I've been thinking about how this coming update will all effect the way we do SEO.
Namely, which particular strategies are potentially at risk of loosing effectiveness. But also, which strategies stand to win.
Let's start with the former.
At-Risk Strategies
Parasite SEO (likelihood: high)
Parasite SEO has been a thorn in Google's side for quite some time. Media/newspaper sites have been utilized by affiliate SEOs, piggy-backing off 80+ DR authority in order to get instant rankings... often with sub-par content.
It's this particular line from the release notes that suggests that this could target parasite SEO.
Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
News sites don't have a primary focus. And sponsored posts are certainly diluting that further.
Also, there's multiple points in the release notes about the need to "demonstrate first-hand expertise" and users needing to feel "they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal." A lot of the parasite content misses the mark here.
That said, just because content is sponsored posted on a news site, doesn't mean its not "helpful content". It could indeed be the best content on the internet.
So not all is lost for parasite SEO. I personally hope not, as I have quite a few plays in this space myself.
AI Content (likelihood: medium)
This one I certainly wouldn't like to see get penalized as I have a big project going on here too.
But this line from the notes is a dead on giveaway:
Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
Doesn't get any clearer than that.
However, I just don't see how they're going to detect AI content.
Certain AI content is easy to detect. Especially content that's trying to reference facts, which AI often trips up on.
But how (I hope) most people are using AI is going to be a huge challenge for them to detect:
Create a researched outline of H2 H3 subheadings
Let AI fill in the gaps
Revise with a human editor to fix inconsistencies
Tool-Optimized Content (likelihood: low)
What I'm talking about here is content optimized for search engines using tools like Surfer, POP, CORA, etc.
Note: I didn't give it a low likelihood just because I'm an investor in Surfer. These are my real thoughts...
From the notes:
Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
Even though this sounds like "you're never allowed to do any search engine optimization anymore!", I just don't see how/why it would matter.
If tools didn't exist, then what would we be doing?
We'd be doing research before we write our content on how long to write it, which sub-questions are important to address, and what vocabulary and terms are required to answer the topic. Namely, all the same things that the tools do for you.
And just because a piece of content is SEO optimized, doesn't mean it can't be "helpful content" at the same time. In fact, I'd argue that its even more likely because its researched.
There is some merit to the idea of adding personal experience and knowledge to the discussion (which the notes discuss as well), but I'll address this later when I talk about information gain.
Strategies Poised to Benefit
Topical Authority (likelihood: high)
Google says you should do the following:
Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
The inverse of this would be: you should focus on a small set of topics instead.
And focus would imply you're producing a lot of content and addressing every single query that a niche could bring up.
Then we have this...
Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
More language around focusing on a specific niche.... which is what topical authority is all about.
Topical authority has been yielding huge gains for my portfolio for the past few updating consistently, so I dont expect the momentum to stop now.
User-metric Optimized Content (likelihood: medium)
Now there's lot of user metrics. For example, time on page, bounce rate, and this one...
Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
This is called pogo-sticking - When the user searches for something, goes to your content, and has to go back to the search result because your content didn't answer them properly.
They mentioned it in the release notes, so it's probably pretty important and something they would love to turn up the dial on.
I give this likelihood medium-high because (I've heard) these signals are hard to track for Google. With multiple browsers, data privacy challenges and the sheer size of data that would need to be retained to do this, maybe they can only get close heuristically... and thus can't turn up the dial as much as they'd like.
That said, if you want to optimize for this, focus on giving answers fast. People are on mobile these days. They don't read content, the skim it. You need to give quick answers in fast, nice looking UIs.
Information Gain (likelihood: low)
Notice this part from the release notes.
Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
The converse would be: you should add value.
That is, not just being a "me too" of the other articles on page one, but adding something more.
There's two reasons I think the likelihood of this is low.
How does Google know which article is the one "adding more"? The one with more words? Or different words? In that case, how does Google know if those words are even correct, if its the only website saying it?
I've straight up single-variable tested information gain and it yielded no-result.
....
That's my perspective.
Hope it helps.
We'll see how this thing turns out soon.
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