It's official: March core update is over ...

Search Engines And SEO Google
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8 days ago, on the 19th April, the update which seems to have finally finished off tens of thousands of small publishers was completed. Google announced this on their search status dashboard yesterday, 26th April.

Why did they wait so long to tell us all?

So, the analysis begins but I keep coming back to the "pages made for search engines" thing. Keyword in URL, title, H1, once in an early paragraph, once in bold etc etc.

I think I'm going to start a test by editing some posts to make that aspect less obvious. I've barely touched my content since the September 23 HCU due to some vain hope that I'd recover ... seeing as I'm pretty sure most of my content is pretty helpful 😊

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Hey Rohan,

Yep, it's a weird one, although I'm counting it as the 18th April (I had to be different from EVERYONE ELSE online, hahahahaha!! But I always count the "first day", i.e. March 5th as Day I)

Anyway, I've got THREE recovery methods (yes, I'll "reveal all" here over the next few weeks), but realistically it may be best to view Google from now on in the same way as your other traffic sources, e.g. YouTube, Pinterest, Medium, etc. if you get 20% of your overall traffic from ONE source you're doing well, from now on view Google in exactly the same way.

Anyway, I feel that the "sitewide classifier" from HCUs of August 2022, December 2022, and September 2023 have "stuck", i.e. your domain may be "tainted", even though you haven't received a "manual penalty" in GSC, you HAVE RECEIVED an "algorithmic penalty" which is not "visible" anywhere to the human eye, but it's obvious because you had a massive drop in rankings and traffic during an algorithm update). I also think this may mean that the "page-by-page" analysis that Google hinted at in the Core update notes is a good reason to start a "fresh" website on a new domain, more below!!

So, one "recovery" method that I wasn't a fan of, purely because you'd "get away" with it for about 12-18 months and then get slapped by Google again (BUT, you can break another one of Google's "rules" during that 12-18 months, i.e. mass produced AI content, and "get away" with it), and that is GET A NEW DOMAIN.

It's already proven to work, and the time taken to "gain traction" in Google is much quicker because of "lots of content in a short amount of time".

Simply, deindex everything on the "old" website, add the content to a new domain, and have NO "evidence" (linking from) from the old domain, so NO redirects, 301s, etc. just treat the new domain as a new website with no previous connections (I only suggest doing this if you have 100% GIVEN UP on the "old" website, it may not work for everyone).

However, with one method of "recovery" comes a headache, if you've built a brand on your domain name then all of that needs to change too, e.g. socials, YT, forums, Q&A sites, website directories, etc.

And as I say, this really is only a "temporary" solution, as you're likely to get clapped again in about 12-18 months (so, it really depends on how much content you can put out and how much money you can make from it in that "12-18 months", so NOT really a permanent business-minded solution. But hey, this is how I've always viewed this "business" if I have a fantastic 12 months, I can then "afford" to have a crappy 24 months after, hahaha!)

BUT

As I've initially said, it's time to view Google as "20% is good" for traffic.

However, don't forget that all this UGC is ranking in Google, purely based on their Domain Authority and what I believe is the "Hidden Gems" (something I wrote about on WA about 5 months ago https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/parthab/blog/parthashorts-googles-hidden-gems-and-promoting-wealthy-affiliate), so take advantage of it.

If you like writing, syndicate all your content to Medium (they have an "import" tool) and Linkedin, and link in your profile from Reddit and Quora and just "get involved" (even if you don't link in most responses you are still getting "citations" by having your name all over the internet, this will help with rankings in search engines, just not as much as backlinks, so obviously occasionally link from these platforms) and if you like visuals get on YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest.

It makes sense, if THIS is what is ranking in Google get your content on there!

I've even recently said that perhaps a "website" should just be a single page with a sign-up to your newsletter. Then all your "content" goes onto your newsletter and the platforms mentioned above, blogging and affiliate marketing in 2024 and beyond, LOL).

Anyway, we still have the "site reputation abuse" update coming on Sunday week (May 5th), and we'll need to give that 2 weeks of "tremors", so let's say 19th May.

So realistically, check your analytics between 23rd -27th May and what you see for that week is what you can expect going forward (from Google) for the content you have on that specific domain.

It all comes back to "Use Google as 20% of your traffic", so work out where the other 80% is going to come from.

Partha

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Hi, have you come across this form from google ( thanks Marie Haynes)

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf76Nm3Xsd5NoOPzFajem2sIdwgeewlqAH7XknhycaqP6myRA/viewform?ck_subscriber_id=1238204387

might be worth adding some feedback - not that it will do any good...

but if you come across non relevant ranking sites and feel strong enough about it - before May 31 - 2024 - then worth filling it in...
some good information here Partha....

