Google Rep Says A New Core Algorithm Update Is Coming Soon

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Google is ramping up to release its next core algorithm update “in the coming weeks”, likely signaling a major shakeup coming to search results in the near future. 

The reveal that a core algorithm update is coming came from Google Search Liaison and well-known SEO journalist Danny Sullivan who posted a lengthy message about the coming update on his website, Search Engine Roundtable.

When Is The Algorithm Update Coming?

In his message, Sullivan says that the teams at Google haven’t figured out exactly what day the core update is coming because there is still testing being done. Despite this, Sullivan felt confident enough to say that he expects the update to roll out in the coming weeks even if it takes tweaking after testing.

Notably, Sullivan says he had considered posting similar updates before the release of past core algorithm updates but did not because of the potential for them to be pushed back. In this instance, he is apparently more confident the update will pass through testing relatively quickly.

Sullivan’s full post reads:

“We’d tell you when the next core update will be if we knew. But we don’t know exactly yet, that’s all. These aren’t scheduled to a particular day. The ranking team makes changes, tests those, evaluates those and eventually we get a launch date. There have been many times I could have said “Core update next week!” because everything was on track for that to happen, but then there’s a need to do a bit more work or other things that might cause a pushback. I would expect we’ll see one in the coming weeks, because that fits in with our general cycle. But precisely when, that’s just not known yet.”

Past Major Algorithm Updates

This upcoming core algorithm update will be the first since one which began rolling out in March 2024 and completed in April. The reason for the longer-than-normal rollout is that this update was the largest core algorithm update to date. 

Before that, Google released a slew of smaller updates in August, October, and November of 2023. 

Sullivan did not give any insight into how big the upcoming update might be or what might be targeted by the update. For now, we can only assume that this update is aimed at reducing spam and improving the relevance of search results. 

We will update you as more information about the upcoming core algorithm update is revealed or when it begins rolling out to the public. 

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Menu Items and Store Traffic May Help Local Google Rankings – A LOT

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Listing menu items in your Google Business Profile and having a busy shop seem to be powerful ways to help your business’s local Google rankings according to a newly published set of tests by SEO expert Claudia Tomina.

Google Business Profiles are the central way local shoppers find new and nearby businesses, so keeping your listing up to date and as full of information as possible is crucial. 

Though officially unconfirmed, Tomina’s test gives strong evidence to support the idea that menu items and how busy a business is are ranking signals for local Google searches. 

How Menu Items May Impact Rankings

According to the report, adding specific menu items on Google can help your restaurant rank for searches for those foods. 

In one example, Tomina added “caesar salad” to the menu items for a restaurant’s account and clearly saw an uptick in search position for the query “best caesar salad near me.” The addition didn’t just give her a small bump in the rankings. The restaurant went from search position 71 to the very top position.

How Busier Locations May Impact Rankings

Tomina’s tests also found that busier stores or restaurants during the Google popular times window tend to rank busier than less busy establishments.

As she wrote in her report, “My research shows that if a business is busier at a specific time of day then they outrank their competitors.”

In the charts below, you can see how rankings for the keyword “caesar salad near me” tended to rank better during popular times during the day.

The Big Picture

Local search results can be a highly competitive area for many businesses. Any edge that you can get on your competition can be the difference between getting a lead or missing out on it to another local business. 

If you haven’t updated your menu on Google, now is the time to do so.

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96% of Sites In The Top 10 Results On Google Have Over 1,000 Backlinks

A new study reaffirms the importance of links for ranking in Google’s search engine. According to the new findings, it is all but impossible to rank in the top 10 search results for commercial searches without a substantial number of backlinks. 

96% of the sites ranking in Google’s top 10 results had over 1,000 links from unique domains. 

In comparison, only 0.3% of the sites in the top 10 had fewer than 100 backlinks and none had fewer than 50 links. 

Links Still Matter

In recent years, Google has made a series of statements seeming to downplay the importance of links for SEO – including saying you need “very few links to rank pages”. 

This has led to considerable discussion about the importance of links, with some saying they shouldn’t be a primary concern for SEO.

This issue calls for more nuance than saying “focus on building links” or that “links don’t matter.”

Ideally, you will naturally receive links from the content you publish because people like to share and discuss good content. As this study suggests, however, it is important that you ARE receiving links. If this isn’t happening, however, you must assess what issues are preventing your content from creating links for your site and address these issues immediately. 

On the other hand, focusing specifically on creating links tends to lead to inauthentic content lacking value to real readers. 

More From The Study

Below, you can see a table of the primary study results:

Along with this data, the researchers noted a few other findings from their analysis of the sites and their backlinks, including:

  • Amazon ranked in the top 10 for over three-quarters of the keywords (164 out of 200). The next closest brand was Walmart, which ranked for 57 of the 200 keywords.
  • The “weakest” site included in the study had links from 54 domains and was ranked in the 6th search result position. 
  • Based on the data, sites required an average minimum of 164 unique backlink domains to be included in the top 10 for local search terms. 

Not All Links Are The Same

As the study is sure to note, it does not assess the quality of individual backlinks. The value of links can vary greatly depending on the authoritativeness and relevance of the site linking to your content. Simply having a specific number of links is not a guarantee of ranking well. 

