massive google update running

**wonderpunter** · 11 March 2024, 4:04 am

Originally Posted by universal4

I wonder if this is what they meant by not to panic during the beginning of the update? They sorta implied the 1st few sets of updates would not be the ultimate fix.

Rick
Universal4

Did they say this? didn't see that part. but i am noticing worse than normal quality and my keywords come in then bounce out, very unstable

**baldidiot** · 11 March 2024, 5:33 am

Originally Posted by wonderpunter

Did they say this? didn't see that part. but i am noticing worse than normal quality and my keywords come in then bounce out, very unstable

Yeah they did: https://developers.google.com/search...-spam-policies

"As this is a complex update, the rollout may take up to a month. It's likely there will be more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update, as different systems get fully updated and reinforce each other. We'll post to our Google Search Status Dashboard when the update is finished."

**wonderpunter** · 11 March 2024, 5:57 am

Originally Posted by baldidiot

Yeah they did: https://developers.google.com/search...-spam-policies

"As this is a complex update, the rollout may take up to a month. It's likely there will be more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update, as different systems get fully updated and reinforce each other. We'll post to our Google Search Status Dashboard when the update is finished."

Saw that.. didn't say don't panic though lol but when the results look like this hxxps://chefpillai.com/2023/12/14/list-of-all-usa-online-casinos and image below makes me optmisitc at least as they are so bad they cannot stick

**baldidiot** · 11 March 2024, 6:02 am

I think the "don't panic" Rick was referring to was inferred from the "more fluctuations in rankings" statement than them saying it specifically.

**Jens Frueh** · 11 March 2024, 1:50 pm

Guess it's a wait-and-see game now, and keeping an eye on that Google Search Status Dashboard is gonna be key.

**Tex Holdem Questions** · 11 March 2024, 3:45 pm

The stats look like they're bit more normal for me now so maybe it was just a couple of days of madness. I am still seeing forums, Reddit and Quora all over the place though.

**bpmee** · 11 March 2024, 4:28 pm

Originally Posted by Tex Holdem Questions

I am still seeing forums, Reddit and Quora all over the place though.

Anecdotally, many people prepend or append "reddit" to their searches because their initial results were unhelpful. Google is likely trying to save a step by presenting these sites first.

Egs. "reddit how to beat a bonus" or "round robin parlay strategy reddit" or "online blackjack game with highest payout reddit"

**daddygambler** · 11 March 2024, 4:40 pm

Originally Posted by Tex Holdem Questions

The stats look like they're bit more normal for me now so maybe it was just a couple of days of madness. I am still seeing forums, Reddit and Quora all over the place though.

did your traffic comeback? i still have 10/15 views daily. but before was 0. Before update 4600 views 31 clicks

**universal4** · 11 March 2024, 5:27 pm

What is sad to see is results on gambling terms search that reveal
usa today
miami herald
times union
daily collegian
denver post

In my opinion the newspapers need to decide if they are in the news business or the business of selling crappy articles to seo and link brokers. (doesn't matter if they are well written or not, it aint news) And google needs to decide whether they care about bought links or not. Newspapers selling such article insertions have left their core business. Google keeps paying lip service to how important that is. (prove it)

Rick
Universal4

**bpmee** · 11 March 2024, 9:54 pm

Originally Posted by universal4

In my opinion the newspapers need to decide if they are in the news business or the business of selling crappy articles to seo and link brokers. (doesn't matter if they are well written or not, it aint news)

Agree with your sentiments. However those particular papers have deals with corporate affiliate operations. They are also the allowable examples of what Google would consider "content produced in close cooperation with".

So I think those will be the last to get bounced, if they ever do. Gambling dot com, Catena, etc, made big investments there because they knew a half decent article with a "in cooperation with Gambling dot com" would not be penalized.

**Tex Holdem Questions** · 12 March 2024, 12:41 am

Originally Posted by daddygambler

did your traffic comeback? i still have 10/15 views daily. but before was 0. Before update 4600 views 31 clicks

Comparable to a week ago yes although its only the latest figures, will continue to monitor.

**maverickbuckland** · 12 March 2024, 2:27 am

Will be interesting to see what post May SERPs look like. There are just way too many of these types of sites in the SERPs

**baldidiot** · 12 March 2024, 5:11 am

Originally Posted by universal4

In my opinion the newspapers need to decide if they are in the news business or the business of selling crappy articles to seo and link brokers. (doesn't matter if they are well written or not, it aint news) And google needs to decide whether they care about bought links or not. Newspapers selling such article insertions have left their core business. Google keeps paying lip service to how important that is. (prove it)

Totally agree with this, and I think it's also what google is getting at.

**baldidiot** · 12 March 2024, 5:48 am

Originally Posted by bpmee

Agree with your sentiments. However those particular papers have deals with corporate affiliate operations. They are also the allowable examples of what Google would consider "content produced in close cooperation with".

So I think those will be the last to get bounced, if they ever do. Gambling dot com, Catena, etc, made big investments there because they knew a half decent article with a "in cooperation with Gambling dot com" would not be penalized.

First off, a caveat - I'm not expecting google to go and wipe out the telegraph et al, or saying anything like that will happen, but I think there's a little more to it than just letting them slide because it's "in cooperation with" an established company - if anything that's exactly what they're talking about, content that they're hosting purely for search purposes that wasn't written by the native editorial team. In fact, one of the biggest examples that keeps being brought up on twitter is forbes.

If you look at the guidelines from: https://developers.google.com/search...-spam-policies

There's a few specific points that are interesting. Again, I'm not holding out much hope that this plays out but if you want to take what they're saying literally then there's some bits that would have me sweating if I ran a major news publication that was involved in one of these partnerships:

---

"Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate Search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals."

