Google’s Unconventional Advice On Fixing Broken Backlinks via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Gary Illyes recently answered the question of whether one should spend time fixing backlinks with wrong URLs that are pointing to a website, known as broken backlinks. The answer is interesting because it suggests a way of considering this issue in a completely unorthodox manner.

Google: Should Broken Backlinks Be Fixed?

During a recent Google SEO Office Hours podcast, a question was asked about fixing broken backlinks:

“Should I fix all broken backlinks to my site to improve overall SEO?”

Google’s Gary Ilyes answered:

“You should fix the broken backlinks that you think would be helpful for your users. You can’t possibly fix all the links, especially once your site grew to the size of a mammoth. Or brontosaurus.”

Unconventional Advice

Assessing broken backlinks for those that are the the most helpful for “users” is an unconventional way to decide whether to fix them or not. The conventional SEO practice is to fix a broken backlink to assure that a site is receiving the maximum available link equity. So his advice runs counter to standard SEO practice but it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand because there may be something useful there.

Keep an open mind, be open to different ways of considering solutions. Something I like about his approach is that it’s a shortcut for determining whether or not a backlink is useful. For example, if the link is to a product that is no longer sold or supported in any way, a 404 response is the best thing to show to search crawlers and to users. So there is some validity to his way of looking at it.

Why Broken Backlinks Should Be Fixed

It’s not really a big deal to fix these kinds of backlinks, it’s one of the easier SEO chores to be done and it’s a quick win.

While any benefit is hard to measure, it’s nonetheless worth doing it for site visitors who might follow the wrong URL to the webpage that they’re looking for.

Check Backlinks After A Link Building Campaign

Checking backlinks is also important to do after a backlink campaign, even months after asking for a link, because site owners will sometimes add their links weeks or months later but it could be that they added the wrong URL. It happens, I know from experience.

Broken Backlinks That Do & Don’t Matter

The kinds of broken backlinks that usually (but not always) matter are the ones that show up as 404 errors on your server logs or in the Google Search Console.

There are two kinds of broken backlinks that matter:

1. A backlink that’s broken because the linked page no longer exists or the URL changed.
2. The URL of the backlink is misspelled.

Then there are backlinks that matter less and the reasons for that are:

• Because the broken backlink is from a low quality website that doesn’t send any traffic
• The link is to an outdated webpage that doesn’t matter and should return a 404 response
• It’s just a random link created by an AI chatbot, spambot, or a spam web page.

How To Identify Broken Backlinks

Identifying any kind of broken backlink is (arguably) best done done by reviewing 404 errors generated from visits to pages that no longer exist or to URLs that are misspelled. If the link matters then there’s going to be web traffic from a broken backlink to a 404 page.

You might not be able to see where that link is coming from, although it may be possible to search for the broken URL and possibly find it.

The server log may show the IP address and user agent of the site visitor that created the broken link and from there a site owner can make the judgment call of whether it’s a spam or hacker bot, a search engine bot or an actual user. The Redirection WordPress plugin and the Wordfence plugin can be helpful for site owners that don’t have access to server logs.

A site owner may find that using a SaaS backlink tool might be useful for finding broken links but many sites, particularly sites that have been around awhile, have a lot of backlinks and using a tool might not be the right solution because it’s a lot of work for finding a link that doesn’t even send traffic. If the broken link sends traffic then you’ll know it because it’ll show up as a 404 error response.

Fixing Broken Backlinks

Fixing links that no longer exist can be done by recreating the resource or by redirecting requests for the missing web page to a web page that is substantially similar.

Fixing a link to a misspelled URL is easily done by redirecting the misspelled URL to the correct URL.

Another way to fix it is to contact the site that’s linking to the wrong URL but there are three things to consider before doing that.

1. The site owner may decide that they don’t want to link to the site and remove the link altogether.

2. The site owner may decide to add a no-follow link attribute to the corrected URL.

3. There are other sites that may have copied the web page and/or the link and are thus also linking to the wrong URL.

Simply adding a redirect from the misspelled URL to the correct URL fixes the problem without any risk that the backlink is going to be removed or nofollowed.

