11:29:55 I just posted the link in the
11:29:59 TMAC.
11:30:02 group again but we've got
11:30:04 members
11:30:06 Coming in now.
11:30:07 Hi, everyone.
11:30:09 We've got some good coverage from across the country so far. I see BC, I see Ontario.
11:30:24 Welcome, everyone.
11:30:49 Before we get started, just a reminder to everyone present that this is uh
11:30:55 a relatively new PD committee. We're always looking for your ideas for sessions and of course
11:31:03 We have such talent in the group membership that
11:31:06 we're always looking for what
11:31:09 members can do to help other members become better in their craft.
11:31:14 And please feel free to reach out to me if you have an idea for a session or think you could run
11:31:20 something yourself.
11:31:23 today's
11:31:25 event is no exception.
11:31:28 we're going to be recording today.
11:31:31 And there are
11:31:33 captions hopefully
11:31:35 currently on.
11:31:41 Christine, do you want to fire up the recording for us?
11:31:49 Recording is on and the captions are on.
11:31:52 Perfect. Thank you so much.
11:32:00 Today, we're being joined by will tang
11:32:03 Our very own Will Tang of Going Awesome Places and
11:32:09 Will is an award-winning content creator
11:32:12 editor and video producer.
11:32:15 And he focuses on outdoor adventures and experiential travel.
11:32:20 With over 12 years of working with destinations, tour operators and brands
11:32:26 He has been at the forefront of creating evergreen content and SEO optimized content
11:32:33 and storytelling through video.
11:32:36 That's why we invited Will today to talk with you about the helpful content update
11:32:44 how that affected the world
11:32:48 And we're going to begin the conversation with his experience
11:32:53 down at Google's headquarters
11:32:58 for their conversation at the end of October.
11:33:01 Without further ado, what I will ask is if you have questions
11:33:05 Please put them in the chat and we will get to them at the end and I'll bring them forward to Will.
11:33:13 Keep your mics off. If you want to keep your video on, that's fine. But Will's going to be sharing his screen. I'm going to be going off video.
11:33:22 And welcome.
11:33:25 Well.
11:33:26 Hey, everyone.
11:33:28 Can you guys see my presentation slides right now?
11:33:31 Should be okay.
11:33:32 Not yet.
11:33:36 Is it coming through?
11:33:39 I am not seeing it.
11:33:41 All right, let me
11:33:44 redo that share.
11:33:47 Well, hi, everyone.
11:33:49 And I can tell everyone it was working when we did the test run
11:33:54 half an hour ago
11:33:56 Of course.
11:33:56 There we go. There it is. You're live.
11:33:58 Is that, all right. So let me…
11:34:01 go back into here.
11:34:04 Are the slides coming through?
11:34:07 Yes.
11:34:08 Awesome. Okay.
11:34:10 So let's just dive right in. I put together this presentation these past two weeks and
11:34:15 It really came from my attendance of the Google Web Creator Conversation event. So that's kind of
11:34:21 Where we'll start, but we'll also be talking about HCU. So what is the Helpful Content Update? We'll kick it off there.
11:34:28 My focus today is really about, yeah, like I said, what was it like going to the event, how I got invited, what.
11:34:36 I learned from that event and how it all unfolded. And to end off, we'll kind of take
11:34:41 digest all of that information. There was a lot that happened over the course of those two days. And what that means for all of us.
11:34:48 as web creators, as digital content creators.
11:34:52 And so, yeah, let's get right into it.
11:34:54 But first, of course, my name is Will.
11:34:57 Over at Going Awesome Places, I'm an electrical engineer and consultant turned blogger.
11:35:03 I started blogging in 2012, YouTube in 2015. I went full time in 2017.
11:35:10 I've been making a six-figure income since 2019 through this work.
11:35:15 And I'll preface all this by saying like, I'm not an SEO expert.
11:35:20 These are things that I've learned along the way doing this for 12 plus years. I've been experimenting and trying new things and keeping up with the ups and downs of
11:35:31 Being a digital publisher.
11:35:34 In terms of a breakdown, I'd say that blogging is my first love and writing and photography. That's where I started. So I'd say even today about
11:35:44 really about 50% at least is through the blog. 20% probably on YouTube.
11:35:50 And everything else, probably social media and everything else that I do as a business with going awesome places.
11:35:59 Nope. Hold on. Bring it back.
11:36:05 So what is the helpful content update?
11:36:09 We lost your slides.
11:36:12 Oh.
11:36:15 technical difficulties.
11:36:21 Let's bring it back.
11:36:22 There you go. We've got your screen again.
11:36:25 And your slides are back up.
11:36:26 Okay.
11:36:30 What is the helpful content update? That's what we're talking about.
11:36:35 The helpful content update was a core algorithm update for Google Search.
11:36:40 So this is basically the engine that
11:36:44 displays what you see when you make a Google search, how things are ordered. There's
11:36:50 some science and magic behind it. It's really an algorithm that does all this. There are many pieces to it but
11:36:59 this particular change rolled out around roughly September 15th to 17th of 2023.
11:37:06 So not this year, but actually last year.
11:37:10 And moving forward, I'll just call helpful content update HCU. That's what most
11:37:14 Most of us have been referring to.
11:37:18 The intention and really goal for Google with this update was with the advent of and rise of AI,
11:37:26 it was a lot easier to create content and the bad actors and other folks
11:37:34 we're leveraging it to create a lot of spam content, a lot of thin content as well.
11:37:38 So Google had a big problem in their hands where, you know, how do we combat a lot of this and
11:37:44 fight off this not helpful content. And so this change was really meant
11:37:51 to do that. But of course, as we know, helpful content update actually
11:37:56 made things a lot worse. And for us as small publishers, we were caught in the crossfire.
11:38:02 I would say. And so many of us were negatively impacted
11:38:06 The travel industry specifically was one of the hardest hit as well for small publishers.
11:38:12 Here's a bit of a timeline. If you go even further back to 2022, in August, they designed this. They created this HCU ranking system. It wasn't put into place until really September 2023 last year. That's when we all saw the big impact.
11:38:30 This year in March.
11:38:32 they baked HCU into the core ranking systems. So it's now part of this giant behemoth.
11:38:40 that is used to generate all the search results.
11:38:44 In August of 2024 this year, they put an update to try to fix things. And some people saw a bit of a lift. So there was some improvement, but really
11:38:52 not that big of a difference.
