Google Now Crowd Sourcing For Helpful Content System👀
Welcome to Crawl or No Crawl - this is Carolyn Holzman and today is August 10rd - day 707 of the indexation research project.
We’re getting close to the TWO YEAR anniversary of this indexation research - and its having a baby - an indexer based on the very door to google itself - I know that sounds dramatic but its true.
Secondly, the Forensic SEO Training enrollment is open for next month Sep 7, 14, 21 and is also being updated with information on a Helpful Content Diagnostic as well as the server log information and more technical diagnostics - https://forensicseotraining.com/ - the page has been updated with the details, specific dates and a pay option.
I’m still a little down in the weeds on volatility. This morning I’ll share another way I’m looking to illustrate the volatility for the same term.
On Tuesday I noticed that search console was behaving like google was working in there -
The problem was no robots.txt - I can assure you there is a live and well robots.txt
Then Google announced their change in the HowTo and FAQ rich results -
https://developers.google.com/search/...
They made special note that this is not an update but a change in who gets those rich results and to be prepared to see that show up less.
Limiting it to desktop searches - won’t show on mobile results ultimately they are rolling that out and you’ll see a change in the metrics in your account - so I’m seeing this as a grace to agencies who have clients that convene the inquisition when anything for any reason drops.
Plus they have again confirmed that the mobile versions of our sites is what they use to rank our sites. My test from 2022 confirmed that was indeed the case - optimizing a mobile set of files for domain that had a separate set of files for desktop - it moved both the mobile AND the desktop versions of the site.
You can read about this here - but I think we know what we have one word for - google has another one -
“Note that there will be a small holdback experiment, so some users may not see these changes right away.”
Holdback experiments.
I’m going to keep that term handy.
Now to show you another way of looking at volatility and while it takes time to run these reports and then this format - it is a lot easier to interpret.
Check this out - to get the best price on Cora SEO Software https://bit.ly/confessionscora
But wait there’s more
I see enough evidence to confidently assert that Helpful Content is all about relevancy of content to the existing content but on a domain level.
And then this happened to make me even more convinced.
A new thing popped up today -
Close up
https://www.americanwaymedia.com/wp-c...
So now they may want to start training the Helpful Content System Classifier based on our feedback.
This only shows up in search console - and while google often asks feedback on a search result I haven’t see this and why NEWS in particular???
Maybe they have to take NEWS sites OUT of the Helpful Content Classifier and what better way to do it than ask the people who own the sites.
Maybe google sucks at being able to tell if one is or isn’t a news site - remember the issue earlier in the summer - Started June 21st and continued to be an issue for just over 3 weeks. What if this is now to refine the system. All the news sites probably complained - who wouldn’t and then now its like who else is a news site? News site are not topically themed.
So I’m making the case that all these signs point to Helpful Content and the topical classification of sites and how that relates to being served - all things are measurable, this explains why we were told if we got hit with a helpful content system - to remove the content but then it could take MONTHs before the system reclassified.
Can I get an amen???
This is the type of information that when the indexer goes live - I’m going to pull these reports under that and make it exclusively available to monthly subscribers. Its still getting programmed.
Also to demonstrate the forensic SEO is a diagnostic skill - if you are the least bit curious and have a client or you ARE your client and this could be ROI for you - make sure to head over the the forensic seo training page - link is in the description or you can google Forensic SEO and its the 2nd result - look for American way media
Check out Confessions of an SEO - New episodes launch Friday mornings. Confessions can be found anywhere you can get podcasts.
Related Topics:
google volatility
Google serp volatility
Mobile First Indexing