Re-ranking in Top Stories, SGE, the March algorithm updates and more questions, answered!

We’re answering your questions about SGE, Google’s March algorithm updates, recapturing ranking in Top Stories and internal links

Mar 25, 2024

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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from a weekend of screen printing and yoga (Jessie) and a lot of March Madness and spring cleaning (Shelby). The irony is that the spring cleaning commenced on the snowiest weekend we’ve had all season in Toronto. Winter is not giving up yet, folks!

This week: A mailbag issue! We’re answering your questions about SGE, Google’s March algorithm updates, recapturing ranking in Top Stories and internal links. If you have other questions, be sure to join our Slack and ask our community at any time.

🎉 Shout out to Holly Pyne: Thank you for inviting five friends to join the WTF is SEO? community! We so value your endorsement of our newsletter. Thank you!

Reminder: We’re just THREE days away from our LIVE call with Barry Adams (

Barry Adams

) all about internal links. Attendees get a 30-minute presentation followed by 30 minutes to ask us any news SEO question. Plus: Walk away with a one-pager on internal links and access to a post-call private Slack channel with Jessie, Shelby and Barry. Seats are limited, so get your tickets now! Use coupon code GROUP when buying five or more seats and save.

A mixed bag of mailboxes … populated by a mailbag. (Yes, this caption is a stretch). Photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

In this issue:

The latest on Google updates
As SGE expands, what publishers should know
How to regain ranking in Top Stories
Internal links: Do they matter?

Questions, answered

What do publishers need to know about the latest Google updates?

Google's March algorithm updates were substantial. The spam update finished rolling out on March 20, and the core update is still rolling out. Some in the industry are saying these updates are as big as the Panda or Penguin updates of yore (2011 was over a decade ago — it is yore 🙃).

These updates are a response to the proliferation of AI spam content that has recently surfaced in search results.

In a March 5 blog post, Google said the updates aim to "reduce low quality, unoriginal content" in search results by 40 per cent. The company said it's a more complex update, with changes to several systems, which will also move the helpful content updates into the main system.

Lily Ray noted on Twitter that many affected sites are new, with some only around for two or three years. Meanwhile, Search Engine Journal reports that many sites have been entirely deindexed from search. It’s possible that many of these newer sites were populated entirely by AI-written content, getting pumped out at a rate that would defy the abilities of even the speediest editor (i.e., thousands of stories per day). These site owners likely aimed to quickly generate traffic (and profit), but Google is catching up and taking action. In some cases, those sites are now gone entirely from the search engine, or have seen their traffic fall off a cliff. As Lily will often comment: It (an SEO tactic) works until it doesn't.

A useful quote from Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison: “What Google wants is what people want.”

TL;DR: Don’t do things “for SEO” if it’s not also good for the real humans that make up your audience. Content written with the help of AI isn't inherently awful (in fact, Google is partnering with publishers to enable them to use AI in the content creation process). What's bad is producing content entirely "for Google" instead of readers.

Google is also getting better at detecting content generated by AI, and is doing more to remove useless content from search results.

“What Google wants to clean up from its search results is useless, repetitive, unoriginal content, whether it’s written by humans or AI or both,” says Julia McCoy.

Actions publishers can take:

Focus on E.E.A.T and topic authority when creating content.
Write high-value journalism. Answer questions that help people in their lives and focus on being a service to readers.
Create a great on-site user experience: Avoid clutter, needless pop-ups and anything else that dissuades readers from sticking around.

There’s no quick fix here. Producing high-quality journalism that serves readers is a strategy.

SGE: Catch me up on AI on search

SGE is still not available to all Google users. However, it’s evident with recent moves by the search giant that AI remains central to their future. The company’s new head of Search is all-in on AI and Google is now testing SGE with users who have not manually opted in.

Liz Reid, a longtime Google employee, moved from leading the company’s efforts with AI search to leading all of Search. In her post announcing the promotion, she talked about how SGE combines quick answers and the ability to “go deeper” on the web (clicking a link). She said SGE is designed to "address new types of questions, including more complex ones like comparisons or longer queries."

A quick recap:

In 2023, when SGE was first introduced, the company emphasized answering complex questions as an SGE strength over traditional search. Instead of conducting multiple searches and reading several articles, an SGE future could streamline this process — and keep the reader on search results longer.
Complexity is a challenge for traditional organic search results, where a query is matched by a single link. With SGE, Google can draw from various sources and paraphrase content, potentially offering a better response to a reader’s query.
A challenge for the company going forward will be appropriately citing the resources they rely on and being "a good partner to the open web."

Liz’s promotion is a clear signal of Google's commitment to an AI-driven future for search. Long-term, Google’s environment is likely to look more like SGE. The company is testing AI overviews for users who have not opted in for Google Search Labs (previously, manually opting was the only way to see SGE).

