On the 18 March 2024, Google announced yet another change in the way its search algorithms and systems work.

Obviously, we mortals know very little about the way the Google wizards design their algorithms – they are closely guarded secrets.

(Between you and me, I doubt the nerds working on the systems even know themselves. It’s far more likely that an advanced form of AI is doing most of the work).

In their announcement they gave advice for website owners and SEOs that was, at best, vague.

What changes did Google make?

We don’t know the ins and outs but, in essence, Google are doubling down on their commitment to spotlight useful, helpful, and reliable content.

(This was also a theme in the last few announcements).

They have said that, due to the algorithm changes, some pages that were previously performing well might fall by the wayside slightly.

This isn’t a reflection on the page necessarily: “They haven’t violated our spam policies, nor been subjected to a manual algorithm action.”

And “pages that experience a change after a core update might not have anything wrong to fix.”

Further down in the document they give a rather cryptic analogy:

“One way to think of how a core update operates is to imagine you made a list of the top 100 movies in 2021. A few years later in 2024, you refresh the list. It’s going to naturally change. Some new and wonderful movies that never existed before will now be candidates for inclusion. You might also reassess some films and realize they deserved a higher place on the list than they had before.

“The list will change, and films previously higher on the list that move down aren’t bad. There are simply more deserving films that are coming before them.”

What should SEO experts do now?

With such unclear motives and really very little research being done on this latest change, we can only offer broad advice to website owners and SEO experts.

Stick to the “useful and helpful” brief.

Clearly, Google is keen to promote this message, despite (or perhaps because of) the rise in AI generated content which has seen strong pushback of late.

The Google team suggest: “Focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can.” Because “that’s what our algorithms seek to reward.” 

This goes back to their Google’s August 2022 helpful content update in which they declared a focus on people-first content over any other.

They are looking to reward pages where “visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience” – though they failed to define exactly how they were measuring that.

Presumably it’s based on time spent, re-visiting rates and engagement metrics like likes and comments.

Either way, it should demonstrate a clear line of focus for SEO experts: useful, human-centred, reliable, and helpful content is a priority.

Most of us will be fulfilling that obligation through blogs and news articles that we post on our sites regularly, which we already know is great for SEO.

However, it might also mean that we need to audit some of our older pages and remove any information that is no longer up to date or could perhaps be written in a more contemporary way.

Equally, narrowing down the focus of your site – if you haven’t done so already – could be a good place to start.

It keeps your pages relevant and allows users to bounce from one useful piece of content to the other.

The Absurd Insights team feel that these updates are simply further targeting of AI generated content so anything you can do to provably demonstrate that you’re not a robot is also a good strategy.

We feel it’s time for SEO content creators to inject a bit of personality into their content and bring the human element into their web copy – something that AI can’t quite do… yet.

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