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@feigner Cheers Phil, I’ve “heard” about the form for a few weeks now, but this is the first time I’m seeing it, so thanks for that!!

As you say, it probably won’t do any good, in fact it could even go the other way… by making yourself “known” to Google, your website could be manually reviewed and then have a manual action slapped on it, and then it really is dead in Google (for at least a couple of years, until everything changes again, LOL)

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yeah- wouldn't that be a laugh....

a site already struggling with an added manual action....

thanks Google....

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@feigner LOL!!! I can see it happening though…

If you’re “alerting” Google about your discontent I would have to guess that they must have some manual review process in place, otherwise, what’s the point of the form?

But, you know millions of bloggers are going to fill out the form, so will they simply get slapped with a manual action in future core updates?

Something else to watch out for is over the last few years we appear to have had “big algorithm updates” in

March
May
August/September
November/December

So, I’d love to know what happens with these sites filling out the form on these dates

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@partha Would the deindexing of the older site also apply for me while working on my Dutch translated site?

I just translated and published a first blog post from my English Africa site to my new Dutch site, will I need to deindex that english blog post or not? I use about the same pictures and videos though. But not literally translated, because that wouldn't make any sense in Dutch haha

Also, at the moment I am transferring hosts from WA to WPX for this new site. (should be in the works)

thanks again !

Lizzy

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@ohnoo_not_her Nope!!

It’s fresh UNIQUE content on the new site, even if it’s just copied word-for-word into a different language, i.e. it is “different” from the original.

So, in your case, you basically have TWO websites saying the same thing but in two different languages, that’s fine!

What my reply above refers to is those who want “revitalise” a website that has “died” in Google’s eyes.

The only time to deindex from website one is because you are basically “hacking” Google’s algorithm by putting EXACTLY the same content, word-for-word, onto a new domain (for better “recovery” chances, it’s even better to have rewritten the content slightly, and adding new images, but just copying and pasting everything has been working since September 2023, you just don’t want to have any “connection” to the previous website, I’d even suggest putting the new domain on different hosting from the original website, a $3 per month hosting from one of the well-known hosts is fine till you hit about 50K visitors per month).

The content was deemed “good” and “helpful” once, so without a “sitewide classifier” attached to your domain there’s a great chance that content will rank again (so, DO NOT transfer articles that weren’t getting any traffic anyway from BEFORE your website got “hit” in one of the HCUs of the last 2 years, these are articles were “worthless” even when your website was doing well, so only copy the “good-performing pre-HCU” articles).

The only thing about this “recovery” method is to remember that Google SERPs are “currently” very different.

So, as an example, if you had an article that was ranking number 1 in Google BEFORE your site got “hit”, and that article was getting 1,000 visitors per month from Google, if you rank that same article (on a new domain) at number 1 in Google TODAY, you will be further down the page (ads, featured snippet which is likely to be UGC or huge DA, People Also Ask, YouTube), so you will ranking the “equivalent” of number 5 on Google.

Therefore, whereas ranking at number 1 in Google for that article TWO YEARS ago got you 1,000 visitors per month, ranking number one today will only get that article 150 visitors per month.

Therefore, you could actually say that ranking in Google nowadays will produce about 85% less traffic than it did two years ago.

Welcome to the “new” Google!!! Hahahahahaha!!

But, as I’ve mentioned above, we seem to be following a trend for a few years now with “big updates” happening in March, May, August/September, and November/December, so who knows what will happen then!!

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@partha aah good to know,saves me some hassle hahaha!

I have to tell you a secret: at first when I started out with my first website,I was actually just translating Dutch articles into English posts (well , again, not literally translated), and that was doing fine! (that and of course my own product reviews of DIY kits)

It wasn't since I started using AI, that new posts started to not rank anymore, go figure. (yeah yeah humanized and all,removed lots of fluff,etc..)

(what a waste of time from following Jays AI classes and using his 'prompts' back then, all because I wanted to "save time", *sigh

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[quote data-userid="3" data-postid="25"]

I feel that the "sitewide classifier" from HCUs of August 2022, December 2022, and September 2023 have "stuck"

[/quote]

I tend to think you're spot on here. My entire site still seems to be hit and I've been posting pure "content made for humans" methodically since January 1st. No keyword research, breaking many SEO "rules" but those posts seem to be driving almost no traffic as well.

Although I'm not sure how G would determine what those pages are about because I have 10+ different stories on the page covering the previous week's news in my niche.