Fixing Broken Backlinks

Identifying broken backlinks is something that many site owners might stumble on when investigating 404 errors. Some call it link reclamation but any discussion of “link reclamation” is basically about fixing broken backlinks, it’s just another name for it.

Regardless, fixing these kinds of inbound links are one of the few SEO quick wins that could actually benefit a site owner and it could be a part of a site audit especially when it’s limited to finding opportunities in 404 error responses because these are links that are either getting crawled or are being used by potential site visitors.

Listen to the podcast at the 5:32 minute mark for the answer on fixing broken backlinks:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi

Google Answers Question About Toxic Link Sabotage via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about how to notify Google that someone is poisoning their backlink profile with “toxic links” which is a problem that many people have been talking about for at least fifteen years.

Question About Alerting Google To Toxic Links

Gary narrated the question:

“Someone’s asking, how to alert Google of sabotage via toxic links?”

And this is Gary’s answer:

I know what I would do: I’d ignore those links.

Generally Google is really, REALLY good at ignoring links that are irrelevant to the site they’re pointing at. If you feel like it, you can always disavow those “toxic” links, or file a spam report.

Disavow Links If You Feel Like It

Gary linked to Google’s explainer about disavowing links where it’s explained that the disavow tool is for a site owner to tell Google about links that they are responsible for in some way, like paid links or some other link scheme.

This is what it advises:

“If you have a manual action against your site for unnatural links to your site, or if you think you’re about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines), you should try to remove the links from the other site to your site. If you can’t remove those links yourself, or get them removed, then you should disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to your website.”

Google suggests that a link disavow is only necessary when two conditions are met:

1. “You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site,
   AND
2. The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.”

Both of the above conditions must be met in order to file a valid link disavow tool.

Origin Of The Phrase Toxic Links

As Google became better at penalizing sites for low quality links and paid links, some in the highly competitive gambling industry started creating low quality links to sabotage their competitors. The practice was called negative SEO.

The phrase toxic link is something that was never heard of until after the Penguin link updates in 2012 which required penalized sites to remove all the paid and low quality links they created and then disavow the rest. An industry grew around disavowing links and it was that industry that invented the phrase Toxic Links for use in their marketing.

Confirmation That Google Is Able To Ignore Links

I have shared this anecdote before and I’ll share it here again. Someone I knew contacted me and said that their site lost rankings from negative SEO links. I took a look and their site had a ton of really nasty looking links. So out of curiosity (and because I knew that the site was this person’s main income), I emailed someone at Google Mountain View headquarters about it. That person checked it and replied that the site didn’t lose rankings because of the links. They lost rankings because of a Panda update related content issue.

That was around 2012 and it showed me how good Google was at ignoring links. Now, if Google was that good at ignoring really bad links back then, they’re probably better at it now, twelve years later now that they have the spam brain AI.

Listen to the question and answer at the 8:22 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/New Africa

Google On Traffic Diversity As A Ranking Factor via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s SearchLiaison tweeted encouragement to diversify traffic sources, being clear about the reason he was recommending it. Days later, someone followed up to ask if traffic diversity is a ranking factor, prompting SearchLiaison to reiterate that it is not.

What Was Said

The question of whether diversity of traffic was a ranking factor was elicited from a previous tweet in a discussion about whether a site owner should be focusing on off-site promotion.

Here’s the question from the original discussion that was tweeted:

“Can you please tell me if I’m doing right by focusing on my site and content – writing new articles to be found through search – or if I should be focusing on some off-site effort related to building a readership? It’s frustrating to see traffic go down the more effort I put in.”

SearchLiaison split the question into component parts and answered each one. When it came to the part about off-site promotion, SearchLiaison (who is Danny Sullivan), shared from his decades of experience as a journalist and publisher covering technology and search marketing.

I’m going to break down his answer so that it’s clearer what he meant

This is the part from the tweet that talks about off-site activities:

“As to the off-site effort question, I think from what I know from before I worked at Google Search, as well as my time being part of the search ranking team, is that one of the ways to be successful with Google Search is to think beyond it.”

What he is saying here is simple, don’t limit your thinking about what to do with your site to thinking about how to make it appeal to Google.

He next explains that sites that rank tend to be sites that are created to appeal to people.