11:38:54 There was another update in November of 2024. So some folks might have seen some changes as well. And that's the latest update and there will be many more updates to come.
11:39:06 This is probably a graph that looks reminiscent for most people looking at their data back in 2023.
11:39:14 For Lian Wong, this is a sample graph that she put up and looks very much like mine. So around, you know.
11:39:20 September 14th or 15th, the rollout happened
11:39:24 And overnight, just traffic just tanked.
11:39:27 Right away. And this occurred until for her roughly around the 28th when the HCU update completed and
11:39:36 kind of just flatlined from there.
11:39:39 If we look at August 2024, this is Retro Dodo. There was a bit of a lift.
11:39:46 So if you look at the right side of the graph in August, it kind of went up a bit.
11:39:51 But I think definitely exaggerated in terms of recoveries. For most people, this is what it looked like.
11:39:57 Nobody recovered back
11:39:59 to what their September 2023 levels were like.
11:40:04 And I myself can say that I saw a bit of a bump, but that was really it.
11:40:11 Now, if we look at different verticals, Lily Ray did do some analysis here and kind of
11:40:17 bundle different groups together. And you'll see that travel and culture blogs put together, we were impacted pretty much the most.
11:40:25 So looking at July 2023, which was pre-HCU to September 2024 this year.
11:40:33 Down on average 94% in this case.
11:40:38 pretty big impact. That's why a lot of us have all been seeing the effects of that.
11:40:46 What replaced a lot of our helpful content
11:40:50 was really the rise of Reddit and forums. And so because of the special relationship
11:40:55 and contract almost agreement that they have in place with Reddit.
11:41:00 we saw a massive spike in forum content and Reddit. As you can see here.
11:41:05 And if we look at a lot of the different well-known forums out there, they saw a similar increase. And that's why you're probably noticing now that when you do Google searches.
11:41:17 that Reddit is near the top and other forums at the top of search results as well.
11:41:24 So the fallout of all this was that you know
11:41:28 helpful while it was intended to elevate helpful content it really
11:41:34 didn't happen that way. For a lot of us that create great content, helpful content, I would say.
11:41:41 our website traffic was decimated. The 94% on average for many
11:41:49 And since then, we haven't really seen minimal, there's been minimal recovery since September 2023.
11:41:55 Result of all this is that at the beginning of the year this year, Google created an HCU feedback form as a way for people to kind of
11:42:04 air their grievances, but also try to provide some tangible kind
11:42:08 hard facts of like what is happening to complain a little bit to to give
11:42:12 Google an idea of what was going on. And this is what led to kind of the next part of what happened this year. And my invites to the Google Web Creator Conversation event.
11:42:24 So one day I got an email from this guy, Danny Sullivan. And if you follow
11:42:31 Google search and SEO. Danny Sullivan is one of those, he's the faces, the public faces of Google search.
11:42:37 Along with somebody like John Mueller. So to get an email from him was really strange. I was like, what is happening? I actually initially thought this was some sort of spam email or some sort of joke.
11:42:48 It was a very simple plain text.
11:42:51 It kind of went like this. You provided useful feedback
11:42:55 through our form or in another way.
11:42:58 And to follow up with that, we'd like to invite you to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California for this web creator conversation event.
11:43:05 The idea of this event is to bring together people from Google search and creators
11:43:11 As an opportunity to talk about what's gone on, to provide feedback, to help them shape
11:43:17 search for the future. And so this is the email that I got.
11:43:20 But of course, there's some caveats, and this came through in some follow-up emails that no Googler will be able to provide specific or individualized advice on how to improve rankings or gain traffic.
11:43:32 Nothing will be shared that isn't already available to the public.
11:43:36 And my attendance will not
11:43:40 improve my site in any way, shape or form. And all of these
11:43:45 came true by going to this event. So I agreed to go. And there's some initial back and forth. I think the other thing I remember asking was like.
11:43:53 Do you know I'm from Canada? And like, are you guys willing to fly somebody down from Canada? And they said yes. And I'm like okay so
11:44:00 first established that this was a legitimate email, we were able to have a bit of a conversation and I decided that, yes, this would be kind of a good idea to go.
11:44:11 So why was this event a big deal?
11:44:14 This, you know, talking to Danny and him various conversations we've had along the way, it's actually quite rare for Google to invite the public to
11:44:26 meet with the actual engineers. I think for most of us, we feel like Google is this kind of black box. And to me, certainly felt that way as well.
11:44:35 But a very unique event for them to do this. And Danny Sullivan really being the advocate for creators
11:44:41 to push Google to do something like this. And I think another thing that Danny said to us that really stuck was that
11:44:50 This was the first time, Google's done a lot of different updates, right? They do updates all the time. And there's been some big ones and small ones.
11:44:58 With all those other updates in the past, most people understood and understood why Google was doing what they were doing. And while there were people that spoke up, there wasn't this kind of mass collective of like.
11:45:11 freak out of what they did. And it was very clear through the feedback form especially
11:45:17 that everybody was willing to speak up that there was
11:45:20 so much momentum behind this like just people unhappy about what happened with the helpful content update. And so he could tell that
11:45:28 There was something different about this update, and we really got to look into this.
11:45:32 I think that's what spawned.
11:45:34 A lot of the conversation and kind of his push to create an event like this.
11:45:41 Here are just a couple pictures from what ended up being two days in california
11:45:46 The first day was really a day to settle in and we got to do a tour of the campus with Danny Sullivan himself.
11:45:54 If you look at the bottom left there, you'll recognize somebody familiar. So Matt Bailey of Must Do Canada was there as well. We were the two lone Canadians
11:46:04 and travel bloggers at that. There were more travel bloggers, but we were the two Canadians that were invited. So that was kind of cool. And to have a familiar face there was great and to hang out with Matt, of course.
11:46:15 The second day was in this room, this conference room, this classroom style
11:46:20 With a podium, Danny was up there at front. Parts of it were live streamed.
11:46:26 And there on the bottom right is me trying not to smile. Had really mixed feelings. I feel like the whole few days while it was really cool to be there, I think most of us felt like
11:46:39 that our businesses had been shattered in many ways. And, you know, this was not really a happy moment to be there at Google, but, you know.
11:46:50 thankful to have been invited, of course, and to be able to provide feedback.
11:46:55 So who is invited? There are 20 of us, 20 websites that were invited from various verticals.
