Helpful Content Update Day 10 - Got Chrome? - Crawl or No Crawl Report
Welcome to Crawl or No Crawl - this is Carolyn Holzman and today is Sept 23 -
Officially Day 10 of the latest Helpful Content Update - or more precisely the recalibration of the HCS classifier system.
Quickly here’s what has been happening in search console
Normally our page reports in search console are updated every 3 days - occasionally a few take 4 - but its been a week - which means don’t a frozen search console as your pages aren’t going to come out the other end of the indexation.
Time marches on even if search console is frozen in time.
So take your data in there with a chill pill - and instead of crying in FB - spend some time to find the pages that are losing or gaining and isolate them. Stop letting the composite view control your life.
Look at the dates before the update for those same pages and see if you’ve got the same number and the same keywords associated with that page in search console - I bet there are some changes.
The amount of chrome build updates in the standard crawlers AND the inspection tools was rapid and frequent this week -
Also, indexation requests through the Indexing API STILL show no love for the 2nd pass or the rendering pass - so don’t discount that -
If rendering is blocked or turned off or god forbid broken - and you have any of your content or optimizations in Javascript or anything that google needs to unpack in order to understand your page
You’re screwed.
Get that?
I have shared what I think the Helpful Content System is about - and data is only growing in terms of validating that the theory I and some others are running with
And I’m here to affirm that data does NOT indicate that this is a version of Panda on steroids -
Panda is about visitor behavior - and is a site-wide signal
HCU is NOT about visitor behavior - and is a site-wide signal
The volatility in the serps went down sharply - over the last 2 years - when I see that - it tells me that they have blocked off updating the search console data - and that bears out with the factor we’re still waiting for one - the last one was last Saturday - when they unblock it - expect a data dump -
That means volatility will go up as measured by SEO Tools -
Right now - keep your powder dry, isolate your money pages in search console under performance and create 2 reports - one the duration for a week prior to the announcement Sept 1 - 12 and then during the update Sept 14 - 21s
If search console shows you 0 data - don’t panic - just know they are working in there. Our sites haven’t gone anywhere -
OK - have a great rest of your weekend and may the odds forever be in our favor.
Related Topics:
Helpful Content Update
Helpful Content System
Helpful Content Classifier
Google Indexing API
Javascript Rendering Status