Ask the SEO Experts: Handling algorithm updates
Lily Ray, Michael King and Ryan Sammy help unpack Google's core updates and how publishers should respond.
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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from a nice, restful weekend in Toronto. Jessie spent her time crocheting a tapestry in the style of Maude Lewis and seeing Pussy Riot live. Meanwhile, Shelby and her friends indulged in not one, but two mimosa towers before finding an outdoor curling-themed shuffleboard (and more beer). Over here leaning into Canadian stereotypes like it’s our (third) day job!
This week: An all-star panel to discuss Google core algorithm updates! Lily Ray, the vice-president of SEO strategy and research for Amsive, Ryan Sammy, manager of SEO for CNBC, along with Michael King, CEO of iPullRank, help unpack the recent core update's impact. We talked the biggest surprises, the rise of AI Overviews, intent switching and much more.
Join our community of news SEOs on Slack to chat any time.
Let’s get it.
THE INTERVIEW
WTF is SEO?: What stood out to you or surprised you about the March core update?
Lily Ray: I’m still analyzing data, but the two biggest trends so far is that a number of pretty well-known established commerce players are seeing really big upticks. Best Buy, Home Depot, Walmart, Lowe's and Target are among the top 10 biggest winners in visibility, according to Sistrix.
On the flip side, I'm also seeing lots of smaller forums — which previously got a boost beginning in late 2023 — are losing that visibility, which doesn't entirely surprise me.
The last thing that I'm not entirely surprised about is that we're seeing tons more AI Overviews, at least in the U.S.
Ryan Sammy: From the publisher side, the biggest thing — and we’re also still looking at data coming in — is the spike in Discover traffic. That's been our biggest change. I’ve seen it shoot up drastically in the last few days. But everybody's kind of holding their breath because it's Discover.
Michael King: We are seeing such a huge increase in AI Overviews and there's definitely a traffic impact from that. But what I'm seeing — and it’s definitely still early — is that there looks to be a bunch of intent changes.
There are a lot of instances in the spaces that we look at where companies that are not the brand were ranking really well before, but now the brands are ranking better for a lot of those queries. That's my main takeaway at this point.
But like we just said, it's pretty early. There's more data to look at and we don't know what components of it they're going to roll back and so on.
WTF is SEO?: Staying with the AI Overviews surge, what are your early takeaways?
Michael King: Glen Allsopp posted about Wikipedia's publicly available analytics; I pulled it and then I marked when ChatGPT and AI Overviews came out. When ChatGPT came out, you would expect that Wikipedia traffic would go down and it didn't. It actually went up dramatically. But then when AI Overviews came out, traffic went down dramatically for Wikipedia.
I'm seeing that across a bunch of really big sites that are very tied to organic search, where Google is their primary traffic driver.
It's just the reality that AI Overviews is taking traffic away. A lot of other people have been showing it is — but it's also allowing them to drive more qualified traffic to websites. That’s a trend that we're going to continue to see.
But on intent switching, that was more interesting. We work with a series of different car websites, and it would be like, okay, these sites are crushing all the dealership and OEM sites. But suddenly that's just not the case.
When we look at the data, we see that there is a correlation in bounce rates going up and average session duration going down. My hypothesis is that Google is seeing a broad trend in user behaviour changing towards those sites and that is one of the things that has impacted what's being surfaced now.
Lily Ray: I would agree with that.
Something that I've spoken about before, specifically as it relates to what Google's trying to do when it launches core updates, is that Google is recalibrating their understanding of user intent for billions of keywords simultaneously if they see a big shift in consumer behaviour.
Before, there were certain keywords that are just ambiguous in nature. If you type “running shoes,” you might be wanting to buy them but you also might want to research or know which are the best.
If they have enough data to show that previously the best types of results were Wirecutter [affiliate commerce] posts for the best running shoes, but now it's Nike, because people want to buy the running shoes, then Google can see patterns over time.
During core updates, we might just see that things shift around because they understand intent differently.
WTF is SEO?: How do you communicate intent changes to key stakeholders? It's one of those things that is a bit outside of our control.
Ryan Sammy: I came out of agency life, so I'm used to having to update clients. I’ve been treating our different teams internally as my clients.
I start every call with a state of search update: what's going on with AI, because it's usually the first question, and then just core web updates, giving examples and how it affects us and our competitors. Educating people helps a lot. Not leaving it to them to figure out on their own or panic.
Especially when AIO came out last year, a lot of people asked what was going to happen or, is SEO dead? Are we never going to get clicks again? There’s a lot of walking people through changes and educating them.
WTF is SEO?: Picking up on that, Mike, you posted recently about traffic declines and the idea that in the long-term, search is going to drive less, but potentially more qualified traffic. Can you talk about that and what sites should be doing?
Michael King: Sites that live off of traffic because they're monetizing it with ads — that’s going away, frankly. There needs to be a bigger picture perspective on what search is.
Historically, we've only looked at search as a performance channel. But it's actually always been a brand channel, too. Just because Google talks about zero-click searches, that's not necessarily a bad thing because if your brand shows up when I look for “who has the best basketball sneakers,” I don't have to click through. I just have to go to the store and buy what I saw in bold in the featured snippet or in the AI Overview.
People are going to recognize more and more that search is also a brand channel and they're going to start measuring it that way, too.
If traffic is your main concern, it's really about rebalancing your keywords and then focusing your intent where there are actually people that are clicking through.