11:47:02 The main four verticals that at least Danny kind of organized this in was one travel
11:47:08 Gaming and review websites, entertainment, and then general. So general was like things like crafts, DIYers, fashion as well.
11:47:18 The one group that wasn't represented was food that stuck out to me. And I found out much later that food was having their own kind of web creator conversation event, not really well publicized because everyone was under NDA.
11:47:32 And this relates to some of the recipe stuff that we were hearing about. So I don't really know how that went, but food was not represented at this event.
11:47:42 Here's a picture that I took of the badge that I had on the flip side. And this was the full day schedule. It was a full day event pretty much from breakfast all the way to the evening reception.
11:47:53 But if I think about the most important bits of the day, it was
11:47:58 The second one, which was the let's hear from you, this was our opportunity to have three minutes
11:48:04 to stand up, speak to all the Googlers in the room and anyone else that was live streaming the event. It was kind of this
11:48:10 this TED Talk type moment a little bit.
11:48:13 The other one was a breakout session. So because there were so many different verticals represented, I thought it was good that all the travel bloggers, travel creators could come together and talk about some of our issues that were specific to us.
11:48:26 And finally, I thought it was really important
11:48:29 to provide supplementary documentation to Google. And that was probably one of the biggest things to me anyways, that I could
11:48:38 explain what I was seeing and really go into detail of like what the impacts of HCU were on the travel industry.
11:48:46 Where I didn't think searches made sense. So I pretty much put together a 30 page document for Google
11:48:53 that they were able to consume.
11:48:56 We started off today with how we build search. And this is something that Danny Sullivan gives all the time to corporations to explain how
11:49:03 how Google Search operates.
11:49:06 I took a couple pictures of slides that he had put up. This first one was very indicative of how the day would go.
11:49:15 there wouldn't be any instant solutions that we weren't going to see as a result of our conversations at this event.
11:49:23 any sort of big changes. He had mentioned that anything that we talk about throughout that day probably won't be implemented for six months, right? That there were going to be subsequent updates.
11:49:34 But that it would take time. Things are complicated, of course.
11:49:38 And it's complicated because the ranking system includes a lot of different things, right?
11:49:44 how to detect spam, deduplication of content, what's considered as fresh.
11:49:51 elevating crisis information. If there's a tsunami somewhere that that information needs to show up first if somebody is searching for that information.
11:49:59 Et cetera, et cetera.
11:50:01 It is a beast, Google search.
11:50:05 Of course, they talked about all the things that they did in 2023 to make search better, all the different experiments that they ran, all the different features that they pushed out.
11:50:14 Of course, most of that was not very helpful in my opinion but
11:50:19 here are some of those numbers.
11:50:23 At the end of that, what was interesting was that Elizabeth Tucker came up and she's the director of product development at Google, so pretty high up.
11:50:31 We snickered a little bit when she said this. They said that Google searches North Star
11:50:37 is that they're trying to make sure that the content that is surfaced is helpful and satisfying. Those two key words.
11:50:47 And of course, this was, again, how the rest of the day would go. They had to tow the company line. Most of what they said was, yeah, what they had already published online.
11:51:00 So we knew that we weren't going to get any direct
11:51:03 kind of answers to our questions or our frustrations. But yeah, certainly with the group, we kind of, you know, rolled our eyes when we saw this, right? Helpful and satisfying. What does that actually mean, guys?
11:51:17 This is also something that I paraphrase from what Danny Sullivan had said to us.
11:51:23 And gives us a little bit of hope, I think. What he said was like, it's likely not you, but it's us, right? For us to be invited to this event, he looked through all of our websites and he analyzed our work. He didn't tell us what he found.
11:51:36 But he knows that all of us create good content. We create helpful content. And so this is his way of saying like.
11:51:41 Your websites are good and it is something wrong with Google. They need to figure something out. And the other part is keep doing what you're doing.
11:51:49 And we'll catch up. That was frustrating to hear.
11:51:54 But what this means is that don't change what you're doing. And over time, who knows how long that will be.
11:52:02 that Google will eventually fix the problem somehow, or at least we'll catch up to
11:52:07 actually content. So take it for what it is. That's something that Danny did say to us.
11:52:16 So with my three minutes, that was tough, right? The night before I
11:52:20 scramble to put together like some cue cards, like what was I going to say in front of all these Googlers, right?
11:52:26 So I knew that, you know, Danny had hinted to us like, yes, you could probably tell your sob story and definitely take your moment to
11:52:34 to tell the group the impact of these updates.
11:52:38 But I really wanted to try to be as helpful as possible, right? Like I talked about, yes, who I am.
11:52:43 what my site is about, how we go about creating content content.
11:52:48 And the impact of the updates, but I tried to give some helpful ideas
11:52:52 for what Google should be doing to improve search. So that's kind of how I use my three minutes.
11:52:59 But maybe better for me to kind of talk about in aggregate, like what I learned from hearing everyone's stories
11:53:06 Like for one, it was uh yeah it was tough to hear, you know, everyone had been impacted roughly 90% or more. They had lost
11:53:14 90% or more of their traffic.
11:53:17 One person had lost literally 100% of their traffic. They no longer get any organic traffic from Google at all.
11:53:26 So really, the story of that is that we're really not alone, right? Everyone else is feeling this. The impact is real.
11:53:36 All of us have pointed to one way or another that we feel like there are site-wide classifiers.
11:53:42 As in, our entire site for some reason is feeling
11:53:46 like we're being suppressed somehow.
11:53:48 So it was good to hear that, okay, other people are seeing that as well. There's something weird going on, right?
11:53:54 And various recommendations that we're hearing, one is like, fix it, obviously.
11:54:01 A few of us had mentioned the idea of some sort of like publisher verification
11:54:06 Of course, we would not want this to be a pay to play type of scheme, but for us to say like, if we are legitimate
11:54:13 publishers to have a check mark or some way of somebody doing a search to identify us in that way.
11:54:20 Balancing the dominant presence of large publishers and forums. So we think about Reddit, TripAdvisor.
11:54:26 US travel and more recently or previously rather, Forbes, that there's really an imbalance of search where this is why we're being not displayed on first page
11:54:38 And smarter signals to determine real publishers versus AI. We know that there are a lot of websites out there that are almost completely AI driven.