SearchLiaison continued:

“Great sites with content that people like receive traffic in many ways. People go to them directly. They come via email referrals. They arrive via links from other sites. They get social media mentions.”

What he’s saying there is that you’ll know that you’re appealing to people if people are discussing your site in social media, if people are referring the site in social media and if other sites are citing it with links.

Other ways to know that a site is doing well is when when people engage in the comments section, send emails asking follow up questions, and send emails of thanks and share anecdotes of their success or satisfaction with a product or advice.

Consider this, fast fashion site Shein at one point didn’t rank for their chosen keyword phrases, I know because I checked out of curiosity. But they were at the time virally popular and making huge amounts of sales by gamifying site interaction and engagement, propelling them to become a global brand. A similar strategy propelled Zappos when they pioneered no-questions asked returns and cheerful customer service.

SearchLiaison continued:

“It just means you’re likely building a normal site in the sense that it’s not just intended for Google but instead for people. And that’s what our ranking systems are trying to reward, good content made for people.”

SearchLiaison explicitly said that building sites with diversified content is not a ranking factor.

He added this caveat to his tweet:

“This doesn’t mean you should get a bunch of social mentions, or a bunch of email mentions because these will somehow magically rank you better in Google (they don’t, from how I know things).”

Despite The Caveat…

A journalist tweeted this:

“Earlier this week, @searchliaison told people to diversify their traffic. Naturally, people started questioning whether that meant diversity of traffic was a ranking factor.

So, I asked @iPullRank what he thought.”

SearchLiaison of course answered that he explicitly said it’s not a ranking factor and linked to his original tweet that I quoted above.

He tweeted:

“I mean that’s not exactly what I myself said, but rather repeat all that I’ll just add the link to what I did say:”

The journalist responded:

“I would say this is calling for publishers to diversify their traffic since you’re saying the great sites do it. It’s the right advice to give.”

And SearchLiaison answered:

“It’s the part of “does it matter for rankings” that I was making clear wasn’t what I myself said. Yes, I think that’s a generally good thing, but it’s not the only thing or the magic thing.”

Not Everything Is About Ranking Factors

There is a longstanding practice by some SEOs to parse everything that Google publishes for clues to how Google’s algorithm works. This happened with the Search Quality Raters guidelines. Google is unintentionally complicit because it’s their policy to (in general) not confirm whether or not something is a ranking factor.

This habit of searching for “ranking factors” leads to misinformation. It takes more acuity to read research papers and patents to gain a general understanding of how information retrieval works but it’s more work to try to understand something than skimming a PDF for ranking papers.

The worst approach to understanding search is to invent hypotheses about how Google works and then pore through a document to confirm those guesses (and falling into the confirmation bias trap).

In the end, it may be more helpful to back off of exclusively optimizing for Google and focus at least equally as much in optimizing for people (which includes optimizing for traffic). I know it works because I’ve been doing it for years.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero

Google: Should H1 & Title Tags Match? via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Office Hours podcast answered the important question of whether it matters if the title element and the H1 element match. It’s a good question because Google handles these elements in a unique way that’s different from how traditional SEO thinks about it.

How Important Is It For H1 & Title Tags To Match?

The question and answer are short. Google’s Gary Illyes answers the question and then links to documentation about how Google produces “title links” in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This is the question:

“…is it important for title tags to match the H1 tag?”

Gary answers:

“No, just do whatever makes sense from a user’s perspective.”

That’s a useful answer but it’s also missing the explanation of why it’s not important that the title tag matches the first heading element.

The Title And H1 Elements

The title element is in the section with the other metadata and scripts that are used by search engines and browsers. The role of the

So it’s not that the title tag entices a click. It’s job is to say this is what’s on the page.

Now the heading elements (H1, H2, etc) are like mini titles, they describe what each section of a web page is about. Except for the first heading, which is usually an H1 (but could be an H2, it doesn’t matter to Google).

The first heading offers a concise description of what the web page is about to a site visitor that already knows what the page is about in a general way. So the H1 element can be said to be a little more specific in a way.

The official W3C HTML documentation for the H1 tells how the H1 is supposed to be used:

“It is suggested that the the text of the first heading be suitable for a reader who is already browsing in related information, in contrast to the title tag which should identify the node in a wider context.”

