first of all: hello new followers!

second of all: I was writing my regularly schedule email I started on Tuesday and

KAPOW

huge Google update drops, ruins my whole flow...

so now there's a whole email about THAT.

and that is this email you're reading now.

here we go...

News and Updates

First: a new service!

You might have noticed... I'm pretty invested in the idea that newsletters are good and valuable. There's data that backs this up. As a believer and ALSO as a person who is, in my extremely humble opinion, pretty good at writing and writing emails, well:

I am introducing a new service. It won't be for every reader, and it's totally fine if you skip this.

I also won't take a long time talking about it, but... if you've been wishing you could send a super good, engaging email newsletter every week to your audience to try and sell more shit, well this offer is for you.

I'm starting a completely DFY newsletter service. I'm super excited to share

​Read more info about it at Impressions.org, and sign-up or book a chat I am ready TO GO.

Second: podcast ep!

I was a guest on the Niche Pursuits podcast this week. Click here to check it out if you're interested, talked about doing a newsletter, aged domains, AI, etc. Was fun!

Third: memezzzzz

You know the deal, I made this meme page so you could click at least one link and show some engagement so I don't have to send you an annoying "do you want to stay subscribed" email.

​Click here to see this week's memes.

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Welcome to the "Oh My God Damn We Are Getting Roasted For How Shitty The SERPs Are" March Core Algo Update.

Months of SEO Influencers (not me, I'm an SEO antihero) complaining on twitter, Narcing on sites to Google + a series of "wow Google has gotten worse" mainstream media articles have resulted in a particularly punishing response from Google.

But this has been a successful PR move for Google (regardless of the ACTUAL quality of the SERPs or the sites that got smashed), as evidenced by the difference between these two article headlines.

The first, from January of this year:

And this second one, from March 5th:

Victory!

That's a PR win y'all, stock price TO THE MOON

LFG!!!!!1!

It's the only only thing that matters...

There is A LOT to unpack in the recent Google Algo Update Announcementso let's get to it.

The Size of the Update

The first thing to know: they expect this to be a BIG update. According to the Google PR person they assigned to stand in the center of town and announce our doom:

As Search Engine Land reports:

Fantastic!

So, just a heads up, this update isn't targeting any one thing, just trying to make the negative PR go away...

Here are the main points of the algo update straight from Google's PR department:

1 - Addressing Low Quality, Unoriginal Results

Or, I guess, "we're targeting sites that are publishing a shitload of AI content.

That's cool, but feels particularly disingenuous juxtaposed against this story from last week:

"Here's $30,000 to push 15 stories per week of pure, shitty AI--sorry, hang on, just gotta push this update live where we are targeting pure, shitty AI in the SERPs lol, okay back! Please use our AI tool!"

Yeah, I get it, there's a difference between a site churning out 100 AI articles per month and a news organization pushing AI news stories with Googles blessing, but when you put both of them in the cool, cleansing water of truth with your stupid little raccoon hands they both dissolve away to the same low quality, empty calories--like this:

Do I think AI content is dead?

Not at all. That's going to prove to be an indestructible enemy.

But is publishing a site with 1,000 thoughtless AI articles and having it rank well dead?

Also no. As before, it'll continue to work until it doesn't. It was never meant to be a long-term strategy. And if you thought that when you hit publish, well, that's on you, I guess. You gotta build with the end in mind, and if you're playing with this particular flavor of fire, you GOTTA know you're going to get burned eventually.

2 - Keeping Spam Out Of The Results

Google says:

I think you can take them at their word on this, but they accidentally left off this bit:

We’ll take action on more types of these manipulative behaviors starting today unless you are Forbes or the Observer and Rolling Stone etc., then you can do what you want we DGAF.

Don't get mad at me, bro--I brought receipts, it's called LOOK AT THE SEARCH ENGINE RESULT PAGES. Thank you.

3 - Scaled, Automated Content

From Google's PR post:

The problem is they're super, super bad at identifying this, lol.

If you're building a site like this and it's working you better burn some incense and kneel at the altar of The God of Shadows and Silence and hope no SEO discovers your shit, because once they put it on blast on Twitter, that shit is "gone like Enron," to quote the great Stephen King.