11:54:47 So is there a way for Google to identify what is a real person versus not real? And one way
11:54:54 was mentioned was through the use of uh or analysis of photos
11:54:58 So that was interesting.
11:55:00 Then we had our breakout sessions. And this is, again, a way for all the travel bloggers. There were six of us in total to get together.
11:55:08 There was one product manager from New York City with some background in Google Travel. That was interesting.
11:55:15 to other product managers. I think another one that actually roamed around between different breakouts and then one from product marketing as well to help facilitate this.
11:55:24 The one product manager basically said like these sessions are interesting because he feels that he's
11:55:30 He's really an ineffectual genie, as in a genie that is able to hear wishes but is not able to grant any. And that was very much the case.
11:55:41 Two things that really stuck to me was that Google was very interested in how our businesses worked.
11:55:48 And that was interesting because that was interesting because
11:55:51 we assume that Google being all-knowing Google, they know how
11:55:56 running a website works, how being a content creator works, how we learn about search and SEO.
11:56:03 But they really don't, especially at the individual level and all the different various groups
11:56:08 a lot of line of questions that we were getting. I knew that they actually don't really understand how we operate.
11:56:15 One very effective thing that we did as a group was that we actually ran through an example. Someone literally pulled out their phone and they typed in things to do in Seattle to see what would show up.
11:56:26 And you guys know this, when you do a search like that, the search results are insanely cluttered right now. There's so many ads at the top, various features.
11:56:36 By the time you get to, and then you got your Reddits and trip advisors and US travel, by the time you get to any like quality content, helpful content, in my opinion.
11:56:46 you're basically scrolling all the way down or on the web. You're on page two or page three. So for us to be able to show that to them.
11:56:54 While this feels like something they should know already, they really don't. And when they saw that, they're like, oh yeah, this is not great.
11:57:01 So that was cool to see. Now, whether that makes an impact is
11:57:06 to be seen.
11:57:08 Again, another thing that came to me was that Google doesn't really have a lot of the answers. And I kind of said this earlier.
11:57:14 What they wanted to know was like, how do they separate? They want to know how to separate thin content from deep original content that comes from
11:57:22 web creators like ourselves in our community
11:57:26 How do we verify who is behind these websites? They're having trouble figuring that out.
11:57:32 They want to know how we monetize actually you know really interesting questions like, why do you care about Google search and why does this matter to you?
11:57:40 How do you guys make money? Again, goes back to like, they don't really know how our business works.
11:57:47 Are there things outside of ranking as a feature that would help?
11:57:53 And so this led us down to a couple of things. I'll get to that in the next slide.
11:57:57 Where do we get our SEO information from? It seemed almost new to them that we have these Facebook groups where we get advice from.
11:58:06 quote unquote SEO experts that we listen to and we watch
11:58:11 You know, YouTube videos or listen to podcasts. So really trying to explain that to them.
11:58:18 Here are a couple ideas that we honed in on and would love your thoughts on some of these things as well.
11:58:24 Photography as a way to determine original content. We went down that rabbit hole a little bit
11:58:32 travel bloggers, travel writers. A lot of our photos have us in them. Is that a way to identify like, okay, this is not a stock photo. If we're in it.
11:58:42 It's clearly original. But then, of course, there are a lot of complexities here. We were thinking about the
11:58:48 The review category of people and let's say gamers, they're taking screenshots of games. It's really hard for them to have and use
11:58:57 original photography in that way. So it's complicated.
11:59:01 We talked about improving Google Search Console. So if you have a website, Google Search Console is kind of
11:59:08 the admin portal that we can log into for Google. And it has a lot of different information about how our performances and whatnot.
11:59:15 But we've always said like if we've always said
11:59:17 If Google thinks that our website is bad.
11:59:20 Tell us why it's bad. And so we went through a thought exercise of like different ways that they could identify maybe in an ambiguous way because they can't tell us exactly what to fix.
11:59:32 Maybe indicators or levels or colors to tell us like, okay, you're over optimizing on SEO. You should tone that down. You're in the red.
11:59:41 turn it green and things like that. So we hope that that was helpful for them.
11:59:48 In a Google discovery.
11:59:50 I know some of us have had some success in having our content
11:59:56 featured in Discovery. So for those
11:59:59 For those that don't know, Google Discovery is something that if you have an Android phone or you use Chrome.
12:00:05 Once you open up Chrome, there are a bunch of articles that display and those are usually timely articles or things that Google thinks that you're interested in.
12:00:13 You were.
12:00:13 For a long time, we were able to surface our articles that way. But I think lately that's not been the case. And so if they could help us bring that back.
12:00:22 That could be an easy win. So we brought that up.
12:00:25 In an AI world, we didn't talk too much about AI, but the idea that if Google is taking and stealing our content, that they should really be licensing it and using some sort of rev share model.
12:00:37 So we brought that up. And finally.
12:00:40 SERP features. So I should explain SERP is Search Engine Results Page. There are a lot of different features and different blocks that you see when you're searching on Google.
12:00:52 What if they created a creator specific or small publisher specific carousel where they could elevate
12:00:59 from all the searches below, basically.
12:01:03 articles that are by bloggers, by writers that would show up near the top and maybe five results that could be in a carousel.
12:01:13 This was also interesting. I clued in on this. This is from one of the product managers. He said that
12:01:18 So when I was reading your notes this morning, everything said HCU, HCU this, HCU that.
12:01:23 He was like, what is that? And that really blew my mind. I was like, how do you not know what the acronym HCU is?
12:01:31 So again, more indications of like how fragmented a lot of their teams are or how siloed they are.
12:01:39 Perhaps the acronym isn't widely used internally, but again, it blew my mind that they didn't even, he didn't know
12:01:47 what HCU was until he was like, oh, okay, that means helpful content update. Interesting.
12:01:54 The rest of the day, I'm going to gloss over group discussion was really an opportunity for us to each of our breakouts to share our findings. We only had an hour. There wasn't much time to go into too much detail.
12:02:04 And then finally, closing remarks. So we had Elizabeth Tucker come back on. Again, she's the director of product development.
12:02:13 And Pandun Nayak, he's the chief scientist of search.
12:02:17 they came up. But again, it was like the very beginning. They couldn't really speak to any specifics.
12:02:24 Really didn't really get any answers. It was quite unsatisfying of an end for the day.
12:02:30 What I learned. Okay, lots of different things. I've touched on a couple of these, but I'll run through this. They know something is wrong.