Other than the fact that the third party pages involved big established companies, this pretty much covers what they're doing. They've added a gambling section, entirely written by other people, and purely for ranking in search.

So take it at face value and these big name collaborations are potentially in the cross hairs (in their current guise).

This content also tends to not have links from the real articles on the rest of the site, so it's not incorporated into the main content flow, and the authors are totally different to the main site. Ie: It's very clearly separate.

---

"Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users."

Again, check ✓. It's partner content which has been specifically named and produced without oversight / involvement of the host site. Ie: The editors of the telegraph aren't writing this stuff and there's no editorial input, reporting or analysis. It's basically just a ****** affiliate site parked on a high authority domain.

The other part of this that could be interesting is the last bit - "provide little or no value to users". If you take that to mean the main site's readership, then it makes a lot of sense. Would the general reader of the site find the info useful, if not, then it's probably not suitable for the site to be hosting.

Again, taking the telegraph as an example, would the general readership who visit the site directly to look for news be interested in casino bonuses? Probably not. Or at least, not the vast majority.

The counter point to this is someone like goal.com hosting football betting content. Would their regular football readers be interested in football betting content? Probably. So this may be treated differently to when forbes writes about the best blenders.

---

"Our new policy doesn't consider all third-party content to be a violation, only that which is hosted without close oversight and which is intended to manipulate Search rankings.

For example, many publications host advertising content that is intended for their regular readers, rather than to primarily manipulate Search rankings. Sometimes called "native advertising" or "advertorial", this kind of content typically wouldn't confuse regular readers of the publication when they find it on the publisher's site directly or when arriving at it from Google's search results."

This part also reinforces the idea that they're looking at what the regular readers of the site would find out of place. So again, football betting offers on goal.com, fine, bingo reviews on the telegraph, bit weird.

Also they make specific reference to advertorial content, which google have said for about 10 years needs to be identified as such otherwise it goes against their guidelines. You could look at this as saying that if this content is to stay then it needs to be marked as an advertorial (eg: https://youtu.be/1SmlsfSqmOw?si=7cQS6229UHdW1C-L).

They even went so far as to say that sites that included advertorial content that wasn't correctly marked up might be removed from google news, which is obviously going to affect the big newspapers more than some random high authority site that decides to roll the dice.

One way to look at this is that they're saying if the content has been added for their users and is marked up as such, then it's OK, but it's not going to appear in search because it's an ad. Ie: you could read this as them saying "you can host this content to promote to your audience yourself, but not on search".

---

Again, I'm not saying I think all of these sites are going to get wiped out and that the serps will be magically cleaned up in a couple of months and we may well end up with even more of it come the summer and we'll be back moaning about it even harder.

But there's probably some difficult decisions going on at newspaper HQ's at the moment - do they play ball and cut ties with their affiliate deals or do they roll the dice and hope that it's all a big bluff?

**wonderpunter** · 12 March 2024, 5:59 am

Originally Posted by baldidiot

First off, a caveat - I'm not expecting google to go and wipe out the telegraph et al, or saying anything like that will happen, but I think there's a little more to it than just letting them slide because it's "in cooperation with" an established company - if anything that's exactly what they're talking about, content that they're hosting purely for search purposes that wasn't written by the native editorial team. In fact, one of the biggest examples that keeps being brought up on twitter is forbes.

Some good and logical points. I have seen recently that forbes have been adding vetted disclaimer texts to articles blatantly written by Chat GPT. Now will Google easily be fooled by this? it's like the fake author profiles to increase EEAT, again it's a blatant gaming of the rules but will google allow them to get away with it? if so then expect a flood or media sites to do the same.

**baldidiot** · 12 March 2024, 6:18 am

Originally Posted by wonderpunter

Some good and logical points. I have seen recently that forbes have been adding vetted disclaimer texts to articles blatantly written by Chat GPT. Now will Google easily be fooled by this? it's like the fake author profiles to increase EEAT, again it's a blatant gaming of the rules but will google allow them to get away with it? if so then expect a flood or media sites to do the same.

Maybe this is part of googles plan. Give two months warning so that all the news agencies go and add disclaimers or mark up articles as third party, just to be on the safe side. Google could then use that information to help identify the content it's talking about.

It could even be that google isn't capable of accurately identifying it via an algo, so they're using the threat as a way to get sites to do it for them.

It's like the whole rel=sponsored link thing - it implies they're not able to accurately detect when a link is paid v not paid, so they're asking sites to do it for them under the threat of a penalty.

**bpmee** · 12 March 2024, 9:01 am

Excellent post @baldidiot. Couldn't agree more, I'm just not holding my breath.

Turning up topical authority and experience would resolve the newspaper dilemma.

**vamius** · 12 March 2024, 10:58 am

Most of the big mainstream news sites are run by a bunch of idiots who dont even know the difference between dofollow, nofollow or sponsored tags, so I wouldnt expect them to act on Google warnings. If thats what Google is counting on, rather than its algorithm, they will not get too far with this update.

**Jens Frueh** · 13 March 2024, 12:51 pm

Originally Posted by baldidiot

Maybe this is part of googles plan. Give two months warning so that all the news agencies go and add disclaimers or mark up articles as third party, just to be on the safe side. Google could then use that information to help identify the content it's talking about.

Ok, so what will become of these pages? Will they no longer be indexed? And what about the links purchased in these articles or blogs? Will they lose traffic and value?

Google might believe this will be beneficial for them, but I foresee the possibility of a backlash, leading to significant financial losses.

**maverickbuckland** · 14 March 2024, 9:00 am

Cannot believe it's even on government sites. It's really bad

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