#Algorithm Update

[dubaiseocompanyuae]

Google’s March 2024 Core Update: 5 Things You Need to Know

Check out our blog for everything you need to know about Google March 2024 Core Update! This Google algorithm update is shaking up the search engine results. Here are five key points:

Content Quality Matters More: High-quality, useful content is more important than ever. E-A-T is Crucial: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) are vital for ranking. User Experience: Google is focusing more on how users interact with your site. Mobile-First Indexing: Ensure your site is mobile-friendly as Google prioritizes mobile content. Link Quality Over Quantity: Quality backlinks are better than having many low-quality links. Want to stay ahead of the competition? Read our full guide and make sure your website is ready for this important Google algorithm update. Don’t miss out—read more!

[digiligodigital]

Google Algorithm Updates 2023

Product Reviews Update (February 2023)

Google’s recent product reviews update, rolled out over 14 days in February, expanded language support to ten languages, including Dutch, Vietnamese, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian, Russian, Portuguese, French, German, and Polish. This modification aims to enhance Google’s product review mechanism, optimizing the ranking and display of product quality ratings on SERPs. The goal is to provide users with more reliable and beneficial product quality reviews.

Core Update (March 2023)

Released on March 15, the major update by Google stirred the web community, focusing on page speed, mobile-friendliness, and content quality. Faster-loading websites are favored in SERPs, while slower-loading pages may experience a decline in ranking. Additionally, websites inaccessible to mobile users risk lower rankings. Google aims to boost high-value websites across all languages and geographies.

Reviews Update (April 2023)

In April 2023, Google introduced an update to the “E-A-T” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) content quality pattern, adding an “E” for “experience.” This update emphasizes the importance of firsthand experience when producing review-based content. Web administrators and editors are encouraged to use terms like “from my experience” and “as per my personal experience” in their topics.

Core Update (August 2023)

The second modification to the search engine’s “broad core update” in 2023, revealed on August 22, aims to enhance Google’s overall evaluation of content. Google suggests that this modification could have a reverse impact, with previously uncredited sites performing well in search outcomes.

Helpful Content Update (September 2023)

In September 2023, Google added guidelines to its Helpful Content Platform records, including reducing restrictions on AI-produced content, allowing content from third parties on subdomains, and providing additional suggestions regarding decreasing site traffic. Google also offered a set of queries to help determine if a website was affected by this algorithm change.

Spam Update (October 2023)

October’s Spam Update extends detection for various spam categories and languages, covering languages like Hindi, Turkish, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. Therollout is expected to take two to three weeks, and users are encouraged to provide feedback through Google’s spam reporting service.

Core Update (October 2023)

The third core update of 2023, announced in October, aims to improve search quality by reducing offensive, low-quality content in SERPs. This targeted effort spans various languages to enhance overall search outcomes.

Core Update (November 2023)

On November 2, Google introduced another broad core update, focusing on delivering more trustworthy and relevant search outcomes. The completion of this update is expected to take a few weeks.

Reviews Update (November 2023)

November’s Review update aims to recognize and credit excellent reviews, emphasizing articles, blogs, and other works that offer unique research and incisive remarks. Website owners are encouraged to consult the Google help portal to write reviews that showcase expertise, provide evidence, and examine topics in detail. The update is set to conclude in two or three weeks.

To know more about Google algorithm update

[peachybunana]

THEYRE HERE AND THEYRE REAL

[4seohelp]

Google Algorithm Updates 2023: August Broad Core Update

Google announced on August 22, 2023 that it has rolled out a broad core algorithm update. This is the second broad core update of 2023, following the March 2023 update. Broad core updates are changes to Google’s search algorithm that are designed to improve the quality of search results. They are not targeted at any specific websites or pages, but rather aim to reward websites that provide…

[markonik12]

SEO in 2023: Best Practices for Google's Latest Algorithm Updates 

The dynamic world of search engine optimization (SEO) is constantly changing and keeping up with the latest SEO trends and updates is very crucial. If you lack behind in this SEO race it will become tough for your website to maintain and improve its search engine rankings. SEO has witnessed so many changes in the past few years and as we move forward in 2023, google continues to change its algorithms to provide users with the most high quality and relevant search results.

For a website owner or a digital marketer, SEO has become a game of adaptation, to successfully flourish a website, adapting to new SEO strategies is becoming a necessity. SEO is an ongoing process and it has the power to run the digital marketing industry at its fingertips. It is very important to align your SEO strategies with the latest google updates to keep your website visible and competitive in this industry.

If you haven’t started embracing the changes in the SEO landscape, it’s high time to learn about the best SEO practices and google’s latest algorithm updates in 2023 and start leveraging its power to stay ahead in this competitive market.