[quote data-userid="3" data-postid="25"]

you can break another one of Google's "rules" during that 12-18 months, i.e. mass produced AI content, and "get away" with it

[/quote]

Yep. I've been thinking about this a lot. New domain. Shed loads of AI content daily. I found a useful looking plugin for wordpress which uses the Open AI API. Just pop in yer keyword and out comes an article, with images too I think. I've got some old domains hanging around with nothing on there so might try one of those!

Nothing to lose!

[quote data-userid="3" data-postid="25"]

If you like writing, syndicate all your content to Medium (they have an "import" tool) and Linkedin

[/quote]

Definitely need to do more of this ... and Reddit/Quora. Or might G see this as parasite SEO and hit us during the "site reputation abuse" update?

Thanks Partha :-)

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[quote data-userid="3" data-postid="38"]

ranking at number 1 in Google for that article TWO YEARS ago got you 1,000 visitors per month, ranking number one today will only get that article 150 visitors per month

[/quote]

Very true. So much more clutter on the SERP now. Plus G are losing market share to Bing and others. I'm actually using Bing Copilot quite a bit for informational searches now where previously I would have 'Googled it'.

Also, as a feeble protest, I switched to Edge and am using Bing as my default search engine across all my devices now. Although I'm still using Chrome on my Chromebook because I figured they already have my Chromebook data anyway!

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@partha Hey Partha. When I read your comment. I just came to the thought. Why not just make a brand-new website that has basically no connection with my other website, and just try this mass production of AI articles, just to see what happens.

Of course I wanted to ask you first. And I didn't want to ask you inside WA since I would be receive 1000 replies saying NO NONONONONO. Lol!

But I would like to hear what you think!

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The biggest takeaway that I have seen from this, my first Google Core Update, is that new blogs and new posts have fallen to the wayside in favor of amalgamated sites like Medium, Quora, Reddit, and such.

I create condensed, Reader's Digest versions of my blog posts for Medium consumption. I see that these condensed posts are being ranked based on the domain authority of Medium. Further down the SERP, I see my answers on Quora and Reddit, though all are listed.

Finally, somewhere down the list of results are the actual posts that I created. I see where you mention -

If you like writing, syndicate all your content to Medium (they have an "import" tool)

Should I do as you suggest and import all of my posts periodically to Medium, or continue to create the condensed versions? It took a while, but I have a great set of prompts that do the work for me.

 Designer-43.jpeg
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[quote data-userid="35" data-postid="58"]

Why not just make a brand-new website that has basically no connection with my other website, and just try this mass production of AI articles, just to see what happens.

[/quote]

@jonathan yeah, why not give it a try? What do you have to lose?

New domain name with privacy protection, SSL obviously, cheap hosting account and then just crank out that content.

I think the main thing to keep in mind is this is mass production so don't worry about content quality. Just get as much content out there as you can. Having said that, with a well crafted prompt you can also make the quality reasonably acceptable as well.

Thousands of webmasters are doing this now. Must be a nightmare for the G engineers!

@partha ... what do you think is the top limit for the number of posts per day, when creating mass content like this?

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[quote data-userid="39" data-postid="67"]

new blogs and new posts have fallen to the wayside in favor of amalgamated sites like Medium, Quora, Reddit, and such.

[/quote]

@mrdon Hey Don ... yep G seems to have just pushed high authority sites to the top of the pile and all of us smaller guys and gals with the site-wide classifier applied are nowhere. Apparently G also signed a deal with Reddit to train their AI on Reddit's vast database of UGC, so that's one potential reason for Reddit seeing a boost in the SERP ... although I don't think anyone can confirm there is favouritism there.

The prominence of Reddit and Quora might just be down to the algo.

[quote data-userid="39" data-postid="67"]

Should I do as you suggest and import all of my posts periodically to Medium, or continue to create the condensed versions?

[/quote]

Medium takes care of the canonical aspect so you can safely import the whole article. If you'd rather post the condensed version then that's fine too. Although if your prompts are rewriting the content substantially, I'd be a bit careful because it may get flagged as AI generated.

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Hey Jonathan,

Oh yes, you'd be told NOT to do it at WA, LOL!!

Okay, rather than me telling you what to do, you can check out Matt Diggity's latest video.

Basically, Matt has a number of sites that are purely AI-generated content.

During the March Core update most of his websites that had "normal" content got hit, however, his AI-generated websites went from strength-to-strength, and even increased in traffic during the update.

Matt speaks about whether AI is "detectable" to Google, but also shows the Google documents where Google says it isn't an issue as long as the content is of "high-quality".

