😮 Google's plan to shake up the internet 😮

Search results, remixed. View in browser Howdy-doody! In certain corners of the internet today you are going to hear much wailing and gnashing of teeth, offset by a little celebrating. Because today is the day that Google rolls out a core update to its ranking algorithm which will shake up the population of winners and losers in Search.  This was the reaction from the last update on, appropriately enough, Star Wars Day itself, May 4th: I was definitely one of those crying out that day as my site tumbled down the search results and organic traffic shrank to pathetic levels. Anyone who also relies on organic traffic from Search will be combing over today's changes, and feverishly checking the rankings. I won't be doing so much of that myself because I'm much more focused on another, bigger update Google has planned for May 2021, I'm several months into a project seeking to take advantage of that. What am I up to? Does any of this apply to you and your publishing business? Admittedly, this email is mostly for my long-suffering non-fiction brethren who are forced to pan the river of my often-more-fiction-focused marketing tips to try and find any non-fiction-applicable nuggets. Today is your day to shine, NF peeps! But some of my brothers and sisters in the world of fiction might be wise to read about these changes too - particularly if they engage in any website-based content marketing or otherwise rely on organic traffic from Google for their business. For everyone else - i.e. those niche weirdos who don't get worked up by cutting edge SEO and awesome SERPs and tricksy LCPs – then I have a few other things you can check out instead: My blog has been super quiet since August while I've been fixing some back-end stuff, and was actually blocked out of any updates for a while, but there's a ton of content coming there over the next few months. First post in a while was this one, about how mega-rich media corporation Disney can't find the money to pay what is contractually owed to Star Wars tie-in author Alan Dean Foster, nor the time to discuss their contractual obligations either. The response from authors has been heartening too, who are demanding that #DisneyMust Pay. More here: BTW the above post isn't just some tradpub dust-up - what Disney is attempting to do has massive ramifcations for all authors and needs to be opposed by everyone. While we are on the topic of trying to get basic respect and courtesy from corporate giants, the widespread problems with Facebook Ads are rumbling on and on into December.  I'm seeing reports of a huge spike in bizarre ad rejections, as well as accounts getting shut down for no logical reason – and I've had way too much personal experience with both of those recently. Here's my video on what's happening and how you can avoid trouble. Never say that Facebook's robots don't have a sense of humor! The small ad I made pushing this video was *drum roll* rejected by Facebook! LOL. I had previously promised a video on Rapid Release, but that was overtaken by events, as you can see above. I do hope to record that one over the weekend.  All right! On to the always exciting and never-at-all-technical topic of SEO. Updates on the Google Updates If you read Amazon Decoded, you know that one of the central tenets is that Kindle Store algorithms are updated way less than people think.  I don't know if it's the overactive imagination of the average author, or the fevered urgings of some dudebro internet marketer, but people seem to ascribe basically any variance in their sales as the Doings of Amazon. However, I can count on one hand the number of major algorithmic changes in the last nine years. Not so Google – who makes several changes to its algorithms every single day. Most are pretty minor, to be sure, but Google will also bundle the most important changes up into what it calls a "core update" a few times a year.  And then out of those core updates – which genuinely are big changes that can dramatically affect your position in Search and the level of traffic to your site – it will flag certain core updates as A Really Big Deal, and it's next year's May 2021 update which falls into that category, rather than today's Normal Sized Deal, which is why next year has all my attention. So what's happening today? What's happening next year? And why does any of this have me spending a lot of time on things which are - let's be brutally honest - absolutely no fun at all? In general terms, these updates are all pointing in one direction: Google wants to give visibility to the most relevant results for whatever search that people make and improve the user experience.  All these updates use a variety of mechanisms to identify and reward the best content on any given subject, while doing a health-check on the sites themselves too. Naturally, it is machines rather than meatbags making most of these calls because of the sheer number of web pages. There were around 3,000 web pages on the entire internet when I started using it in 1994, and presumably around 2,900 of those were Doom servers.  That number grew a little bit to a trillion web pages by 2008 and, in case you think that pace has slowed, we are up to around 30 trillion web pages now in 2020, although how much of that is down to this year going on for ever and ever is hard to say. I won't get into the specifics here of how an army of robots (and no small number of humans) bash all that information into some kind of digestible shape – no matter how riveting that might be – because what I want to highlight to you here is a different aspect of that process. Google doesn't just look for the best information on the topic, the most linked to resources, the most authoritative authors, and the most engaging and popular and trusted content, it also downgrades sites and pages for a whole bunch of reasons which are immediately relevant. Remember how going to virtually any website 15-20 years ago resulted in a string of horrible and spammy (and sometimes dangerous) pop-ups as sites engaged in the first clumsy steps to monetize? It was Google who took those to the woodshed. Those with even better memories might recall the plague of dialers – a piece of malware which inserted itself on your computer and then opened up your dial-up internet connection when you weren't using your machine and racked up huge phone bills back when that was a thing and back when going online often sounded like you were feeding a fax machine to a food blender. Again, it was Google that fitted these guys with concrete shoes and tossed them in Lake Good Riddance. Google regularly surveys (and surveils!) the web and like some paternalistic but benevolent Internet God it decides that it needs to Fix Something. Usually they are very positive changes, to be fair, even if they can cause sleepless nights for webmasters – who could do with getting some extra rest as it is. For example, one of the big changes coming next May which has me scurrying hither and tither along the less traveled paths of my site's back-end is aimed at solving a huge frustration around mobile web browsing.  Ever notice that some sites can be slow to load, and you can tap one thing, but the content just kind of… moves around?  It's especially frustrating when you inadvertently click on a late-loading ad, especially these days when many companies turn Single White Female with the slightest eye contact and can stalk you on Facebook for weeks. Well, Google is going to get rid of that next summer… or try to, at least. The boffins at Google HQ have come up with one of their usually snappy titles for the metric measuring this – Cumulative Layout Shift – which is basically their way of measuring how long it takes for the main elements on a page to settle down and stop moving about. A lot of the updates next year are going to focus on page experience, particularly on mobile devices and particularly when it comes to site speed. The good news for users is the mobile web is going to get a lot faster and easier to use. The bad news for site owners is that you are probably going to drop a lot in the rankings if you don't make some changes to your site. I'm not going to get into specifics here of what specifically is changing and what you need to fix, this email is more of a heads-up. I'll probably explore that deeper aspect in a blog post early next year. However, if you want to drill down into what has changed today then I recommend following Google Search Liaison on Twitter and reading places like Search Engine Land for analysis. But, really, I recommend pretty much ignoring it for a couple of weeks until everybody is sure what has happened – otherwise you will probably read lots of contradictory stuff, not least because these updates don't always go as planned, and Google often releases correcting changes in the days afterwards. And anyway, I think the May 2021 update is worth much more of your attention. Because that is a far bigger change which potentially requires much more work on our side, Google has flagged the broader contents of that change in advance. Huzzah! In short, this May 2021 update is called the Page Experience update – which shows you where the focus will be. Core Web Vitals are going to become a key ranking metric, and if you are not already paying attention to those in your Google Search Console, then now is the time to start doing that. If a lot of this email went over your head, don't worry, that just means you are a normally functioning human being who isn't dangerously obsessed with SEO. And you can get a handy explainer of how Google organizes information in Search in this article from Search Engine Journal - which is worth your time. Dave P.S. Site optimizing music this week is the Pointer Sisters with Slow Hand. DavidGaughran.com Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin, Ireland You received this email because you signed up at DavidGaughran.com. Unsubscribe