How Does Google Use H1 and Titles?

Google uses the headings and titles as a source of information about what the web page is about. But it also uses them to create the title link, which is the title that shows in the SERPs. So if the

Twenty years ago it used to be mandatory to put the keyword phrase you wanted to rank for in the title tag. But ranking factors don’t work like that anymore because Google has natural language processing, neural networks, machine learning and AI that helps it understand concepts and topics.

That’s why the title tag and the heading tags are not parking spots for the keywords you want to rank for. They are best used to describe the page in a general (title element) and a bit more specific (H1) way.

Google’s Rules For Title Links

Gary Illyes of Google linked to documentation about how Google uses titles and headings to produce title links.

Titles must be descriptive and concise. Yes, use keywords but remember that the title must accurately describe the content.

Google’s guidelines explain:

“Title links are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality title text on your web pages.”

Avoid Boilerplate

Boilerplate is a phrase that’s repeated across the site. It’s usually templated content, like:

(type of law) Lawyers In (insert city name), (insert state name) – Name Of Website

Google’s documentation recommends that a potential site visitor should be able to distinguish between different pages by the title elements.

This is the recommendation:

“Avoid repeated or boilerplate text in

Branding In Title Tags

Another helpful tip is about website branding. Google advises that the home page is an appropriate location to provide extra information about the site.

Google provides this example:

The extra information about the site is not appropriate to have on the inner pages because that looks really bad when Google ranks more than one page from the website plus it’s missing the point about what the title tag is supposed be about.

Google advises:

“…consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each

”

Content That Google Uses For Title Links

Google uses the following content for creating title links:

• “Content in
• Main visual title shown on the page
• Heading elements, such as
  

  elements

• Other content that’s large and prominent through the use of style treatments
• Other text contained in the page
• Anchor text on the page
• Text within links that point to the page
• WebSite structured data”

Takeaways:

• Google is choosing the title element to display as the title link. If it’s not a good match it may use the first heading as the title link in the SERPs. If that’s not good enough then it’ll search elsewhere on the page.
• Use the title to describe what the page is about in a general way.
• Headings are basically section “titles,” so the first heading (or H1) can be an opportunity to describe what the page is about in a more precise way than the title so that the reader is compelled to start reading or shopping or whatever they’re trying to do.
• All of the headings in a web page together communicate what the entire page is about, like a table of contents.
• The title element could be seen as serving the function similar to the title of a non-fiction book.
• The first heading is more specific than the title about what the page is about.

Listen to the question and answer at the 10:46 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Khosro

When Is Duplicate Content Acceptable For Local SEO? Google Explains via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google’s John Mueller clarified that localized duplicate content across regional websites is acceptable. Unique content is still recommended for specific page types.

• Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content on localized websites.
• Translating or customizing core content for local markets is acceptable.
• However, unique content is still needed for certain pages.

Google’s Response to Affiliate Link Heavy Content via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about whether affiliate links have a negative impact on rankings, touching on factors that affiliate sites should keep in mind.

Hypothesis: Google Targets Affiliate Sites

There is a decades-long hypothesis that Google targets affiliate sites. SEOs were talking about it as far back as Pubcon Orlando 2004 and for longer than that on SEO forums.

In hindsight it’s easy to see that that Google wasn’t targeting affiliate sites, Google was targeting the quality level of sites that followed certain tactics like keyword stuffing, organized link rings, scaled automated content and so on.

Image Representing A Low Quality Site

The idea that Google targets affiliate sites persists, probably because so many affiliate sites tend to lose rankings every update. But it’s also true that those same affiliate sites have shortcomings that the marketers are may or may not be aware of.

It’s those shortcomings that John Mueller’s answer implies that affiliates should focus on.

Do Many Affiliate Links Hurt Rankings?

This is the question:

“…do many affiliate links hurt the ranking of a page?”

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“We have a blog post from about 10 years ago about this, and it’s just as relevant now. The short version is that having affiliate links on a page does not automatically make your pages unhelpful or bad, and also, it doesn’t automatically make the pages helpful.

