Is Google currently experiencing its largest search ranking issue and unable to solve it? I’m no conspiracy theorist, but the last few years of algorithm updates and Google’s recent summit with web publishers affected by their “Helpful Content Update” seem to suggest yes.
What Was/Is The “Helpful Content Update?”
If you’re in the content world, you know about the “Helpful Content Update” (HCU) , a series of algorithm updates by Google that have rocked the indie/niche website world over the last 24 months.
If you’re unfamiliar, the first HCU was confirmed on August 25, 2022. The stated purpose (according to Moz’s Algorithm Change tracker) was “to reward “people-first” content and devalue content written primarily for SEO.”
The next came on December 5, 2022, and overlapped with a confirmed backlink spam update, so teasing out these changes from link spam updates was difficult to impossible.
The third HCU confirmed rollout happened starting September 14, 2023. According to many site owners, this impact was much more broadly felt. This was also the first real helpful content update after AI-generated content became popular after the launch of ChatGPT, and this update was likely partially meant to target that content.
The final HCU rollout started on March 5, 2024. It was a Google Core Update (an update to their core algorithm, instead of versions that they iterate upon) that integrated the HCU algorithms into the main algorithm. According to Moz, “Google claimed that the latest changes will reduce unhelpful content in search results by 40%.”
The reality is a lot murkier, and there are a lot of site owners whose traffic is still almost completely gone. I highlighted a few in my recent article here, and some were recently flown out to Google for a forum with Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan (who previously ran eminent publication Search Engine Land and SEO conference SMX for many years):
on a plane to Mountain View California to hear what google has to say to small publishers they have removed from google search results this year. hope this lil chat is worth a 10 hour travel day today, a day of meetings, and the red eye back immediately after. pic.twitter.com/EeEAjgSngE
— Morgan (@CharlestonCraft) October 28, 2024
What Sites Were Affected?
Tom Capper, a long-ago former colleague of mine from my days at SEO agency Distilled (acquired by Brainlabs in 2020), did a great job explaining some trends he found with the sites that benefited, or didn’t, from the Helpful Content Updates.
His findings were that hit sites had lower Brand Authority (a Moz metric “that measures a brand’s strength and influence, guiding strategic decisions in PR, marketing, and SEO to enhance visibility and reputation”) as compared to their Domain Authority (a Moz metric “is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs)”).
Tom’s analyzed data shows that websites with a low brand affinity/strength to Domain Authority (a marker of how “SEO’d” a website is) were much more likely to be affected than websites with a stronger correlation between the two.
Source: Moz
What’s The State Of The Affected Websites?
To put it simply – they haven’t recovered.
One site I profiled, thewaywardhome.com, has seen almost all of its organic traffic disappear over the last two years:
(Screenshot from Semrush)
Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon scenario. These sites have original, well-written, well-researched content written from actual experience. Still, they’re being outranked by aggregators and AI content, sometimes even AI content that stole their content and republished it as an original piece.
Some writers, like Kristin from The Wayward Home, have managed to get traffic in other ways:
Post by @thewaywardhomeView on Threads
Most others have not been so lucky or don’t have the skill set that Kristin, a very good marketer, does.
Why Haven’t These Sites Recovered?
I am unabashed about avoiding any SEO industry drama these days (young kids and I’m just tiiiiired of all the drama, y’all), so I won’t comment about some of the things others have, but I did see some Twitter and Threads posts that stood out to me, which I want to highlight because I think the HCU is pointing to a much deeper issue with search than just a bad algorithm. A bunch (20 or so) of website owners were recently brought to Mountain View to talk with the Google team, and there have been some interesting threads on the former Twitter and Threads.
I personally think there is a real core issue with Google’s algorithm. While I’ve personally taken steps back from full-time SEO work over the last five years, I’ve kept up to date and have 15 years of experience through which to filter changes, going back to the original quality content update, Panda.
In short, these sites haven’t recovered not because their content is bad. They haven’t recovered because Google’s search engineers don’t know how to rank them properly, and that is a scary thought.
It’s Not A Content Issue
At the heart of the whole thing is Google’s apparent admission that the issue these site owners are facing is not a content issue. Danny, whom I’ve long respected, apparently said, “There’s nothing wrong with your sites. It’s us.”
Danny (@searchliaison) is a genuinely lovely guy. His heart is in the right place and it's obvious he feels very strongly that Google has done wrong to all of us. He was quick to say "there's nothing wrong with your sites, it's us". pic.twitter.com/EvnEDxaKb0
— Kim Snaith (@ichangedmyname) October 30, 2024
If true, and I have no reason to doubt it is, it’s a monster admission. It’s been over two years since the first HCU rolled out, and Google still has no idea how to rank these sites properly.
That’s huge.
“How do I tell the difference?”
One of the more interesting themes I’ve seen is that search engineers seemed to be asking the creators themselves for ideas on how to differentiate between sites that deserve to rank and those that don’t.
Senior Search Engineers Don’t Care?
I’ve seen a few posts on the two social sites about engineers and search leaders attempting to figure out what’s happening. Two stood out.
The first was this article (I hesitate to link to it because the page is full of ads and makes for a really bad reading experience, but it is the original source, and I want to respect that). The writer, Josh Tyler, said the following quotes.
We [sic] asked the only question that mattered: Why has Google shadowbanned our sites? Google’s Chief Search Scientist answered this question using a strategy based around gaslighting and said they hadn’t. Google doesn’t ever derank an entire site, only individual pages, he said. There is no site-wide classifier. He insisted it is only done at the page level.