12:02:36 They don't know how to fix it is kind of what I got out of it.
12:02:41 They did not want to admit to any site-wide classifiers. We kept bringing it up again and again
12:02:48 They did not want to talk about that. They kept coming back to they use page level indicators when they surface results. So page is more important, but
12:03:00 We are all convinced that at a site level, we're being suppressed somehow.
12:03:05 Search is massive. We met so many different peoples, people throughout the day of different products and different teams.
12:03:13 They were very siloed. And just from the lot of questions that they asked.
12:03:18 They are not all in sync and that's a little bit scary.
12:03:21 But that's how big companies are, right?
12:03:24 Google search is not the same as Google Ads and they don't talk to each other. So I did confirm that. I think I always made the assumption and many of you have as well, is that Google search
12:03:34 And ads, they got to be in sync, right? Because the Google search results page has lots of ads. That's what I thought. But no, they purposely actually do not talk to each other. So they don't influence how they build their products.
12:03:46 Google was very interested in exploring features that weren't rank related. So as much as we wanted to say like, guys, fix your rankings. They are not working in the new algorithm.
12:03:57 They were very much wanting to figure out like, are there other features that we can build around it to help
12:04:04 elevate small publishers in some way. That was actually their focus. And that was very indicative of maybe
12:04:09 what we will see in the coming months and coming years.
12:04:13 Google doesn't really know how our business works. We talked about that.
12:04:17 Another thing is that they're scared to make big changes.
12:04:20 Of course, we all wish that they could push a button and everything would be fixed or maybe undone.
12:04:27 But I think they've been burned by what they did with September. Their team is very…
12:04:33 cognizant of like not wanting to make a change that's going to break things further, that they're going to create changes that will
12:04:42 lead to something that spammers or bad actors will be able to take advantage of. So they are being very careful, almost fearful in a lot of ways.
12:04:51 And another thing I picked up on is that Google doesn't love SEO. So these are SEO experts.
12:04:57 as much as we think they do.
12:04:59 So there were a couple of moments where they kind of snickered at SEO advice and they're like, oh yeah, that's not a thing.
12:05:07 If you're wondering, I thought I'd touch on this, we did not really talk about AI overview at all. There just wasn't time. It would just take us down another rabbit hole. And I felt like they were steering us away from
12:05:20 AI conversations.
12:05:23 Key takeaways, again, I know I'm beating the drum a little bit here but
12:05:26 Google was interested in things that weren't rank related. So we talked about publisher verification. I'm curious what you guys think about that.
12:05:34 Using photos to determine originality and authenticity.
12:05:38 carousel to feature small publishers and Google Search Console improvements.
12:05:44 Another thing I kind of took away was that you cannot really trust
12:05:49 your ad networks completely
12:05:52 For years, we've always heard that with Mediavine and Raptiv that their placements, their density is compliant with Google ads.
12:06:03 But we assumed that Google Ads was synonymous with Google search. That is not the case. So for them to say that they're compliant, yes, they're compliant with Google ads.
12:06:10 But that doesn't mean that Google search loves what you're doing with ads. So really take a step back and think about like, do I have too many ads on my website?
12:06:20 I've certainly toned down how many ads that I have on the page to make things better. And I haven't seen any improvements, but it's something that we can all look into.
12:06:32 And really, we can't expect any changes to happen in the next little bit. It's going to take many months. And so that's my expectation, if not months, a year at least, to see real improvement.
12:06:45 some semi confirmations that I got from folks that were there. Somebody did ask.
12:06:51 can you publish many articles all at once? Is that something that Google is going to flag? And they said, yeah, that's fine. No problems there.
12:06:59 What about Google's stance on dates? This was very much an ambiguous answer. It's very much like do what makes sense for the user.
12:07:07 Change dates only if they're meeting or display dates as long as they're meaningful for the user, that type of answer. And so this is
12:07:14 what I kind of captured
12:07:16 from that rapid fire question.
12:07:21 Great. If you're feeling this way, this is exactly how I felt coming out of it.
12:07:29 But was it worth going? And I, you know, on the flight back as I was writing the article.
12:07:34 that some of you may have read. I still felt like it was worth going because like for me, it was an opportunity for
12:07:41 to advocate for travel creators, to tell them the issues that we've been seeing in our space.
12:07:48 It was good to see, at least for my sanity, some solidarity amongst all of our creators that, guys, we were able to say, there's something wrong and all of us were feeling the impacts of it.
12:08:01 We were able to provide real case studies
12:08:04 If any of you are on Twitter, there's a lot of crap that's on there. There's basically a Twitter war of people complaining to each other. Google's not taking any of that advice. You could share all that stuff up there. It's not being taken in.
12:08:18 Like seriously, I felt like this was finally a forum for us to like actually show them real case studies, our own
12:08:25 provide them then with supplemental documentation that they would actually read and
12:08:29 one product manager said that he actually went through my document
12:08:33 Another thing was like now I at least have some direct communication with Danny Sullivan to have any sort of direct line with Google. Never thought I would have. So that's a positive thing.
12:08:46 And I think
12:08:47 For many of us, we were able to hopefully convey to Google that.
12:08:51 Guys, if this continues further, many of us are going to go out of
12:08:56 Many have actually closed their websites. And if we're not seeing the value of creating articles for the web.
12:09:03 We're just going to completely stop. And if we stop, what are your AI models going to train on? And so really trying to explain to them that there are
12:09:13 you know, big ripples
12:09:16 that will happen if this continues and things aren't fixed
12:09:21 If anything, I came up with this. Got a lousy bag, a bottle, socks, sticker, and a badge. That's really what I came out of the event with.
12:09:36 Lastly, I think something that Danny said, maybe not directly to me, I think this kind of
12:09:43 swirled around in our group that
12:09:45 Danny basically said that if this is not an official position, this is just him kind of saying this.
12:09:52 He's like, if I were your position, I'd probably work on something in the meantime. I think he knows how intricate and complicated this is.
12:10:01 And that there's, like I said, I've been saying all along there's no
12:10:04 quick and easy fix like you should probably think about doing some other stuff. And that could be interpreted in many ways. It doesn't mean like get a job or something like that or do something completely different. But maybe you should work and focus on something, another part of your business or diversifying in some way.
12:10:21 And I can confirm that my site did not see any improvement as a result of attending. So I know some of you are wondering about that.
12:10:31 So what now?