1. High quality content

Content is said to be the king, hence its quality matters in determining the success of a website in search engine rankings. In 2021, the emphasis was especially on making original high quality contents, this trend was within the realm of B2B enterprise SEO. But the term ‘quality content’ often leaves a question mark in the minds of business owners and digital marketers and leaves them unsure of its true meaning. Nevertheless one thing that remains constant is that a powerful SEO strategy is incomplete without high quality content.

Every website should focus on making relevant and useful contents that attract users and encourage them to spend more time exploring your pages. This is the only way to boost your search engine rankings. To connect with your target audience effectively, organisations must strategize and tailor their content creation in such a way that it aligns with their target audience’s interests and needs. High quality contents are those offering expert level information, engaging and capturing the attention of customers at the right time and in the right manner. Content will always remain the king with every passing year, its relevance cannot be changed.

2. Mobile-First Indexing and user experience

The significance of mobile first indexing has been effective since 2016 and in 2023, google has fully embraced this approach. This gradual shift towards mobile first indexing is because of the trend of users now accessing the internet through their mobile devices. Google highly prioritises the mobile version for any website for indexing and ranking. Hence it is very crucial for website owners and SEO practitioners to optimise their site and make it mobile friendly, responsive.

A mobile friendly website has become a necessity for a seamless user experience, neglecting its advantages will lead you to a failure, you won’t be able to cater the growing mobile audience which will result in lower user engagement, higher bounce rates and ultimately a decline in search engine rankings. Google prioritises loading speed in mobile first indexing the most. Streamlined navigation of websites, structured data implementation are other critical aspects to pay attention to excel in Google’s mobile centric ranking system.

3. E-A-T

Expertise, Authority and Trust are the basic principles that you should follow to improve your content quality and SEO. This ranking factor has emerged as a key aspect since google’s medic update in 2018. In 2023, the significance of EAT is undeniably growing especially for those websites that offer contents related to subjects like health, finance and other sensitive matters.

If your website is dealing with critical subjects like heath and medical fields, it is very essential for you to have a strong sense of expertise. Content quality should focus on expertise, authority and trustworthiness to boost your search engine rankings and promote trust better your website and its audience. Your website should be a place that only offers reliable sources of information with accuracy, transparency and security. Google algorithms are very strict in identifying websites that give authoritative contents and hence help them in increasing their search engine ranking.

4. Semantic search and user intent

One of the most important advancements that google has been focusing on since years is semantic search and understanding user intent. Rather than focusing only on stuffing your website pages with specific networks to rank higher, Google algorithms in 2023 suggests adopting a more sophisticated and holistics approach of SEO.

It now aims in creating contents that can solve users queries and deliver relevant results for them. It focuses on identifying related terms, phrases and concepts about the topic rather than focusing just on specific keywords with high search volume. Semantic search is all about interpreting the user’s intention behind a search providing them with content that best fulfils their needs. This approach promotes useful content which promotes user experience. It has become very important to align your SEO strategy with Google’s semantic search and user intent algorithm to stay strong in this competitive realm in 2023.

5. Voice search optimization

With technological advancements in this fast paced digital world, voice search is emergings as a game changer for SEO. Voice activated virtual assistants and smart speakers are rising in demand and users are depending on them to search information online. With this increasing demand and popularity of voice search in 2o23, google places high importance on it.

Adapting to voice search optimization has become very essential for your websites tk rank higher in search engines. With voice activated search your website can focus on customer queries by providing them concise answers with relevant long tail keywords.

Core web vital and page experience

This significant update in search ranking algorithm was made by google back in 2021 and it was introduced as an essential ranking factor. Core web vitals are metrics that focus on three aspects of a website’s page: loading speed, interactivity and visual stability. Altogether these three metrics are made to evaluate the overall user experience of your website. In simple words it gives a sneak peek into how well your website is performing and how enjoyable the user experience is for visitors.

All the three metrics of core web are very crucial for websites tk improve the search engine rankings. The user experience simply determines and influences search engine rankings of your website. Hence it is very important to implement strategies like server side rendering, lazy loading and content compression to enhance your page performance and exceed your user experience.

Video SEO

In 2023, Google has highly recognized the importance of video content consumption. Video content has become a powerful tool to satisfy user intent and gain online engagement. The demand of video content is rising day by day and optimising such contents for search engines has become a vital part of Search Engine Optimization strategies.

There are many ways to harness the full potential of video content and rank higher in search engines. You can host videos directly on your website, it increases your engagement and user experience. Using descriptive titles, tags and transcripts and optimising image alt tags and file sizes are also very crucial to enhance overall user experience and boost your website’s search engine rankings. By mastering Video SEO you can stay ahead in this competitive digital market.

