Update Picard - Google Core Algo Update - Jan 2020

[Brett_Tabke]

Google Announced today that it is rolling out a Main Algo Update - Via the following blog post.

Unfortunately, the post is not so much about an update, but another diatribe against website owners and content producers. They continue to insinuate that if you lost traffic, you have violated the webmaster guidelines.

They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor been subjected to a manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those guidelines.

[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

None of the analytics rank watchers have yet to go off in any meaningful way. Most assume the the first algo update of the year is to correct issues with the last update of the previous year. Going all the way back to the Florida, Google often has a way of messing with the algo late in the year and correcting it in the spring. Some have speculated that the fall updates are intended to drive PPC traffic around Christmas shopping and January/Feb updates roll that back to fix results because of irrelevant shopping heavy results.

[Cralamarre]

Unless I'm mistaken, the official name of this update is the January 2020 Core Update. "Picard" is just something that someone here made up, because why keep things simple when you can add needless confusion.

[StupidIntelligent]

It should actually be called a Megxit update.

[glakes]

I thought that the word "Picard" referred to some kind of methodology that google had incorporated into its algorithm to try to improve the SERPs.

Picard, starting with a "P" would surely fit in with the Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, etc. updates.

[Jori]

Panther, Peacock or best of all, Pig update would be appropriate. :D

What it has targeted ? For me, for now, so good so far...

[blend27]

.. starting with a "P" ..

As long as it is not called Pi, other than that... who knows...

[Sally Stitts]

I got a nice bump up in traffic yesterday, best day in the last 3 months, if I toss out 2 anomalies. I sure hope it continues upward. My fingers are crossed, but with so many disappointments over the last few years, it is probably just a matter of days, before I get another bullet to the head. I know now that Google has no intention of EVER showing me any favor, when they can just keep the money, and do.

The ONLY consolation prize - they can't take away what you never get.
Continuing, sustained performance! DEPENDABILITY! YEA!

We need a new game.
.

[EditorialGuy]

We've had a nice increase (week over week and year over year) in the last couple of days, too. Growth seems to be mostly for major subsections of our information site where we have a lot of authoritative "evergreen" content about our key topics.

[aristotle]

You may be thinking of Jaccard, which is a means of measuring similarity between two sets.
[en.wikipedia.org...]

Paul Jaccard (the person that developed the above index) was a Swiss professor of botany and plant physiology.

That's possible. Sometimes my memory is rather hazy, especially for obscure names.

[sofie77]

This is a big update for us in the medical sector.

Like I said before, we lost in May 2018, we lost in August 2018 (Med), we recoverd half in March 2019, we lost the recovery from March in September 2019 and now we made a recovery again to March 2019 or hopefully more...we will see when its settled down. We did so many changes on our websites, that I have no Idea anymore if this changes made the recovery or not.

[blend27]

89% of traffic is of none converting traffic for one of the sites. 1-2 page views max coming from Goog. 6+ page views from Bing and most of other sources. What are they thinking at Goog?

Take you Phone, search for something, if you know the subject of search see how f'd-up the Goog SERP is.They give you everything that is sometimes ALMOST True.

[HereWeGo123]

@sofie77 - Good to hear that there is some recovery right now. Always inspiring. What can kind of changes have you done to your site since then?

[tangor]

Site(s) managed have made no changes chasing g serps. Improvement appears to be g making minor corrections on THEIR side of things ... ie. removing a bit of overreach the first time and second time and even third time around. But is it too little too late to save some sites which have been run into the ground?

[MrSavage]

All the favicons/graphics make every listing look like an ad. Not joking.

[tangor]

@MrSavage: building their product ... based on "you"!

(no smilie attached)

[ichthyous]

I'm not seeing a recovery, I have seen a drop each day since the 13th in SEMrush. I've seen #1 ranking terms vanish entirely, and unusually large drops across other terms. So far this doesn't seem to have impacted traffic too heavily yet, but if it keeps spreading across a wide swath of terms it will.

I think this update might have a lot to do with link spam. Interestingly, I compared the anchor text of a recent huge increase in spammy links to my site from hacked domains, and the anchor text correlates directly with the terms that I have been hammered. I have seen this pattern before, and suspect that one of my main competitors is purchasing these links to knock the competition out of the box. The anchor text is far too specific and too similar across these networks of ghost sites that come and go. Unfortunately Google isn't very good at weeding these hacked/spam sites out and if you add them to a disavow file it has no effect that I can see. They eventually just vanish on their own, but in the meantime your traffic is impacted.