12:10:33 So now to kind of close things off, I wanted to
12:10:37 take a lot of my interpretations and kind of some things that I've been thinking about and have been doing
12:10:42 Over this past year.
12:10:45 over 12 months since September 2023. And I know a lot of us are
12:10:50 trying to figure things out. I think the good of all this is that at least Google knows something is wrong. They're trying to figure it out.
12:11:00 What they will do is to be seen.
12:11:03 that we're not alone. That was the big part of going to this event. And I think
12:11:10 a big kind of message I wanted to leave with all of you today is that
12:11:14 don't feel like you're going through this by yourselves. Like communities like TMAC, we're here for each other.
12:11:20 And we're here to
12:11:23 event to share ideas, to give each other a hug
12:11:29 I think as we're having more of these conversations and this really being the start of it, that we can all support each other.
12:11:39 And I'm thinking of this like silver linings as this is maybe a good time to slow down publishing of your website. If you were in the mode of publishing an article a week or multiple articles a week.
12:11:50 Like, okay, this is maybe a good time to take it easy and
12:11:55 actually slow down to strategize and think about the future because we don't often have a lot of those moments. We're always so go, go, go in our work.
12:12:03 That like with all that's going on, like we should slow down our writing and maybe think about where else we can build our business around.
12:12:13 The bat. Of course, I have to think of things negatively as well.
12:12:18 We know for sure. I think Danny said this at one point, like there's no going back to pre-HCU if
12:12:24 If you are thinking that you are going to get back the levels of traffic that you had
12:12:30 pre-september 2023, it's not happening.
12:12:34 So change your mindset for sure around that. Full recovery will be unlikely as a result.
12:12:42 There's no quick and fast fixes, as I've mentioned throughout this presentation.
12:12:48 And really, we're thinking timeline wise, like six months to a year at least to see really much recovery.
12:12:55 Of course, there's the it depends as part of that. I know some people have seen some improvement. So it really is going to be site specific.
12:13:04 But don't expect something to happen in the next month or two.
12:13:09 I tried to think of some do's, like some do's and don'ts.
12:13:15 I think it is still worth your time right now. As you slow things down, maybe on the writing side to
12:13:20 reflect on your site in totality and fix things that you've been meaning to fix for a while or maybe you haven't had time to really think about
12:13:30 So one of the big things that really came out of HCU is that there's a lot of old and stale content on many websites. Mine included.
12:13:40 And so that's pruning out old content. What pruning means is literally
12:13:45 deleting some of that old content. It could be old contest articles that you had in the past that are just sitting out there.
12:13:54 These are articles that you've written that literally bring in no traffic because they're out of date. They're not relevant anymore. And so just get rid of them. So delete
12:14:03 I think you can put a 403 on them to let Google know that the content has been deleted.
12:14:10 But that's what pruning means.
12:14:13 update old content. So if there's some, there are many articles on my website where they're not very good
12:14:20 But I could take what's there. The bones are kind of the structure's there, but updating them to revive them.
12:14:26 So making sure that they're up to current standards, that you're adding better photos.
12:14:33 Linking to affiliates, which is something maybe you have not done in the past and just making it better.
12:14:40 Fixing technical issues is another thing. So if you're getting warnings on Google Search Console.
12:14:47 Or you just have been ignoring things, it's probably a good time to fix those technical issues because that's really a foundation of your website. And so that could be hurting you and maybe they're identifying that now, improving page speed.
12:15:02 Errors and things like that, it's time to fix those.
12:15:06 Another thing that came out of HCU is excessive SEO optimization. So I think many of us are guilty of this because this was the
12:15:14 the advice that we were getting from SEO experts, like use a lot of keywords like
12:15:20 In the past, like you would stuff keywords everywhere from
12:15:24 image alt tags to headers to in the body to the URL, to the metadata, like have it all over the place and just put it like maybe 20 times. And that's really too much. We know now that that's something that they're
12:15:41 they're targeting. So as you fix up old content and create new content as well.
12:15:47 It's really toning that back like
12:15:50 we can still follow good SEO practices, but not take things overboard.
12:15:54 And so that's something that you should be thinking about.
12:15:58 In a world of helpful content.
12:16:01 Google is really honing in on is your article giving people the answer
12:16:07 And for that answer to be surfaced up at the top. So maybe not necessarily top of fold.
12:16:14 But at least something where they don't have to scroll all the way to the end to get to the answer.
12:16:18 So it's all about reducing fluff. And I think we're guilty of that as well, like talking about maybe the background of a city, the history before finally getting into the itinerary or
12:16:31 or the recommendations for places to stay. So what I've been doing is trying to move a lot of that fluff out of the way, deleting it completely or creating these summary boxes. And so by getting people answers
12:16:46 The answers to their questions right away up at the top, like here's what you need to know. This is probably what you searched.
12:16:51 And if you want to read more, the below has everything else you need in terms of detail.
12:16:59 reducing the fluff, getting people the answers.
12:17:01 And finally, analyzing pages. Maybe this is a finally time to look at, okay, you've had all these
12:17:06 pages that performed well in the past, they've dropped in rankings. Like maybe you can go and look at
12:17:13 trends right for maybe those top 10 articles that have lost rankings
12:17:19 You can see what has replaced them. Is there something that these other websites are doing that you're not doing?
12:17:26 And doing that deep dive.
12:17:28 I would say still also stay abreast of search and SEO news. So I know Chris has a newsletter this week in blogging.
12:17:42 And I think that's a great one to just know what's happening. I think the main thing, the reason why I say that is that I think we're in a very turbulent
12:17:51 world from a search perspective.
12:17:53 SEO perspective. And there's a bit of a revolution that's happening, especially with AI as well and so
12:18:00 we need to know what's happening and be ready to pivot when that happens. There's going to be a lot of changes for sure over the next couple of years.
12:18:06 And finally, maybe just diversifying away from relying specifically on your website.
12:18:12 Building your business in different ways. And I won't get into all that, but I'll leave it at that.
12:18:18 And because I'll talk about some other ideas.
12:18:22 A lot of us have relied on organic search over the years, and that means Google driving traffic to your website. But think about as well.
12:18:31 how else you can drive traffic to your website. And you can do that by things of
12:18:36 things such as you're building out your newsletter, owning your audience. And so a lot of us
12:18:42 have certainly been putting a lot of effort into growing our newsletter base, sending out better newsletters, and the idea that newsletters are a vehicle to drive people back to your website.