Look at this, a twitter user tweeted @SearchLiason about a site that published tens of thousands (or millions--the screenshot in the tweet reply to the below tweet appears to show a broken number: 87,00,000) pages and quickly scaled to +1M organic traffic:

Mohammad Qaiser @moqaiser No hate to the website owners, but just tweeting this to @searchliaison and seeing what kind of response time and social monitoring they have going on 😅😅 site:http://reptileknowledge.com currently still indexed with 87,70,000 crap pages! #googleupdate #SEO 3:19 AM • Mar 7, 2024 0 Retweets 4 Likes Read 23 replies

​

fucking TWENTY HOURS LATER

Mohammad Qaiser @moqaiser It's gone this morning 😲 Mohammad Qaiser @moqaiser No hate to the website owners, but just tweeting this to @searchliaison and seeing what kind of response time and social monitoring they have going on 😅😅 site:http://reptileknowledge.com currently still indexed with 87,70,000 crap pages! #googleupdate #SEO 11:26 PM • Mar 7, 2024 0 Retweets 2 Likes Read 2 replies

​

First of all, that dude burned AN ENTIRE SITE to see "what kind of response time and social monitoring they have going on."

I respect the scientific pursuit, but jesus H, lol.

Second: that's what I mean about keeping it away from the jealous eyes of your fellow SEOs -- one tweet submission to Google's new SERP quality Twitter division and that site is shot out the air.

A quick point: am I saying I endorse publishing 87 thousand or million pages of shitty AI content? No, I am not. Personally, I am not a fan of AI content, I *hate* reading it. Do I have a problem with Google's algo discovering this site and deleting it? Again, no.

But saying you're targeting these sites with your algorithm, being unable to find them on your own (apparently) and just relying on tweets to clean up the problem is wild.

It's fucking wild.

4 - Site Reputation Abuse

This one is super interesting, and appears to be targeting a fairly recent trend of partnering with a high DR site, putting together a subfolder (domain.com/affiliate/) and publishing a ton of AI-generated affiliate content, and ranking the shit out of it due to the root domain's authority and take a cut of the affiliate monies.

Impressive that they're giving site owners 60 days to fix this before they enforce it.

Call me a cynical bitch and--hang on, lemme put my tinfoil hat on--this feels like a campaign of fear in advance of not AT ALL being able to enforce this algorithmically. Maybe they'll have a team of people crawling the SERPs looking for these sites, or maybe they'll rely on the ole dependable Twitter complaint department, but it feels like they're hoping people will just stop doing a thing because they're afraid of the consequences, essentially stopping a known-thing-that-works from going too mainstream because they can't do much about it.

THIS IS A THING THEY HAVE DONE BEFORE, imo.

Which leads us to:

5 - Expired Domain Abuse

Yeah, aged domains is something I've done a lot of in the past and have talked at-length about.

Here's what they say:

From what they say, it seems like this is SPECIFICALLY targeting sites that are "rebuilt from Archive.org."

This is something I've been saying NOT to do for years. Years and years.

There's no reason to do this.

AGED DOMAINS ARE DEAD.

No. I mean maybe, the update is still early, but probably not.

Aged domains where you try and copy the original site? Maybe. IDK how they're gonna find those algorithmically. But I'm just a dumb newsletter writer, not a Google engineer so I wouldn't know anyway.

Aged domains where you blast out 10,000 articles in a month? Maybe! If no one discovers your site and tweets @ Google about it, lol.

Aged domains where you just take the subject of the site and, copying nothing, just build out a bunch of good articles on a domain with juice? I'm gonna keep an eye on things, but I'd be willing to bet those'll be fine and still work long term.

Here's what Elizabeth Tucker (Director of Product Search at Google) said about expired domains in that previously-linked SEL article said:

Like I said, it bears further study for months and months after this algorithm is done rolling out, but if you just build good content (aka content that doesn't look AI generated and doesn't publish at a clip of like 1,000 per month) aged domains are probably still an amazing SEO tactic...

So there it is, my personal thoughts on Google's March algo update announcement. Now to keep an eye on the SERPs and see what actually happens over the next few months. This email was just focused on what they SAID not what they've DONE (which will takes months to really see).

It's 2014 Again and Everyone Is Getting Their Entire GSC DeIndexed

Speaking of what Google has done...