[Muskie]

The favicons weren't there on the 13th but they appear to be there now. Are they in mobile too? Is there a ranking boost to having a favicon? Does any modern website not have one?

[nettulf]

I would think the point is to make the 'AD' icon blend in with the favicons and not stand out, so that people are more likely to click on an ad.

[MrSavage]

I think having the favicon will increase ad clicks, so the end result will be less clicks on organics, meaning less traffic. It's going to result in less, not more visitors. Again, you can't SEO your way out of these types of changes. I will be glad when the favicons go away. Absolutely unnecessary from an end user. People might report dips in traffic from this update but nobody should really waste a lot of time analyzing. Cosmetic wise, complete rubbish seeing so many tiny, awful looking favicons that mean absolutely nothing. Two things. Who thinks the "favicons" make the search experience better or improved? Who thinks that favicons will help "ad" favicons (inserted joke there) blend in? Let's discuss when the next financial reports are released in the near future. Not a SEO story here folks. People clicking more ads rather than your organic listing is what this update is about. Sorry to be a party pooper.

[breeks]

I think that the favicons will last about as long as the author images did. They clutter up the search results, making it less likely that a Google Ad will be clicked. --- End of favicons. Nothing is more important to Google than the mighty dollar.

[MrSavage]

With all due respect, you have this 100% incorrect. The "ad" label, which has been there for a long, long while, its placement is where? It's exactly where these clutter favicons reside as well. It's very easy to mistake the "ad" label as just another favicon. Most people here know one thing. If it looks like an ad it won't get clicked. Make it look or blend with the content? That's money. Add relevance? It's dynamite. As with other "updates" there is nothing more content, better this and better that can do to change human nature. That #1 ad placement just became a whole lot more like the true #1 organic listing. I would love to hear some SEO strategies to turn the tables on this one.

[tangor]

I would love to hear some SEO strategies to turn the tables on this one.

Don't hold breath! If a way is figured out you can bet it will NOT be shared in public ... two reasons:

1. Everybody in the soup will be off to the races and,
2. G will hear about it and kill it dead, dead, dead!

YMMV

[chrisv1963]

Nothing is more important to Google than the mighty dollar.

And that is exactly what all these algo updates are about. I haven't seen an improvement in the Google SERPS quality since Panda. Actually, each update results into lower quality, less dollars for publishers/businesses and more dollars for Google. Google used to be a good "no evil" search engine. These days it is a content scraping (featured snippets) and hotlinking bandwidth stealing (image search) money machine. Content scraping and bandwidth stealing is theft, nothing more and nothing less. Actually, it's quickly becoming a "fake search engine".

[RedBar]

Favicons:

Does any modern website not have one?

Many, many, many, many ... it's even easier to notice now!

TBH they don't bother me, in fact when I am checking the SERPs for specific companies' rankings / placements, I find it easier visually looking for their favicon ... maybe it's just me!

But, in reality, this is only G COPYING DDG, they've had favicons for ages and being a DDG user it has never bothered me and seemingly their ever-increasing number of users.

[duckduckgo.com...]

[No5needinput]

Waiting for the surge of favicons to change to brighter eye-catching ones as websites update theirs to new flashy/flashing/rotating ones. Serps should look like a Christmas tree in a few weeks - depending on how long caching has been enabled for them.........

[Shepherd]

Waiting for the surge of favicons to change

Don't imagine you'll have to wait long. We updated ours yesterday, sure other are doing the same as we speak...

Also, thinking it would be cool if everyone changed their favicon to the "ad" logo, kind of a resistance sort of thing...

[MrSavage]

I'm going to create a favicon, featuring the word "free" and see what happens.

[swright]

Here's one of the things I noticed. For some results where a certain site was in the featured snippet (position 0) AND the same result was also shown in positions 1-10, that result is now sent to position 11 - top of page 2. I guess the logic is that if the result is in position 0 on page 1, it doesn't make sense to show it several positions down again, so it is still shown again, but on page 2.

[fearlessrick]

My favicon is a pretty straightforward combination of the capital letters "D" and "T", which, I just realized are the same as the initials of a certain president of a large nation.

Don't know if that's good or bad, if people even pay attention to such minutia.

[KaseyM]

Seeing a load of Indian blog spam popping up. Talking about topics with three paragraphs not even coherent most of the time ranking above us. GG Google.

[EditorialGuy]

Nothing is more important to Google than the mighty dollar.

Said the pots to the kettles.