Barry Schwartz reports that the search giant is starting this test with queries where it thinks generative AI can be helpful. That includes longer, more complex searches where multiple pages or articles are necessary to pull together a robust answer, like “how do I get marks off painted walls.”
Google told SEJ that these results would be surface AI overviews when it’s “truly additive and in the instances when people would get a better response than what they’d see on Search today.”

This is still a test, so the experience now may not be what is eventually available to all users. Google's objective remains the same, as Gwen Milder said last week: Connecting readers with the information they want as quickly and easily as possible.

The concerning variable is how likely readers will be to click on a link to a website if SGE provides an efficient answer, and what results will look like under SGE. Will a link in the SGE response replace the traffic from ranking first in Top Stories? Hopefully this becomes clear if SGE rolls out to all users (and if we get any reporting data. We're still waiting for Top Stories filtering, so let's not hold our breath).

Also still unclear: How often — or how quickly — will Google feel comfortable surfacing AI-generated responses in breaking news environments? How will Google's generative experience handle changing information that’s so commonplace in a live news moment?

Paying publishers: Separately, the question of how Google (and other generative AI companies like OpenAI) will compensate news outlets — and creators generally — for using their content to train large language models is up in the air.
Meanwhile, OpenAI and Microsoft announced in February a partnership with Semafor and others “to help journalists work with generative AI in content production.”

Actions publishers can take in the face of SGE:

Publishers can block Google-extended, the crawler that trains Google’s Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs;
Outside technical recommendations, publishers should analyze potential traffic losses to SGE and consider strategies to make up that missing audience. Can you recover that traffic on other platforms, or by focusing on other Google surfaces?

When a story is ranking in Top Stories, then falls out — but is still relevant — what actions do you take?

You publish a story and it ranks in Top Stories. Terrific! Then you notice it has fallen out of that prized position. Terrible! What do you do next? Here are a few suggestions:

Real-time monitoring: A news-focused SEO tool can show which stories are ranking for which keywords, and will alert when a story is falling out of Top Stories (or other placements such as Rich Snippets). This monitoring can help identify why you fell out of Top Stories, too, by showing what publishers are ranking for your targeted keywords on mobile and desktop. These tools can also show which keywords are surfacing a Top Stories box and could be new keywords to target in the headline instead.

News Flashboard is a free tool that can help with real-time monitoring. Without a tool, real-time Googling is the next best option (i.e., search your target keywords).
Invest in a VPN, or find a way to look at SERPs across multiple geographical locations. This gives you a better inclination of which markets are the concern.

Keyword research: Use the topic view on Google Trends and analyze how readers are looking for information. For example, are readers searching "Kate Middleton" or "Princess of Wales" more often? Has it changed over time? Use the target term in your on-page elements like the headline, URL, subheads (h2 tags), deck (meta description) and anchor link text across the site.

Uncover new angles or additional breakouts: If your initial report has fallen out of Top Stories, can you use Google Trends to uncover new questions to include in the story? Is there enough information for a second follow story, like an explainer that focuses on a rising keyword? New stories create new opportunities to rank, and always link back to the original piece.

Link the story more: How many related stories is this linked to? Add it to as many as possible, linking on optimized anchor text. Link it from the homepage — your most powerful page — and in navigations that spread across the site.

Claim backlinks: Are outlets rewriting your story, but not linking to it? If the story is a scoop and you’re being pushed out of Top Stories, track down organizations that are mentioning your work and request a backlink. Strong backlinks send clear authority signals, which can improve your ranking. Send an email to the relevant reporter or editor asking for proper credit. (Be polite, but firm.)

Join our Slack

Are internal links really important for publishers?

Yes. Links — along with clicks — are very important for publishers.

Links are how Google finds new content to crawl, index and rank for various keywords. They help search engines understand a site's structure, communicate which pages are most important and provide a signal of value (more links = more important) to search engines. Links help readers find additional stories to read, too.
Clicks are one way publishers measure the impact of stories. A high volume of clicks can indicate readers care about the story. Google uses clicks as a metric of positive engagement to fine-tune results, Barry Adams argues.

Barry says: “Links provide the initial signal that a webpage might be worth ranking in search results, and clicks then confirm (or deny) that ranking as it shows how people interact with that webpage.”

This makes sense. How else would Google's systems — robots — understand what readers actually care about if not for a positive engagement metric? It needs to understand the content (links) and how readers engage with it (clicks).

For publishers, getting traffic comes from writing content the audience wants to read, and linking this content strategically across your site.

Level up your linking knowledge: Good news! If you want to learn more about how to execute linking best practices, WTF is SEO? and
Barry Adams
are hosting a live call THIS THURSDAY all about this SEO superpower. Done well, internal linking can boost your topic authority, drive readers further into your site, and improve how efficiently your site is crawled by Google. Reserve your ticket now.

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