Furthermore, the "site reputation abuse" update next Sunday is targeting "mass-produced AI content", as well as a couple of other things.

However, this is mainly for people who are producing 100s or 1000s of articles PER DAY.

This is just viewed as spam and a way to manipulate the search results, so these types of websites will get "hit".

SO BASICALLY, 100s OF ARTICLES A DAY IS SPAM, BUT A LOWER NUMBER IS NOT!

Matt has spoken about his own "success" with using AI content and has said that he only ever publishes about 10 articles per day, and suggests that you only ever do 10-20 articles per day.

Personally, I would say stick to 10 or under every day, especially when just starting out, so perhaps go with 5-10 articles per day for the first 4-6 weeks, and then increase thereafter, but never more than about 15-20 per day.

The other thing with doing this is that you're likely to get picked up by Bing too, and you should start ranking really well there.

Obviously, it won't be a great deal of traffic, but because you're producing so much content it all adds up.

The way to "blackhat" (or greyhat really) articles to write about is simply to find websites in your niche that are ranking well and then going through their sitemap.

So, find a website, go to the homepage, and then after the .com type in

/sitemap.xml

You should then get a clickable link (may not work on ALL websites) for their sitemap, which reveals all their titles and keywords.

You now have lots of content that you can reproduce with AI.

Obviously, we simply don't know what's going to happen after next week's update, but AI is here to stay.

Plus, I see nothing wrong with having a number of websites projects running at the same time, whereby some are created "normally", while others are created just to "test" how things go.

Anyway, here's Matt's latest video, I'd also suggest subscribing to his channel, and watch at least his 2 previous videos as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ7G7RiRAGM&t=14s

Partha

[quote data-userid="35" data-postid="58"]

@partha Hey Partha. When I read your comment. I just came to the thought. Why not just make a brand-new website that has basically no connection with my other website, and just try this mass production of AI articles, just to see what happens.

Of course I wanted to ask you first. And I didn't want to ask you inside WA since I would be receive 1000 replies saying NO NONONONONO. Lol!

But I would like to hear what you think!

[/quote]

17

Hey Don,

Nope, no need.

The point being, you have found something that works for you, so no need to change it up, just keep doing what you're doing.

I've always said there is no "one way" to do things online, so while importing works really well, you've found your own system that works really well for YOU, so keep at it.

Realistically, people have ALWAYS tried to manipulate Google in some way, so Google is forever fighting against this.

So, more often than not, something works really well for a few years, and then it doesn't, it's just the way it is with ever-changing algorithms.

However, for the moment, "parasitising" off sites such as Medium, Linkedin, Reddit, and Quora works really well, so ensure that you are using these platforms to your full advantage.

What will happen next Sunday, I don't know, but at a guess it will be SOME of the "normal" websites that are allowing people to "parasite" off them that will get hit.

So, this will mainly be websites that have things like "Write a guest post for us" advertised somewhere on their website.

However, I'm pretty sure Forbes will get away with their practices, because let's face facts, they're a big enough company to take out a lawsuit against Google if they are "hit" in this update (kinda shows that Google is ALL about business and making money).

Furthermore, I can't see "user-generated content" websites (Medium, Linkedin, Reddit, and Quora) getting hit, as this is in line with the "Hidden Gems" update that Google spoke about around 5 months ago (people sharing their personal experience of something).

So, for now, carry on doing what's working for you, and if you have to "evolve" in the future then so be it.

Partha

[quote data-userid="39" data-postid="67"]

Should I do as you suggest and import all of my posts periodically to Medium, or continue to create the condensed versions? It took a while, but I have a great set of prompts that do the work for me.

[/quote]

18

Hey Rohan,

I've replied to Johnathan about this, you can also check out Matt Diggity's video, but I agree with Matt, keep it to around 10 a day, you'll still gain traction a lot quicker, but you won't be "spamming" Google in the same way as those producing 100s of articles a day are.

Plus, you can use my "sitemap trick" to find article topics/keywords to start producing content.

Partha

[quote data-userid="5" data-postid="73"]

what do you think is the top limit for the number of posts per day, when creating mass content like this?

[/quote]

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@partha thank you Partha 😀 huge amount of great info on this thread. I love the sitemap trick!

Back to the lab ...

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@partha I have watched the video, and the one of humanizing the AI content. What I think I will do is to do the experiment, I mean $16 isn’t the whole world. I can survive losing it, lol! Might want to wait until the update is done? Or maybe not, new websites won’t even get affected most of the time, at least from what I have heard, hope I remember it correctly, lol!