What Google’s New Update means to websites

This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:58 am

It looks like, Google has updated its algorithms significantly recently (Apr 24), and webmasters are as usual, looking very agitated. SEO forums are reporting ups and downs in traffic, but these are not sure signals at the moment, as anything solid can only be seen over the coming days.

Google’s new update is all about fighting webspam this time – “leveling the playground” – in Matt Cutt’s words. The official blog warns – “In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.”

Google claims that with its update (series of it, right from Panda) good and bad websites will be filtered and bad ones discounted from the index. Guidelines for websites have always been there but this time looks like they’ve figured out an accurate or close way to fight it.

We have seen “Too many Ads – Less content” problems (Page Layout Algorithm update) earlier, “Low quality content update” problems earlier, and this time it is “Over optimization”. If your website is heavily optimized, you can expect a penalization in the coming days.

But its not clear as to what level of over optimization does Google consider optimal. Possibly its not going to be an on-page analysis and a direct correlation between the page score for a particular keyword and spam but more of a site-wide phenomenon. There are reports already that big players are safe and SMBs are getting the stick.

As it always have been, Google is inclined to the biggies who have an overall better and sizably bug reputation.

But at the same time, there are also reports that the new update, though claiming to be fixing the webspam/low-quality issue, is flawed and Bing scores better than Google in many aspects, when measured over search query examples.

This is indeed sad to hear, but I hope this is an unfair notice and the real deal is yet to be revealed. In the coming days, we’ll know how lucky we really are.

Anyone noticed anything yet?