Interpreting Google’s Shift (May Core Algorithm)

Another wave forward for the pressure of novel, useful content. I guess it was inevitable with the last couple years of nonstop AI tactics for churning out content. My own experience of local networking and webinars have shown the prevalence of leaning on the LLM of the week to do everything from sourcing ideas to drafting them for social media.

As an aside: I’ve been surprised by how often social media managers are the ones recommending this approach. To me that’s always seemed like a short term urge to look cutting edge for what seems like an inevitable collapse of the need to hire that person.

On sites that I managed where teams have posted primarily commodity content — material written mostly for SEO to maintain a consistent publishing stream — the sudden surge of pages no longer indexed is striking. Most of these have shown up as “crawled – not indexed” in Google Search Console.

The common threads I’ve seen in these pieces are:

• Superficial advice: Vague assertions not backed up by concrete examples. Brief mentions of what the reader should do without unpacking the ideas. Advice is not really actionable because it’s so basic.
• If the information is based upon real research or figures, it isn’t applied thoughtfully in a way where new conclusions can be made about it. (That weren’t already apparent in the source material.)
• Pages or posts with minimal images that depict or help explain what the page is about.
• Little or no appeal to authority. Meaning, the copy did not illustrate or reference the business’ expertise in the industry or why the reader should trust their analysis. Not every page has to hammer this home

A recent podcast by Edward Sturm discussed how Google’s latest priority is in removing unhelpful third parties from the process of searching for answers. He shared how directory listings were being majorly de-prioritized in SERPs because they essentially just restate information found elsewhere — and why wouldn’t Google just show users the source website? More specifically, if someone needed a plumber there’s no reason to show a listing full of plumbers instead of just showing the user one of those plumbers.

For Local SEO, this is a big shift. Some businesses that have relied on these directories, according to Sturm, fell completely out of the top 5.

Some of this is a welcome change, and probably for the better as search goes. What I’ve been seeing in blog posts coming out of the index seems to align with this.

In the same way that Google no longer seems interested in storing and ranking third party sites that don’t contain any novel information, same seems to go for blog posts. Blogs that restate things that have been said a hundred times already, with no unique thoughtfulness, add nothing to the index. If they had once been indexed and ranked, that may very well have changed.

But there’s more going on than just that. One client in particular employs subject matter experts on nearly every blog post, and what we publish together are some of the most thoughtful that I’ve been a part of in the last year or so. And yet, several of even these posts have become de-indexed.

That stands out to me as a growing need for something beyond the standard “thought leadership” type advice. 

The Need For First Party Research

Citing other websites can be viable with enough thoughtful analysis added to it. But what’s stronger than that?

Original research, done by the company publishing the blog.

That’s arguably real thought leadership. True comparisons and experimentation. A/B tests. Actual exploration of one’s field that demonstrates ongoing learning instead of repackaging old information each year. Cases where the information shared is thoughtful and additive, and doesn’t exist anywhere else.

The reality of that isn’t lost on me as I write this.

It calls us to consider what search is really here to do, in the most gracious interpretation. For anything published, there’s a real question of, “Why does this thing deserve to be shown to users asking about it?” If we put ego aside simply because we wrote a thing, is there a clear answer to point at?

What we’re seeing play out right now in search, among other things, seems to be a reckoning of that bill coming due.

Arguably this has always been the ideal, but it’s a lot of work and not something we all have the capability to do on a regular basis. In the past, thoughtfully adding our own experiences while discussing info covered elsewhere has been a viable alternative. It’s not to say that it’s not viable anymore, but to me these recent changes in what Google will index seems to suggest a preference for completely unique material.

Be Careful With AI-Churned Content

In similar fashion, this highlights the caution of leaning too heavily on AI-created content. As a tool for drafting and outlining, sure it’s still helpful.

But as people have been discussing for at least a year or so, LLM drafted material pulls from content that already exists. Knowledge that has already been shared. That means that drafts an LLM creates are by definition not novel information. They do not add any lived experience or anecdotes.

You can certainly use them to speed up your publishing process, but if there was ever a time where a human needed to play the role of editor to flesh that draft out into a complete piece, it’s now.

People have been sharing warnings about this for a year, but I think folks have been able to succeed in spite of it just enough that it felt like just one group’s opinion. What we’re seeing now is real data suggesting Google simply isn’t interested in this type of material.

Google’s indexing practices at this point seem to be saying: If what you published is a rehash of what’s already out there, I’ll pass.