You need to make sure that your pages can stand on their own, that they’re really useful and helpful in the context of the web, and for your users.”

Pages That Can Stand On Their Own

The thing about some affiliate marketers that encounter ranking issues is that even though they “did everything perfect” a lot of their ideas of perfections come from reading blogs tha recommend outdated tactics.

Consider that today, in 2024, there are some SEOs who are still insisting that Google uses simple clickthrough rates as a ranking factor, as if AI hasn’t been a part of Google’s algorithm for the past 10+ years, insisting as if machine learning couldn’t use clicks to create classifiers that can be used to predict which content is most likely to satisfy users.

What Are Common Outdated Tactics?

These are in my opinion the kind of tactics that can lead to unhelpful content:

• Targeting Keywords Not People
  Keywords, in my opinion, are the starting point for identifying topics that people are interested in. Google doesn’t rank keywords, they rank content that’s about the topics and concepts associated with those keywords. An affiliate, or anyone else, who begins and ends their content by targeting keywords is unintentionally creating content for search engines not people and lacks the elements of usefulness and helpfulness that Google’s signals are looking for.
• Copying Competitors
  Another tactic that’s more harmful than helpful is the ones that advise site owners to copy what competitors who rank are doing and then do it ten times better. That’s basically just giving Google what they already have in the search results and is the kind of thing that Google will not find unique or original and risks getting discovered/not indexed at worst and ranking on page two or three at best.

The essence of outcompeting a competitor isn’t copying them, it’s doing something users appreciate that competitor’s aren’t doing.

Takeaways:

The following are my takeaways, my opinion on three ways to do better in search.

• Don’t just target keywords.
  Focus on the people who are searching for those keywords and what their needs are.
• Don’t research your competitors to copy what their doing.
  Research your competitors to identify what they’re not doing (or doing poorly) and make that your competitive strength.
• Don’t just build links to promote your site to other sites.
  Promote your sites to actual people. Identify where your typical site visitor might be and identify ways of making your website known to them, there. Promotion does not begin and end with links.

What Does Google Say About Affiliate Sites?

Mueller mentioned that he wrote something ten years ago but he didn’t link to it. Good luck finding it.

But Google has published content about the topic and here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Use the rel=sponsored link attribute. The following is from 2021:

“Affiliate links on pages such as product reviews or shopping guides are a common way for blogs and publishers to monetize their traffic. In general, using affiliate links to monetize a website is fine. We ask sites participating in affiliate programs to qualify these links with rel=”sponsored”, regardless of whether these links were created manually or dynamically.

As a part of our ongoing effort to improve ranking for product-related searches and better reward high-quality content, when we find sites failing to qualify affiliate links appropriately, we may issue manual actions to prevent these links from affecting Search, and our systems might also take algorithmic actions. Both manual and algorithmic actions may affect how we see a site in Search, so it’s good to avoid things that may cause actions, where possible.”

2. Google’s ten year old advice about affiliate programs and added value:

“If your site syndicates content that’s available elsewhere, a good question to ask is: “Does this site provide significant added benefits that would make a user want to visit this site in search results instead of the original source of the content?” If the answer is “No,” the site may frustrate searchers and violate our quality guidelines. As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality of our users’ search results. “

3. Site reputation abuse

“Affiliate content on a site previously used by a government agency”

Not site reputation abuse:

“Embedding third-party ad units throughout a page or using affiliate links throughout a page, with links treated appropriately”

4. Thin affiliate pages:

“Thin affiliate pages are pages with product affiliate links on which the product descriptions and reviews are copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value.”

5. Google has an entire webpage that documents how to write high quality reviews:

Write high quality reviews

Affiliate Sites Rank Highly All The Time

It’s a fact that affiliate sites routinely rank at the top of the search results. It’s also true that Google doesn’t target affiliate sites, Google generally targets spammy tactics and low quality content.

Yes there are false positives and Google’s algorithms have room for improvement. But in general, it’s best to keep an open mind about why a site might not be ranking.

Listen to the Office Hours podcast at the 4:55 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Dilen

Google’s Stance On AI Translations & Content Drafting Tools via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

In a recording of Google’s June SEO office-hours Q&A session, John Mueller, a Google’s Search Relations team member, discussed the impact of AI-generated content on SEO.

