Sept Helpful Content Update Completed Crawl or No Crawl Report 28 September 2023
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Welcome to Crawl or No Crawl - this is Carolyn Holzman and today is Sept 28 -
Like I said on the 25th, we were going to hear about the end of the Helpful Content update this week and Officially they say it is over - and I know there are a lot of field reports where the results are shall we say it - NOT very helpful
We need to remember that this is the first recalibration of the HCS classifier system since they first ran it back in December 22.
That one ran 38 days - does it make sense to anyone else that these are noted as March 2023?
Anyway
This most recent one lasted 13 days and 11 hours -
It says officially it ended on Sept 28 today - but at like 8 minutes past midnight - that’s Sept 27th in my books
The general conversation is we are assuming that the ability of the HCS classifier to classify our sites and then getting indignant with the ridiculous outliers
likely the HC system works as a filter in-between the indexation and ranking OR between the ranking and serving subsystems of the indexation system.
But who cares right?
I just want to make sure we keep our wits about us - now that the update is over - likely we’ll see a few targeted corrections -
SO what happened between the last report and today -
1. We had a search console page update - that’s where they confirm what’s in the findable index getting impressions - and normally these occur every 3 days - it took 10 days to go from Sept 15 to Sept 25 -
Like I predicted that lag where the volatility dropped into low territory - once they opened up the search console suddenly it felt like a data dump and we were back into the high 7’s - low 8’s in semrush volatility -
2. We also had a new chrome build
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.5938.92 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html
By my internal count since starting this project it’s Mobile googlebot #46 and it showed up on the 27th - I have reliable data from a colleague that saw this new chrome build on their enterprise site as early as the 23rd in the evening.
Normally when Google issues a new mobile bot that’s the sign that an update is OVER - the fact that they are issuing bots and updating InspectionTool crawlers during an “update” is also why I think the Helpful Content System works like a filter instead of a sorting algorithm. If it was a ranking thing - they wouldn’t have done it in the middle - either before or after but not during. Limiting the number of factors if something goes wrong and you have to undo things.
So now we wait - likely we’ll see the knobs shift in time for the holiday buying season and it will look like Google favors brands -
But you know Google is involved in an antitrust trial and they are working hard to keep disclosures private even during the court case, it wouldn’t be seemly to overtly adjust the knobs too sharply. Or do they even care?
Anyway - let’s figure some of this out.