, redirect the slash version of URLs to the non-slash versions.
• Use "noindex, nofollow" tags on pages you don't want Google to index, rather than relying on canonical URLs. The "nofollow" tag is crucial for optimizing crawl budget.
• For ecommerce sites, ensure that URLs for all product variants (such as color or size) are same.

It has been a bad problem after the HCU, especially if you had content on sites you dont own.

Site that were hit but had content on medium, even if they had canonicals set up properly, the medium

pages got indexed shortly after the HCU and began outranking the orignal page no matter

if that page ranked number 1 for years. Completely disregarded the canonical.

Grid Architect said:

If it's missing, redirect the slash version of URLs to the non-slash versions.

Click to expand...

shouldn't this be the other way around?? And what are the effects of not having / at the end?

Other than this great tips! And thanks for sharing them

tazarbm said:

shouldn't this be the other way around?? And what are the effects of not having / at the end?

Other than this great tips! And thanks for sharing them

Click to expand...

you're welcome, thank you!

It doesn't matter actually, some sites don't have slash character at the end of their URLs. So, if they redirect to slash versions, google needs to crawl and index entire site again, and it can ruin the crawl budget bullshit

Jaordas said:

It has been a bad problem after the HCU, especially if you had content on sites you dont own.

Site that were hit but had content on medium, even if they had canonicals set up properly, the medium

pages got indexed shortly after the HCU and began outranking the orignal page no matter

if that page ranked number 1 for years. Completely disregarded the canonical.

Click to expand...

Exactly, absolute horse shit. The truly aggravating part is that Google's web spam team appears unresponsive to these concerns. It's as though they're more interested in what dessert is on the menu for lunch today, than in listening to our feedback about updates. They always get away with favoring the websites of large corps over small and mid sized websites.

Grid Architect said:

They always get away with favoring the websites of large corps over small and mid sized websites

Click to expand...

they've been doing this for a long time, man. I've been crying about this for years, there are literally billions of long tail keywords that are underserved and instead of these fuckers letting the little guys (who have no resources to chase after bigger keywords) rank their 1-page websites with badly written content and make a few dollars here and there they totally obliterate us from the SERPs to make room for the big sharks who don't have the slightest interest in any of those keywords and who rank for them without any SEO at all, and then they preach us the importance of addressing the keywords' intent and LOL. F**ing hypocrites and capitalistic idiots!

Instead of making things easy for the little guys so we can all thrive and be happy they choose to side with the sharks by eating up everyone until we all die (we get eaten up by the sharks and then the sharks will die due to lack of available sustenance because they've consumed us.)

I've gone on a little rant, sorry. But I got triggered by your point which I fully agree with btw

Google has significantly altered the landscape, leading to the dominance of major corps in SERPs. Despite numerous complaints on twitter (under Google Search Central's tweets), it appears that Google remains unresponsive to these concerns.

For me
Just use old method
focus only UNIQUE CONTENT (Which mean my content is never see at another website) And UNIQUE BACKLINK (Guest post with high traffic, PBN With low OBL)

The problem they cost too much for starter website like mine
so temporary i only used web 2.0 like blogspot zombie,tumblr zombie, wordpress zombie, etc filling them with semi AGC Content

Since the update I post content regularly but my traffic slowly goes down even more. I hope that one morning will wake up and will see the chart going up.