12:18:54 So I'm at a point now where after Google and direct searches
12:19:01 newsletter traffic is actually third place right now. And so that's something that's really taken years to build or at least this
12:19:09 you're in a serious focus to build out, but it can pay dividends in the long run.
12:19:15 getting featured on other publications, maybe some of these larger publications you can leave quotes for or maybe write as well, but that could drive traffic back to your website.
12:19:26 social media in general, I'm thinking everything from Pinterest, which I know a lot of people have had success with.
12:19:33 Facebook still, Instagram, TikTok. Another idea was Flipboard. Flipboard's kind of going through this renaissance of using that as a way to drive
12:19:42 people back to your websites.
12:19:45 experiment and get a little creative.
12:19:48 I know folks have been
12:19:50 trying to knowing that so much of our focus is on Reddit and forums, like, can you leverage that so
12:19:57 Being very careful on Reddit, of course, but finding ways to be part of that conversation and ultimately share links back to your website and that becoming a viral moment, perhaps that could lead to a lot of traffic
12:20:12 Another idea is somebody I talked to mentioned like having interactable or interactive, sorry, things on your websites like
12:20:20 quizzes. So this is a bit of a rumor or kind of a theory, but if you can increase the time on page
12:20:28 that could lead to better rankings as well. So quizzes being something where people have to click and do things on your page.
12:20:36 that could impact things.
12:20:39 Another idea is to go niche. And so this is something that I've certainly been thinking about going out some places is very much a broad like
12:20:45 website about all travel. But I know those that have been less impacted by HCU are the ones that focus on very specific topics.
12:20:55 So a friend of mine, they focus just on Costa Rica travel. They have not been impacted as much
12:21:03 as the ones that I, you know, have lost 90% or more of traffic. They've lost traffic, certainly, but certainly not at the degree that we're seeing elsewhere. So thinking about, can I go niche? Do I pivot?
12:21:18 Create a new website or brand.
12:21:21 There are a lot of possibilities there.
12:21:23 And finally, thinking back on the newsletter itself, it's the idea of building a community. There's value in that. I think many of us
12:21:32 discounted that because of, you know, maybe they're focused on just wanting to build the website and creating great articles.
12:21:39 But building a community is really important. A newsletter can be viewed as a community, but social media as a way of growing your community. And ultimately, these are the people that
12:21:51 our dedicated followers. And once you have them.
12:21:54 using that as a way to bring people back to your website or bringing them back to whatever channel you're looking to grow and build and build your business out of.
12:22:05 Don't get a Cybertruck. But beyond that, there were a lot of Cybertrucks in the Bay Area.
12:22:13 But I would avoid spending a lot of money on website audits. There was one guy in our group that had spent $30,000 in website audits. And he basically said it was all a waste of money.
12:22:27 So I would not do that, especially when we know that nobody knows the answers to anything right now. Everyone's
12:22:33 grasping at straws and try to figure out they're experimenting and doing all this stuff, but there's no silver bullet, right?
12:22:39 I would avoid making massive, massive changes to your website.
12:22:44 It's time intensive and you are banking on whatever change
12:22:49 you're doing to have to
12:22:51 some sort of impact down the road and it might not. Or maybe Google might course correct and do something a little bit different. So I'd be cautious about doing those
12:23:01 sweeping changes on the website, other than fixing technical issues and things like that.
12:23:06 And lastly, I'll say that if there's a fix that
12:23:11 you're hearing online that sounds too good to be true.
12:23:15 It probably is. So there's no silver bullet to all this. So I would…
12:23:21 Still be careful, stay cautious, be willing to try a couple of things but
12:23:25 But yeah, don't invest too much time on some of these wild theories that are out there
12:23:31 So into that, I think we're at 47 minutes.
12:23:36 This is my last Q&A slide. I have a QR code there just to make things easier. That is a link to the article that I put together post
12:23:48 Google web creator conversation event for anyone that's curious about all my ramblings, I kind of really broke things down there. If you're curious about learning more. But I'll
12:23:58 hand it to you, Nadine. I don't know if you got any questions and
12:24:01 Yeah. Will, thank you.
12:24:03 If you guys are curious about anything.
12:24:05 Wow, wow. Okay. So, so much fantastic content there. I'm still
12:24:10 wrapping my mind around basically I'm paraphrasing you
12:24:13 working on your business, not just in your business and the whole idea of having to go a little higher level.
12:24:20 Do you want to drop that article link in the chat and then we can
12:24:25 take your screen down so that we can
12:24:28 see the group here.
12:24:28 Yeah, I can…
12:24:31 I can definitely do that. Just give me a second.
12:24:32 And while you're doing that, I'll just go to a couple of questions in the chat.
12:24:38 Stephanie was asking, are there tools you're using right now to balance SEO optimization?
12:24:47 Balancing SEO optimization.
12:24:50 I haven't really found any sort of new tools to do that. I think I am more conscious
12:24:57 of not overdoing
12:25:00 I think we all got into
12:25:04 some of them.
12:25:06 bad advice or just poor behavior of using the same keywords over and over like
12:25:11 I would say on my website, I do use Yoast as a plugin on WordPress. So it does tell me how many times I'm using a keyword. It's not a new tool. It's always been there for me.
12:25:23 And there are other similar tools out there. But just looking like, oh my gosh, if I'm using this keyword like 20 times, like that's a problem. And so when I'm going back and trying to fix old articles, I am making sure that's pretty much down to
12:25:39 I don't know, five references, four references of that particular keyword
12:25:45 And doing a better job of mixing it up and using other ways to phrase maybe that particular keyword, but again, not
12:25:52 overtly doing it like, you know, as many times as maybe some of us used to.
12:25:57 So sorry, I've just unmuted myself so I can ask a follow-up question. It's probably easier than jumping back in the chat.
12:26:02 Sure.
12:26:05 I use all-in-one SEO right now in WordPress.
12:26:10 And now my concern is that because it's another plugin that's been around for a long time. Now my worry is that maybe it's information is out of date because
12:26:19 The way it works is basically it wants you to hit a certain percentage of keywords and then your thing turns green and sort of just becomes a habit to make the thing turn green. And maybe that's bad advice now. Is there…
12:26:31 Do you have any thoughts on how we can sort of investigate that?
