After Google’s latest update on March 7th, Googler John Mueller explains to the webmasters what the update was all about and who were impacted the most. Muller said that update was more inclined towards content relevance, instead of low quality sites, since some webmasters speculated it.
During a webmaster hangout on April 6th, John was asked the following question:
"If we have a site that was hit by the March 7th and 9th quality update that’s a legitimate site, it’s generating world-class quality content, getting lots of links — and it gets scraped. Now, after the update, the other scraper sites are ranking before us … what could we do to fix that?”
Mueller started by saying that Google’s algorithms mostly focus on relevance. He said if a website was affected by the update, it doesn’t really indicate that that site’s content is of low quality. He suggested that marketers should be requesting unbiased feedback from users about your website’s user experience and what should be done further to improve it.
Mueller said that most of the updates that Google introduces are more around relevance. They (Google) evaluate the websites around its relevance for certain queries. Our perception that a website isn’t relevant doesn’t indicate that it’s a bad website. All it says that the website isn’t just relevant for those specific queries.
Furthermore, if your site suffered due to non-relevancy, it’s not always the case that you did something wrong that you need to undo to change to get back. All this happened because things have changed over time.
While concluding the hangout, Mueller recommended two things:
Marketers should get unbiased feedback from users to find how they are taking up your website. The feedback should be objective so that it could help you unleash things to be done to mark a visible change.
Another change Mueller recommended is to analyze the technical details of the website to ensure crawlability and indexability of the website.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.