It's really about a content strategy that’s focused on that lower funnel stuff. Traffic is probably not going to be the same, but you can recover some of it by going wider across the mid- and lower-funnel.
Ryan Sammy: We're never returning back to 2020 traffic. It's never happening. We need to understand that we have very limited traffic — how can we use it to get newsletter sign ups or new things we're offering?
We have to refocus how we're using this traffic and keywords we're going after.
Lily Ray: If your business model is page views, it's going to become much more tricky.
We're probably not going to go back to where we were a few years ago. But there are other ways that publishers can drive engagement and traffic in different ways.
Generative AI tools don't show every component on the page. If you have interactive maps or custom videos, those are ways that you can entice people to still visit your article. You’re offering something really unique and compelling, and a good experience.
I've been working with lots of publishers on Google Discover, which is usually promoting something that's much more emotional or something that has to do with your specific interest. There's still a ton of opportunity on Discover. I’m seeing a lot of sites start to get a higher ratio of Discover traffic over search lately.
WTF is SEO?: It’s often the case that AI gets things wrong. How are you advising clients around AI features?
Lily Ray: It's a tricky one because you can't always anticipate what they're going to get wrong — that's the nature of how it works. It can hallucinate different things that are wrong on different days. Right now, a lot of people are talking about how AI Overviews and AI Mode hallucinates the wrong business that’s been uploaded correctly in the Google business profile. That's a Google problem. But I think we'll start to improve these features over time so they're much more accurate.
But, for publishers that are concerned about any inaccuracies, there's a whole suite of new tools out there that do LLM tracking and monitoring. If there are prompts that you care about or aspects of the business that you care about, use those tools. If you see discrepancies with information about your business, make sure that you're really being proactive as far as communicating the right information on your website and on your different social media platforms.
WTF is SEO?: How do you communicate algorithm update changes within your newsroom?
Ryan Sammy: I have an SEO channel where I post daily updates and trending stories. And if an update affects a certain team or group of writers, I’ll meet with them and discuss what’s happening. A lot of it is monitoring who each update is affecting and reaching out to them directly. That just calms a lot of the panic.
I’ve been doing that for years and it builds trust with these editors and writers. They know I'm going to visit and break the bad news. I had a team say, "You never have any good news about Google." I was like, "Sorry, there's not really ever good news to give you about Google." Recently, I gave them a presentation about AIO and how it's stealing traffic. And then we talked about their questions about Reddit and forums appearing. I was trying to explain it to them and I was like, here's my conspiracy theory about [Google’s] deal [with Reddit] that they just made and all sorts of things like that.
WTF is SEO?: Any top tips for thinking about responding to algorithm updates, when to freak out and when to keep calm, and how to communicate with your teams?
Lily Ray: I think for many sites, not going into anything too risky as far as their SEO approach, more often than not, won't be heavily impacted by core updates.
My team and I at Amsive specialize on websites that have been impacted by core updates. We get a lot of companies coming to us because they've lost a lot of traffic with algorithm updates. You can tie it back to some SEO strategy that they used that goes against Google's guidelines. Almost always you can get to the bottom of it and help them clean up their act.
That’s why I've made my entire brand for years and years: just don't do that stuff and you should be okay. But people still want to play with fire.
Start with reading Google's search quality guidelines, which do change year to year. Any SEO should be very familiar with them; if you're ever unsure about an approach, just make sure it does not violate the guidelines. And generally speaking, you'll be okay in future algorithm updates.
Michael King: I basically put it into three buckets: chill out, get more data and don't do bad things.
When I say chill out, I mean Google is a software company. They roll out things in sprints just like any other software company. They'll roll something out and then they may roll back components of it or they may roll back the whole thing. If you say, "I got this huge drop" and just start changing everything the day it happens, you may not know what impacts your recovery. I always say wait at least two to three weeks. Google may do their sprint review and pull back components.
I say get more data because, in SEO, there’s a lot of anecdotal data. But you need data on your specific space. Not only should you be tracking your ranking, you should also be tracking the pages in your space as they change and compare them.
The last thing is: Don't do things that Google says not to do and you won't have most problems.
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RECOMMENDED READING
Google news and updates
🤖 Barry Schwartz: Google’s AI summaries now appear in local Knowledge Panels.
🤖 Barry Schwartz: Danny Sullivan says Google does not have a system to recognize if a site is run by a big brand and automatically ranks it higher.
🤖 Danny Goodwin: Google’s AI Overviews surged during the March core update, especially in entertainment, restaurants and travel spaces.
🤖 Matt Southern: JavaScript-loaded images can be indexed.
🤖 Barry Schwartz: Google will subscribe to your emails to find content for your search listings.
Even more recommended reading
❌ Matt G. Southern: Google’s Martin Splitt reveals three big JavaScript SEO errors and how to fix them.
📈 Shane Dutka: Winners and losers for the March core update.
⬆️ Jojo Furnival: Here’s why entity or rebrand migrations can be a silent SEO killer.
🍔 Carolyn Shelby: The role of E.E.A.T in AI narratives and how to build brand authority for search success.
🖥️ Aleyda Solis: SEO versus GEO: Optimizing for traditional or AI search.
🕷️ Jes Scholz: Nine steps to get your content indexed by Google and Bing.
🤔 Rob Waugh: The widely-quoted media experts are not who they seem.
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Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.
Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley
I absolutely would not take advice from or hire any consultant who is just now discovering that search is a brand channel. Analysts have known that brand awareness correlates with seo performance for at least a decade.