Content Caffeine: a newsletter for the content-obsessed.

Hi everyone!

There's so much happening with this set of updates. And unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know Google's making massive changes.
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But if you've been too heads down to notice, we've got you covered. Read on.

News & Analysis

Everything we know about the algorithm updates.

On March 5th, Google announced SEVERAL concurrent updates that would be rolling out over the ensuing weeks and months. Taken together, they are the largest updates in the history of Search. All of these changes are aimed at ending or drastically minimizing traffic arbitrage. So, if your site exists to monetize ads or as an affiliate, you’d better add significant value via content.

There is a core algorithm update, a spam algorithm update, an update to spam policies, and an update to the Quality Rater Guidelines.
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Over the past 10 days, I’ve heard a LOT of misinformation. So, let’s break each update down carefully, one at a time.

It’s all about Spam.

Google added three new types of spam to its spam policies.

• Expired domain abuse has been happening in spammy areas of the web for years. It’s when SEOs buy old domains for their link equity, regardless of industry. So, an old aviation site could now host a site about pets. Moreover, this practice combines creating lots of low-quality content to engage in traffic arbitrage.

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• Site reputation abuse is another addition to the spam policies. This practice is what the SEO community has been calling parasite SEO. Parasite SEO happens when an authoritative site known for high-quality content abuses that reputation to create low-quality content that quickly ranks for many valuable terms. In a strange twist, Google is not taking action on this update until May 5th, giving publishers 2 months to prepare for these new rules. Implementing this portion of the update might mean that Google is getting better at identifying good content at the page level than the domain level.

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• Scaled content abuse has been made insanely easy over the past year with the popularity of AI. Is Google against AI content? Not expressly. The problem lies when AI is used to scale content production to the point that quality suffers.
  • FYI, it is our experience that AI is nearly impossible to leverage at this time to create truly helpful content. Thus, any use of AI results in inferior quality.
  • Manual penalties for AI content began rolling out within hours of the announcement. When a site is hit with a manual spam penalty, it is completely removed from Google’s index.
  • Originality.ai ran a study in which it checked 79,000 sites that monetized via ads. It found that 2% had been deindexed. Of the deindexed sites, 100% used some degree of AI content. 50% used a high degree of AI content.
  • Ian Nuttall of Niche Site Metrics had similar findings.
  • All this was manual and BEFORE the community began noticing signs of the algorithm update.

The spam algorithm update also began on March 5th and will take until Tuesday, March 19th, to fully roll out.

Core Update​
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The core algorithm update began on March 5th and is predicted to take 3 to 4 weeks to roll out fully.

Beginning on March 9th, SEOs began to notice algorithmic changes. As with all algorithm updates, it’s best to wait until they are done before making any huge proclamations.

QRG

Google also updated the Quality Rater Guidelines, adding examples of lowest-quality pages to section 4.7.

Early visibility changes

There are signs that Reddit and Quora are losing visibility. Here’s an early list of winners and losers from Lily Ray.

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Misconceptions I’ve seen about the updates:

1. Removing your site from Google Search Console will help you recover. This one is interesting. Removing your site from GSC will not stop Google from crawling your site or seeing anything that you’re doing. This will not help you.
2. Your link practices are responsible for the penalty. This one is curious. As much as I’d love to be able to blame bad link practices (again) and point folks in the direction of our awesome digital PR service, that’s simply not the case. Google is trying to improve the quality of onsite content in the SERP.
3. You will not get a scaled content “pure spam” manual action if you haven't used AI. Listen, before the advent of AI, content farms have been scaling low-value content for decades. And since AI content looks like low-quality content written by humans, I think at least some sites without AI content will be penalized.

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What should you do if you were hit with a manual penalty?​
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Please remember that a manual penalty was given to you by humans at Google. Not the algorithm.

Many folks have been penny-wise and pound-foolish over the past 12+ months. Recovering is possible, but you’ll need to work hard, be honest and thorough, and fess up in a reconsideration request.
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If you’re ready to invest in real content, it will take real research + actual expertise + information gain.

No shortcuts.

Step 1. Find and remove all AI-generated content. Find and remove all low-quality content. AI content is getting a lot of attention. However, these updates aim to devalue low-quality content regardless of its source.

Step 2. Create a content strategy aimed at a well-defined audience. More and more, I’m seeing sites benefit from narrowing their topics and focusing on a core audience. Take a close look at your content and ask yourself if you’ve strayed too far for the sake of search volume. If so, you are at risk.

Step 3: Consider removing content outside this new core audience.

Step 4: Invest in great content that is well-researched and contains expertise and information gain. This process is and should be hard. I will soon be writing about how content is now as difficult to execute well as link building has always been.

Step 5: Ask people who know you (not other SEOs) to actually read your content and tell you if they liked it or found it interesting or useful. When you are too close to the content, it can be hard to be honest about its relative quality.

Step 6: Write a nice letter to Google apologizing for what you’ve done. Be brutally honest with them and confess. They know what you did anyway. And remember. You are pleading your case to the humans at Google, trying to convince them that you know what you did, stopped, cleaned up your act, and moved forward in a new direction.

Step 7: Request a review.

If you need help, reach out. We've got a great track record of recovering sites.
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Google also released its FAQs to address manual action.

I hope these insights help. For more tips, follow me here. To explore our work further, reach out here.

See our work! Check out more of our work or how we might help you achieve your organic goals.

Inspiration

In November 2023, we conducted a study to identify the friendliest neighborhoods throughout the U.S., and our effort earned us 146 links, including those from prominent sources such as Axios, CultureMap, TimeOut, Deseret, The San Antonio Express-News, and Seattle Magazine.

Here's EXACTLY how we did this and how you can too:

1. We generated a list of popular neighborhoods by reviewing Zillow's 200 most-viewed city neighborhoods in 2022.

2. Next, we analyzed approximately 150,000 Google reviews of businesses in these neighborhoods.

3. We categorized these businesses into ten sectors: banks, bars and pubs, beauty salons, car-repair shops, coffee shops, convenience stores, dry cleaners, grocery stores, pharmacies, and post offices.

4. We determined the friendliest neighborhoods by calculating the average number of reviews that included the word “friendly.”

5. We considered only the reviews posted within the last year to guarantee fairness.z

6. We created a landing page that contained all our findings, including a nice article and a few tables and visualizations.

7. We ran targeted outreach to each neighborhood, city, and state for what I call scaled localization.

8. Watch the placements roll in.

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Upcoming PR & Seasonal Dates

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Apr 22 - Earth Day (U.S.)
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Apr 30 - Tony Awards nominations

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April is also:

National Child Abuse Awareness Month
Global Volunteer Month
National Alcohol Awareness Month
National Soy Foods Month
Sexual Assault Awareness Month
Autism Acceptance Month
National Pickleball Month
Stress Awareness Month
Summer Tire Changeover Month
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See our work! Check out more of our work or how we might help you achieve your organic goals.