A lot of very public SEO personalities are getting their ENTIRE STABLE OF SITES deindexed.

Not just penalized, deindexed.

This run of getting manual actions (or, as Google calls it, getting to second base) is affecting several people who talk about their site publicly or who share SEO tactics that Google may not agree with, some are not.

A lot of collateral damage happening with this. It looks like a day or two before the update rolled out Google team members just went in and did what the algorithm isn't quite capable of doing, and handed out manual penalties for "automatically generated gibberish."

lolwat

Here are some of the people affected:

Niche Site Lady @NicheSiteLady Fucksake. Two of my sites hit. One absolutely did not deserve it. Pretty obvious they've been rooting through my GSC looking for targets. ☹️ I thought that keeping your sites separate was only needed for black hats. Not so. My mistake. 5:9 AM • Mar 8, 2024 11 Retweets 135 Likes Read 49 replies

​

👆 If you dig into the comments, it's up to four sites.

Harsh @seo_harsh @NicheSiteLady Same here for my website, Not using AI at all, in fact the kind of content we are publising AI isn't even capable but still manual SPAM action. Published 1200 content in 7+ years of daily work by 4 real experts, 1 Industry expert fact checking. But now Google says deindexed. Niche Site Lady @NicheSiteLady Fucksake. Two of my sites hit. One absolutely did not deserve it. Pretty obvious they've been rooting through my GSC looking for targets. ☹️ I thought that keeping your sites separate was only needed for black hats. Not so. My mistake. 6:39 AM • Mar 8, 2024 0 Retweets 4 Likes Read 1 replies

​

Jacky Chou had... half of his main site hit? And some others from GSC:

Jacky Chou (buying online businesses up to $1m) @indexsy It finally happened Google targeted me They clapped all the sites in the same GSC Even sites that didn't deserve it Here are my thoughts 👇 4:56 PM • Mar 6, 2024 13 Retweets 220 Likes Read 50 replies

​

This one hurts:

Mila (The Slowpreneur) 🍩 @MilaChervenkova The craziness with Google is just starting... I just received an email from GSC with manual spam action. This website doesn't have even a single AI-generated article. My company paid thousands of dollars to human writers; I have invoices for each article. I don't have ads or… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1765654344886526162 3:22 AM • Mar 7, 2024 1 Retweets 51 Likes Read 15 replies

​

Targeting the entire GSC account:

Zeshan (Niche Bloggers) @niche_bloggers Got manual penalty on 5 websites in same GSC. Other websites that are not on my personal emails are still good. Thankfully I haven't added all in this email. 4:13 AM • Mar 7, 2024 1 Retweets 38 Likes Read 9 replies

​

And finally, here is a running thread of sites that got completely deindexed:

Charles Floate 📈 @Charles_SEO This 🧵 is a continuous culmination of the ongoing, public reports of sites being hit with manual pure spam penalties by Google 👇 3:36 AM • Mar 8, 2024 9 Retweets 41 Likes Read 3 replies

​

It's rough out there!

Ever since I seen these "one site gets a penalty and all sites on the same email in GSC ALSO get the penalty" happening in 2014 around PBNs I've been paranoid.

And I don't even really have that many sites, and I am definitely not doing much in the way of buying links or spamming AI content, but I'm still paranoid af.

In next week's email, unless I forget, I'll give you some tips around this that I think have served me well (and that I was surprised other SEOs I talked to in the Advise community didn't know about).

If I forget, y'all remind me.

Stay safe out there...

Work With Me

I can be your fractional director of SEO if you need a bit of help. Look what one guy said about it:

​You can sign up here if you're into that.

As I mentioned at the top of this newsletter I will write your newsletter for you--a great fit for busy founders or agency owners. Just check it out here and see if it's a good fit.

~

that's it for this one!

wow, what a week.

might have an exciting coffee shop update in the next week or month (real estate moves slowly) but keep your fingers crossed!

also, god, real estate is expensive please hire me for SEO or newsletter services. I gotta stock up on pumpkin spice for the fall...

🍁🎃☕️

until next week!

sean
sean@ranktheory.com

PS - what'd you think of my newsletter? you know I am always looking to hear from readers. hit reply, tell me what you thought and how the update has been treating you so far...