The discussion focused on two key areas: the indexing of AI-translated content and using AI tools for initial content drafting.

As the use of AI in content creation grows, Mueller’s advice can help you decide what’s best for your website and audience.

AI-Generated Translations

One of the questions posed to Mueller was: “How can one be transparent in the use of AI translations without being punished for AI-heavy content?”

In response, Mueller clarified that there’s no specific markup or labeling for automatically translated pages.

Instead, website owners should evaluate whether the translated content meets their quality standards and resonates with their target audience.

Mueller advised:

“If the pages are well-translated, if it uses the right wording for your audience, in short, if you think they’re good for your users, then making them indexable is fine.”

However, if the translated content falls short of expectations, website owners can exclude those pages from search engines’ indexing using the “noindex” robots meta tag.

Mueller encouraged website owners to go beyond the bare minimum of word-for-word translation, stating:

“Ultimately, a good localization is much more than just a translation of words and sentences, so I would definitely encourage you to go beyond the minimal bar if you want users in other regions to cherish your site.”

AI-Assisted Content Creation

Another question addressed using AI tools to generate initial content drafts, with human editors reviewing and refining the content.

Mueller’s response focused on the overall quality of the published content, regardless of the tools or processes used in its creation.

Mueller explained:

“What matters for us is the overall quality that you end up publishing on your website.”

He acknowledged that using tools to assist with spelling, formulations, and initial drafting is not inherently problematic.

However, he cautioned that AI-generated content is only sometimes considered high-quality.

Mueller recommended referring to Google’s guidance on AI-generated content and the company’s “helpful content” page, which provides a framework for evaluating content quality.

He also encourages seeking input from independent third-party reviewers, stating:

“I realize it’s more work, but I find getting input from independent third-party folks on these kinds of questions extremely insightful.”

Analyzing Google’s Advice

On the surface, Mueller’s guidance is straightforward: evaluate the quality of AI-translated or AI-assisted content and ensure it meets quality standards.

However, his repetition of Google’s oft-cited “focus on quality” mantra offered little in the way of specific, actionable advice.

While Mueller acknowledged AI tools can assist with drafting, formatting, and other content creation tasks, his warning that AI output isn’t automatically “high-quality” hints at Google’s underlying skepticism toward the technology.

Reading between the lines, one could interpret Google’s stance as an attempt to discourage reliance on AI, at least for now.

Until more transparent and practical guidelines emerge, websites will be left to take their own calculated risks with AI-assisted content creation.

How This Can Help You

Whether using AI for translations or initial drafting, the key takeaway is prioritizing overall content quality, audience relevance, and adherence to Google’s guidelines.

Additionally, seeking third-party feedback can provide help ensure that AI-assisted content meets the highest standards for user experience and SEO.

Listen to the full episode of Google’s June SEO office-hours below:

Featured Image: Bakhtiar Zein/Shutterstock

Is Google Broken Or Are Googlers Right That It’s Working Fine? via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Recent statements by Googlers indicate that the algorithm is working the way it’s supposed to and that site owners should just focus more on their users and less on trying to give the algorithm what it’s looking for. But the same Googlers also say that the search team is working on a way to show more good content.

That can seem confusing because if the algorithm isn’t broken then why are they also working on it as if it’s broken in some way? The answer to the question is a bit surprising.

Google’s Point Of View

It’s important to try to understand how search looks like from Google’s point of view. Google makes it easier to do with their Search Off The Record (SOTR) podcast because it’s often just Googlers talking about search from their side of the search box.

And in a recent SOTR podcast Googlers Gary Illyes and John Mueller talked about how something inside Google might break but from their side of the search box it’s a minor thing, not worth making an announcement. But then people outside of Google notice that something’s broken.

It’s in that context that Gary Illyes made the following statement about deciding whether to “externalize” (communicate) that something is broken.

He shared:

“There’s also the flip side where we are like, “Well, we don’t actually know if this is going to be noticed,” and then two minutes later there’s a blog that puts up something about “Google is not indexing new articles anymore. What up?” And I say, “Okay, let’s externalize it.””