Conclusion:

Staying on top of Google’s latest SEO algorithm updates has become a necessity to maintain and improve your website’s search engine rankings. Google continues to refine its algorithm every year and the focus remains on high quality content, user experience,user intent and many more latest updates. Every website owner and SEO practitioner should start prioritising mobile first indexing. EAT contents, semantic search, voice search, core web vitals and video contents to stay ahead in this SEO game. Keeping up with trends is not a complex thing, it just takes some time to do thorough research and optimise the trends into your SEO strategies to create an unparalleled online presence.

[moastudiess]

Daily Productivity Challenge: 4/10

04.08.2025~ Getting started on my complexity theory homework that was due yesterday :D, also working on my computer graphics GPU programming project on the side. Working towards finishing the wrapper assignment for my Bayesian Net project as well :)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[resurrectedteleport]

okayokay i just made a new tumblr account to see what they've changed (besides the "for you" being default.), and they are totally pushing it more than an old user would realize

im logged into this account in one tab and the new one in the other and tumblr is REALLY confused and im not sure where this will post but thats besides the point.

anyways when you sign up it gives you this

which is very comparable to sites/apps like pinterest and tiktok that have a personalized algorithm. when you scroll down its just random shit like Automobiles and Education. this is not pinterest. it censors stuff like sex but does NOT censor stuff like 'pee kink' . Notably!

anyways i picked some very normal interests (random shit i could think of, i left pee kink because Haha Funny) .

it then forces you to follow people! there is NOT a search, just a few trending users. it makes you pick 3 out of 10 users, one of them is the merch account, at least for me.

once you go into the actual website it looks like this! note 'for you' being default. there is NOT an option that i see to change this. this is what i was trying to look at before i ran into all the other shit haha.

time to go turn off tumblr live again ! ^^ ((tumblr fix your goddamn site

NOTE SINCE THIS HAS GOTTEN ATTENTION - I have made 2 tumblr accounts before this one (in 2019 and 2021 i believe ?) and I don't remember this in the sign up process - however, my memory is also dogshit, so please do not sue me

[noahschnappinfs]

Noah with fans in New York last year

17/3/2024

[magnusbae]

i wonder if y'all even realize how little tumblr staff cares about the general userbase XD

literally don't even hide it, don't even try to XD

they know that people who are here for 5-10+ years won't leave, hence they don't give a fuck whatever you're comfortable or enjoying yourself.

maybe they'll care when the same userbase stops buying crabs and paying for fake twitter marks and ad-free dash :)

since the "new and infrequent users" sure as hell are not the ones buying those things. but hey. get money from the general userbase and only serve the "new and infrequent" users. right?

[beabaseball]

I think that... instead of changing our home dashes or making for you pages, Tumblr should add a function that is like reblogs but call it "zeitgeist." And you click it like a reblog, and it goes into the zeitgeist.

The zeitgeist is a separate dashboard that just is everything that was put into it, so it'll be a whole new hoard of posts from every active corner of tumblr every time you refresh. Whenever you're bored just tap into the zeitgeist. People will put stuff there like 37 times and you'll still have posts between them it'll be great (or it can be the only place with mandatory shortened posts, to prevent Color Of The Sky spamming, but only shortened posts, none of this "last few comments" thing. If you want to have embedded comments, have them in the replies so I can have a conversation without @ing them and digging for the last reply because it's functionally unusable if too many people engage)

Anyway.

create the zeitgeist you wish to see in the world.

[excurseon]

do i need permission to be nonverbal like can i just start now

[cl0wnbytez]

Projecting my tboy period struggles onto the tf2 mercenaries

[theramblingsofadork]

It’s finally done!!

After a grueling number of hours, I’ve finally completed the entire play by play story of the first arc of the Starpoint Squad AU!! 🎉🎉🎉

I debated on whether I should publicly share it, or hold off until I could share more art and the like. But I think I’d like to release it on my birthday next month.

It’s long past overdue at this point, and with the direction my life’s going, I doubt I’ll ever be able to actually write it alllll out in story format. XD

SO!! Here’s the deal:

I’m going to release it mid next month (May)

It’s going to contain all 3 acts of the Competition/Starpoint Squad story arc, with colored text, background music, and art breaking it up into more manageable chunks to read.

Example:

My question now is: if I should share the Google Docs file, or directly post it to Tumblr. (It’s about 14 pages long.)

If you could vote in the poll below your preference, that would be lovely!

Thanks for all your patience, and hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy my vision of this when it finally comes out. :)

[moastudiess]

03.29.2025~ Some of it's pretty, some of it's ugly. Many a computer graphics lecture and algorithm's videos later I've learned to find peace in finishing my assignments early. Such is the conundrum of pushing off things till later, because the peace is something I've unfortunately learned to create for myself regardless of the presence of pressing matters

[gay-david-tennant]

just wait when next tumblr update they implement the good old algorithm where likes determine how popular a post gets, and the transformation to boring mainstream social media platform is complete :)