12:26:35 That's a good point. I'm hoping that they actually make tweaks to those
12:26:41 Because Yoast has the same thing. We're all trying to strive for green
12:26:46 I don't really have a good answer there.
12:26:48 Stephanie. But I'll let you guys know if I find…
12:26:52 kind of specific tools that are out there. The problem
12:26:57 that as you've seen just through this presentation is just like nobody, nobody knows right now. And we're all test. The thing is like, we're all testing all these sorts of different things, but we're not seeing any impact. So we have no idea what works, you know, like
12:27:12 We've seen some of the insider leak documentation and stuff are like, oh, wow, I think that's what this means.
12:27:19 So like I said, we're all trying different things, but we haven't seen any full
12:27:25 recoveries or like clear correlations. I think that's been the problem but um
12:27:30 But yeah, it'll be nice if guys like All in One or Yoast or others kind of catch up and maybe change those. But yeah.
12:27:40 Short answer, no, I don't have a specific tool that has adapted to the new world.
12:27:45 All right. But it is fair to be questioning those tools and sort of maybe relying on what we're hearing.
12:27:50 For sure. Yes.
12:27:51 Yeah, okay, that's great. Thank you so much for this, Will. It's been great.
12:27:56 I think one of the other comments you made, Will, about the whole idea of when you slow down your publishing and strategize.
12:28:04 the pruning, the updating, all of those fixes um
12:28:10 it's really important for us to take a step back and
12:28:15 I know some of our members have had decent success or didn't see a lot of
12:28:22 change in their traffic and you explained very clearly that for a lot of people it's because they are
12:28:27 niche markets. And that's something I think we have to consider more moving forward
12:28:33 what is our niche and how niche can we get to stay safe from these?
12:28:39 For sure.
12:28:39 But because you all know I love artificial intelligence, of course, I went to chat GPT and I said.
12:28:45 What immediate changes could travel writers implement to improve their content search performance?
12:28:51 And according to ChatGPT,
12:28:55 a lot of the things you mentioned came up. So prioritizing originality and depth
12:29:00 And their specific comment was, instead of what we used to do with our generic top 10 beaches in Spain.
12:29:08 that instead we should be flipping to
12:29:11 underrated Spanish beaches
12:29:14 Perfect for solo travelers.
12:29:17 Yeah, it's very specific.
12:29:19 Very specific. So that's something that we may need to play around with.
12:29:23 And the second one, again, to your point about the personalization.
12:29:30 they say
12:29:32 enhance the e-eat, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
12:29:38 And again, that idea of us having our photos
12:29:42 with ourselves and with ourselves
12:29:44 AI is not able to replicate the photos as well. These will all work.
12:29:51 E-E-A-T.
12:29:51 in our favor. And yeah, Taryn
12:29:54 Is eat dead? Great question.
12:29:57 And again, we don't have the answers but that
12:30:02 this move away from seo
12:30:08 I think is very real
12:30:10 people are interested in
12:30:13 more storytelling and that's what we do. We're experts at it so
12:30:17 Yeah, for sure. And I think it kind of goes back to, in a way, like how we used to write, if that makes sense. I mean.
12:30:26 For years, with SEO on the rise, like we we all were
12:30:31 kind of forced down the path of writing in a very specific uh
12:30:35 sometimes very monotonous way.
12:30:38 And the nice thing now is like we are being encouraged to
12:30:44 show more of our personality and tell our stories, unique stories, as opposed to kind of the generic stuff that we have been doing in the past.
12:30:53 And Taryn, I know your question about EAT. I think we did ask about that.
12:30:59 But again, it was frustrating because like again
12:31:03 very speaking generalities, you know, official, their official position on EAT is that it is not
12:31:09 part of the rank. It is not a ranking factor officially
12:31:14 We know that it does
12:31:17 play a role somehow.
12:31:20 That they're using the concepts of those
12:31:24 for certain verticals for sure
12:31:26 But yeah, what is this actual impact? We don't know. Because you look at the search results.
12:31:32 And I can't say that, you know, there's particular EAT
12:31:39 or the top page search results um it is
12:31:41 kind of a mess.
12:31:44 Now, Gemma had a question, but I think you answered it because her question is, what are you concentrating on now?
12:31:49 But you did that on your last few slides
12:31:52 Yeah, those are really what I've been doing. I've tried to be proactive.
12:32:00 For a long time, there's been, you know, we've been around for 12 years, just a lot of articles, right? And so pruning has definitely been a thing that I've been doing
12:32:08 We've been trying to go back into old articles, articles that were
12:32:13 even like commissioned, if you guys remember back in the day, Hitmonk, some of you may have worked with them. But there are these old articles that they had commissioned on the blog and they weren't very good, I'll be honest.
12:32:25 And so I've been trying to find ways to
12:32:28 repurpose them somehow or rewrite them so that they're kind of, like I said, back up to standards.
12:32:35 taking in what we know about today's seo
12:32:38 how we want to write them.
12:32:40 trying to be much better about highlighting things as well, like going back to my point about surfacing content much earlier, answering people's question.
12:32:51 And being helpful, although we feel like a lot of our content is all helpful, but needing to reframe it in a certain way. I've certainly been focusing on getting and moving fluff away from the top.
12:33:06 It's a lot of that. But again, even though I said I had been doing these things, I am also not convinced that this has made a difference at all. So that's been the frustrating part of all this. And I think a lot of you can relate.
12:33:18 But don't worry, Will. We don't think of you as an ineffectual genie.
12:33:23 We think that you've given everyone a lot to think about today and
12:33:30 At a very minimum
12:33:32 we now feel we're all in this together and we can continue the conversations going forward.
12:33:38 So on behalf of Tanya and Gabby and Christy and myself on the PD committee
12:33:45 Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
12:33:48 And I'm hoping that any of you out there who have topic ideas
12:33:55 for virtual sessions or even sessions for the
12:34:00 the meeting in June.
12:34:03 that you reach out to one of us on the committee, including myself on email on
12:34:12 through social media.
12:34:14 And give us your ideas for sessions you can lead.
12:34:17 Or give us ideas for sessions that you've seen someone do that
12:34:22 we can dive into this together. I feel like there's a lot of room for us to
12:34:27 learn together and learn from each other.
12:34:30 So thank you for everyone who attended today and we hope to see you in our inboxes and on social media.
12:34:41 Thanks, everyone.
12:34:43 Bye, guys. Take care.