What SEO Marketers Can Learn from Google’s Recent November Update

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Search Engine Journal Study Provides 3 Takeaways As Seen From Google’s Recent Activity

“Recovery” is the word Search Engine Journal used. Partly because many SEOs have found that their rankings are dropping, partly because evidence of the impact of recent Google algorithm updates has been surprising to many of us who follow Google’s activity closely.

Read the full SEJ article about November Google updates and their impact here.

So, how’s your “recovery” going?

There are three things we can learn from all of this.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Content That Answers User Questions Is More Important Than Technical SEO

The study shows that many top ranking domains aren’t necessarily optimized for things like page speed, or other technical SEO optimizations. What it does find is that the pages that are ranking are doing a great job answering specific questions. And though technical SEO is important for many reasons, SEOs should likely take these signals as motivation to focus first on content optimizations that support user queries more than anything else. If there’s an area where SEOs must be highly proficient, it’s in providing relevant answers rather than displaying advanced technical skill.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Spammy Links Aren’t Necessarily Going To Negatively Effect Rankings

This may be counterintuitive for many SEOs who’ve worked hard to maintain a clean and healthy website with a low spam score. But, Google is showing with their recent update that once again relevant content is more important than being clean. Many websites ranking at the top of SERPs have junk links. However, this doesn’t mean that junk links will help either. “Off topic keyword-optimized anchor text links from spam sites are ignored by Google,” Search Engine Journal makes clear. It also doesn’t mean that having many junk links isn’t a slippery slope. SEJ gives a compelling argument that sites that meet a certain threshold will indeed be penalized. But, that threshold does allow for compromise when it comes to link purity.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Google’s Recent Activity Points To One Thing: Relevance

If there’s one clear takeaway for the SEO community, it’s this: Google is trying to rank the most relevant content to user queries in searches. In other words, they want relevance.

The SEJ article sums things up well.

“Fixing technical SEO factors is important. But identifying relevance issues may be even more important in order to recover from a ranking decline. Almost every update that Google has rolled out had ‘relevance’ as a factor.”

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How Expio SEO Intends To Move Forward

We’re proud that as an SEO team, we’ve always prioritized great content over technical tricks. We’ve never farmed content. We’ve never sold links. We’ve never promised that anything other than a highly-relevant website will ultimately be the key to SEO success.

These recent changes have shown that our values are for the most part aligned with what Google intends.

Our team is focused on providing insights to our SEO clients that focus on what users are asking. From those insights, we work hard to create real, honest and original content written from our own keyboards and in collaboration with our clients.

Contact us to learn more about Expio SEO services. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]