Many of the shadowbanned site owners attempted to politely push back and point out that the reason all 20 of us were there was specifically because our entire site was deranked from Google in a single night.
He continued insisting this didn’t happen and then looked confused that anyone would disagree with him.
When asked what was wrong with our sites, as if we were jilted lovers in an abusive relationship being kicked to the curb, one Googler actually said “it’s not you it’s me”.
Finally, someone bluntly asked, since nothing is wrong with our sites, how do we recover?
Google’s elderly Chief Search Scientist answered, without an ounce of pity or concern, that there would be updates but he didn’t know when they’d happen or what they’d do. Further questions on the subject were met with indifference as if he didn’t understand why we cared.
He’d gotten the information he wanted. The conference was over. I don’t think he even said thanks.
The second was this post from Morgan at Charleston Craft, whose posts I referenced multiple times in this article. She posted:
The other Google employees there seems to either 1) deny that a problem exists or 2) hear our problems, but be 100% clueless as to how to fix it pic.twitter.com/gqeUtWM4fR
— Morgan (@CharlestonCraft) October 30, 2024
In her words, her take was that these engineers deny that a problem exists (or are clueless on how to fix it, which I’ll address below).
The attendees also pointed out that the senior employees present did not know how to respond to their “frank” questions and didn’t seem used to being challenged.
The higher up employees don’t seem used to being challenged and did not know how to respond to our frank statements that their sloppy algorithm updates straight fucked a lot of businesses and individuals pic.twitter.com/CfgZ3oToxP
— Morgan (@CharlestonCraft) October 30, 2024
The SEO industry has complained for many years that many Googlers seem to not care about the sites they’re supposed to be ranking properly. When Googlers are pushed back upon, they give either gaslighting or non-answers that are helpful to no one.
It seems the broader publishing industry is also starting to see that now. A broader cultural issue within Google itself has finally affected Google Search in a deep way, and as a longtime search engine marketer, I’m honestly quite sad to see it.
Danny and Engineers Can’t Figure It Out
This next one is fascinating, especially since Google explicitly said in 2022 that AI powers great search results for them. It’s not lost on me that the first HCU rolled out six months after this article was published, and things have only gotten worse for independent publishers.
It seems that the search engineers have no clue how to fix these issues, even after running their “debugging process” and examining search results individually.
Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren't they showing up and they did their "debugging process" and couldn't figure it out.
— Morgan (@CharlestonCraft) October 30, 2024
the robots are winning.
Has Google Lost Control of Its Algorithm?
This was a fascinating mention on Twitter/X:
So, so many times they said this. Literally Danny hand picked us because we all create helpful and satisfying content. They just cannot get the algorithm to understand that. They are actively doing query debugging based on examples sent by our group.
— Morgan (@CharlestonCraft) October 30, 2024
In essence, Google, a company that is literally built on organizing and displaying the world’s knowledge, cannot get its algorithm to do what it wants.
And that is the real story here. If the largest search engine in the world, with a 91%+ market share, which has tasked itself with properly organizing the Internet’s information, has lost control of its ranking algorithms, and its employees have no idea how to fix it, that is a very big deal with huge ramifications.
Let me also say that I am under no pretense that search ranking is easy. It’s a very hard problem to solve. But if the people who are tasked with it don’t know how it’s currently working and, therefore, how to fix it, that is a very scary proposition indeed.
What’s Google Doing About It?
That’s a great question, and I’m so glad you asked. Google is mired in anti-competitive and anti-monopoly cases as we speak, which means the company is under increased scrutiny.
As of October 21, 2024, Google has named a new Head of Search, Nick Fox. Fox was previously the deputy to the old head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, the man who famously killed Yahoo! search and somehow, inexplicably, got the top search job at Google as well. I guess there are very few people with that experience.
From that Reddit thread:
During his time at Yahoo, the company’s search market share PLUMMETED from 30.4% to 13.4%. Yeah, you read that right – it was a FREE FALL. And it’s not like he was just a bystander, he was in charge of research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products. But wait, it gets better. Under his leadership, Yahoo’s search market share DECLINED FOR 9 CONSECUTIVE MONTHS. And to top it all off, Yahoo had its LARGEST LAYOFFS IN CORPORATE HISTORY at the time, cutting nearly 2,000 jobs.
Source
Raghavan has been moved into a chief technical position, working closely alongside Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and away from ads. Nick Fox has been with Google since July 2003, has been quoted by SEO industry publications many times, and so has a depth of knowledge about both Google and Search that should be immensely helpful should Google decide it’s still a search company.
We should also note that some areas under Raghavan’s purview are not under Fox’s. Fox will oversee “Search, Ads, Geo, and Commerce,” but Raghavan also oversaw Gemini (AI) as well as some Platform and Devices teams working on Google Home, which Google is bring Gemini to very soon.
Google’s moves seem to be in the right direction. They’re moving someone well-respected into the head of search role and giving them a reduced scope, which hopefully will help them focus on these core and, in my opinion, existential problems plaguing Google’s core business.
While I personally don’t like the same person overseeing both Organic Search and Ads, I do also see the argument for it and hope that Fox can see the broader picture that more user satisfaction with organic results will inevitably drive more searches and therefore ad dollars, instead of trying to milk every last search for as much ad revenue as possible.