John Mueller then asks:

“Okay, so if there’s more pressure on us externally, we would externalize it?”

And Gary answered:

“Yeah. For sure. Yeah.”

John follows up with:

“So the louder people are externally, the more likely Google will say something?”

Gary then answered yes and no because sometimes nothing is broken and there’s nothing to announce, even though people are complaining that something is broken.

He explained:

“I mean, in certain cases, yes, but it doesn’t work all the time, because some of the things that people perceive externally as a failure on our end is actually working as intended.”

So okay, sometimes things are working as they should but what’s broken is on the site owner’s side and maybe they can’t see it for whatever reason and you can tell because sometimes people tweet about getting caught in an update that didn’t happen, like some people thought their sites were mistakenly caught in Site Reputation Abuse crackdown because their sites lost rankings at the same time that the manual actions went out.

The Non-Existent Algorithms

Then there are the people who continue to insist that their sites are suffering from the HCU (the helpful content update) even though there is no HCU system anymore.

SearchLiaison recently tweeted about the topic of people who say they were caught in the HCU.

“I know people keep referring to the helpful content system (or update), and I understand that — but we don’t have a separate system like that now. It’s all part of our core ranking systems: https://developers.google.com/search/help/helpful-content-faq

It’s a fact, all the signals of the HCU are now a part of the core algorithm which consists of a lot of parts and there is no longer that one thing that used to be the HCU. So the algorithm is still looking for helpfulness but there are other signals as well because in a core update there are a lot of things changing.

So it may be the case that people should focus less on helpfulness related signals and be more open to the possibility of a wider range of issues instead of just one thing (helpfulness) which might not even be the reason why a site lost rankings.

Mixed Signals

But then there are the mixed signals where Googlers say that things are working the way they should but that the search team is working on showing more sites, which kind of implies the algorithm isn’t working the way it should be working.

On June 3rd SearchLiaison discussed how people who claim they have algorithmic actions against them don’t. The context of the statement was in answering a June 3rd tweet by someone who said they were hit by an algorithm update on May 6th and that they don’t know what to fix because they didn’t receive a manual action. Please note that the tweet has a type where they wrote June 6th when they meant May 6th.

The original June 3rd tweet refers to the site reputation abuse manual actions:

“I know @searchliaison says that there was no algorithmic change on June 6, but the hits we’ve taken since then have been swift and brutal.

Something changed, and we didn’t get the luxury of manual actions to tell us what we did wrong, nor did anyone else in games media.”

Before we get into what SearchLiason said, the above tweet could be seen as an example of focusing on the wrong “signal” or thing and instead it might be more productive to be open to a wider range of possible reasons why the site lost rankings.

SearchLiaison responded:

“I totally understand that thinking, and I won’t go back over what I covered in my long post above other than to reiterate that 1) some people think they have an algorithmic spam action but they don’t and 2) you really don’t want a manual action.”

In the same response, SearchLiaison left the door open that it’s possible search could do better and that they’re researching on how to do that.

He said:

“And I’ll also reiterate what both John and I have said. We’ve heard the concerns such as you’ve expressed; the search team that we’re both part of has heard that. We are looking at ways to improve.”

And it’s not just SearchLiaison leaving the door open to the possibility of something changing at Google so that more sites are shown, John Mueller also said something similar last month.

John tweeted:

“I can’t make any promises, but the team working on this is explicitly evaluating how sites can / will improve in Search for the next update. It would be great to show more users the content that folks have worked hard on, and where sites have taken helpfulness to heart.”

SearchLiaison said that they’re looking at ways to improve and Mueller said they’re evaluating how sites “can/will improve in Search for the next update.” So, how does one reconcile that something is working the way it’s supposed to and yet there’s room to be improved?

Well, one way to consider it is that the algorithm is functional and satisfactory but that it’s not perfect. And because nothing is perfect that means there is room for refinement and opportunities to improve, which is the case about everything, right?

Takeaways:

1. It may be helpful to consider that everything can be refined and made better is not necessarily broken because nothing is perfect.

2. It may also be productive to consider that helpfulness is just one signal out of many signals and what might look like an HCU issue might not be that at all, in which case a wider range of possibilities should be considered.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ViDI Studio