My theory on the drop:
Earlier you were able to target a keyword and develop content. So finding a good keyword meant you can find a good audience = good traffic. People who were able to find good keyword + having good DA would rank high and get traffic.
The above pattern meant that Google search users were also able to good content because the websites having good DA (authoritative backlink profile) produced quality content + if you guessed what people would search for - you obviously wrote pretty good content to cover the search intent and have the visitor stay engaged.
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In one of his tweets last month, Danny Sullivan of Google mentions that you shouldn't rank check and terms it as guessing at terms people would use to find content. He also says its a terrible way to judge performance. [
twitter.com...]
So now, there is a negative bias toward this approach - especially now that they have BERT to understand what the content is all about. So, I feel websites were bucketed mostly into two - wherein High DA + Good Content, etc., like a Government website or CNN or NYT and they let them continue or get a slight boost. Lots of Government website and big sites reported a traffic increase.
Whereas, if you were in the middle and Google didn't quite understand well your engagement pattern or content - you have to now fight out with everyone else including the bad content people for Google to gather enough data to judge you. So, I feel the traffic is getting rotated between everyone or SERPS quickly changed for the ML to have enough data again keeping in mind the BERT algorithm.
Now with BERT, I am not really sure about how it understands the content or if NLP is that far ahead. You can try some of google's NLP products here [
cloud.google.com...]
When it was a human reader and human writer - a lot of grammatical errors, innuendos, slangs or human remarks are automatically understood. Humans are error-prone and that's just natural.
But, when a machine starts reading your content and understanding what you are trying to put forth giving it a lot of weight (instead of the keyword targetting) - it would obviously look bad and it could point countless spelling and grammar mistakes.
So, now I think in the long-term to win this game, before writing an article - we need to stop asking what would our human visitors like and ask ourselves what would BERT like? But, then again if you adopt that approach and start putting hours of time and money into it...Google still can one day decide we hate the new approach, not even tell all stakeholders, switch all ranking strategy and leave everyone scrating their head for months - as to just ascertaining what they are looking for.
Imagine you are a small business owner who had just invested in a lot of inventory keeping in mind last years traffic and you get a 70% traffic drop unannounced or unaccounted for right in the middle of the holiday season. That could for a lot of small businesses be a death knell.
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I saw this man vs machine fight happening in Google Adwords - wherein it jus became impossible to optimize certain campaigns as Google kept finding ways to fully spend the budget despite numerous negative keywords, targetting, etc., It was literally like playing Chess with a Computer on the toughest level and the computer always won.
Now, I feel like man vs machine fight in SEO as well. And, the more I think abt it. Sometimes better to just stop fighting the computer, give it the bird and go enjoy life. After all, we are here in a beautiful world and would be a shame to spend most of our time on a small box.
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But, anyways I have spent 100s of hours over the last month checking my website, all the forums, etc., just trying to figure out what is going wrong. I know collectively just with the people on this forum we would all have spent countless manhours - JUST TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IS WRONG! And, we still don't have an answer.
The above question could have been answered by Google in a simple blog post which wouldn't have taken a person writing it 10 minutes. That is the sad part.
To cap it all - I invite everyone to watch this video where Sathya Nadella talks about how businesses should have empathy. [
youtube.com...]
Empathy is humanness. Empathy is something machines don't have.
He also talks abt how all the plans he had crumpled when he had a son with Cerebral Palsy. But, then came out stronger. Like that - the sun will rise again tomorrow and life will go on with or without website traffic. And, humans will win :)
Google Updates and SERP Changes - December 2019