For more, read the full study report here. 

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TikTok Tests Allowing Users to Share Hour-Long Videos

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Despite facing a ban in the United States in the coming months, TikTok continues to expand its features and content options, including longer and longer videos. 

After already extending video lengths to up to 30 minutes earlier this year, TikTok is now testing allowing users to upload and share hour-long videos without forcing creators to split long-form content into multiple parts.

More Than Short Clips

TikTok made its name by starting out with bite-size videos that were just 15 seconds long. As time has passed, the platform has consistently increased these limits to allow for more types of content. 

With the content on the platform gradually becoming more varied, the number of creators having to work around the length limitations has grown. This move gives creators more flexibility to provide long-form content such as cooking demos, beauty tutorials, and educational lessons without breaking up the flow of their content. 

What This Means For Brands

Along with allowing for more flexibility when uploading branded content, this move will potentially allow for more advertising options such as pre-roll and mid-roll ads. 

At the moment, however, TikTok remains quiet on what type of ad formats it may allow with these long-form videos. 

Still Just a Test

Hour-long videos are currently just being tested and are only accessible to a limited number of users. Currently, the company has “no plans” for a wider rollout. Given the reception of previous tests to increase video lengths, however, this is one test we expect to see become available to the general public before too long.

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What Is Content Decay and What Should You Do About It?

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A lot has been made of the importance of new content when it comes to ranking on Google. But, what’s so bad about older content? Are all old posts bad for your site? Should you be regularly removing old posts?

Thankfully, Google’s John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman addressed this recently on an episode of the Search Off The Record podcast.

In the episode, Mueller and Sassman talked at length about content decay, a term referring to content that becomes outdated or irrelevant over time, how it affects your site, and what you should do about it.

What Is Content Decay According to Google

While the term content decay isn’t necessarily a commonly used term within the SEO community, it is an apt term for some types of content. Specifically, this is how Mueller defines content decay:

“[Content decay is] something where, when you look at reference material, it’s kind of by definition old. People wrote about it because they’ve studied it for a really long time, so it’s an old thing. But, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer true or no longer useful.”

Is Content Decay Inherently Bad?

As Google’s workers explained, content decay isn’t inherently bad. Even some posts that may seem outdated, such as old event announcements or product updates, shouldn’t be treated as a problem.Sassman recommends keeping this content around for historical accuracy.

As an example, Sassman pointed toward Google’s help pages which still use the outdated term “Webmaster Tools.”

“If we went back and we replaced everything, like where we said Google Webmasters or Webmaster Tools, if we replaced Search Console everywhere we said Webmaster Tools, it would be factually incorrect.”

What Should You Do About Content Decay?

It might be tempting to simply delete outdated content but Mueller recommends going back and adding context to outdated content instead. This way, you still retain the value from past content while making it clear what aspects are now irrelevant and prevent confusion among readers. 

As he stated:

“People come to our site for whatever reason, then we should make sure that they find information that’s helpful for them and that they understand the context. If something is old and they search for it, they should be able to recognize, ‘Oh, maybe I have to rethink what I wanted to do because what I was searching for doesn’t exist anymore or is completely different now.”

For more, listen to the full episode of Google’s Search Off The Record podcast below:

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Everything You Need To Know About Canonical URLs And Your Google Rankings

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Every brand wants to put their best foot forward. If you want to do that online, you need to understand what canonical URLs are. So, today we are going to talk a bit about what canonical URLs are, why your pages may have a canonical version, and how Google chooses which page is the canonical page. 

What Are Canonical URLs?

A canonical URL or web page is the version of a page selected to be indexed by Google when there are multiple versions of the page. 

This version of the page is used by Google to rank the web page and be displayed in search results in order to prevent duplicate search listings. 

As the owner of the website, you have some control over which pages are chosen to be canonical URLs. As we will get into further down, though, Google doesn’t always select the page you believe should be the canonical version.

Before we get to that, let’s take a moment to talk about the legitimate reasons why you may have duplicate versions of a page.

5 Reasons For Having Duplicate Web Pages

According to Google’s official documentation and guidelines about canonical webpages, the search engine believes there are five legitimate reasons a webpage may have multiple versions. 

  1. Region variants: for example, a piece of content for the USA and the UK, accessible from different URLs, but essentially the same content in the same language
  2. Device variants: for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version
  3. Protocol variants: for example, the HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site
  4. Site functions: for example, the results of sorting and filtering functions of a category page
  5. Accidental variants: for example, the demo version of the site is accidentally left accessible to crawlers

How Google Chooses A Canonical Webpage 

Until very recently, it was unclear exactly how Google selected canonical pages. Website owners and managers could signal which version they wanted to appear in search results using the rel=”canonical” tag in the code of the page. 

However, this version wasn’t always the one that Google went with.

Gary Ilyes from Google cleared the mystery up (mostly) in a recent Google Search Central video. 

The process starts with finding the content and identifying the main content or “centerpiece of a page”. Then, it groups the pages with similar content in duplicate clusters. 

Then, Google uses a handful of pages to essentially rank each version of the page like it would a listing in search results. The page with the best ranking is selected as the canonical version and included in most search results. 

While he doesn’t list exactly what signals are used, Ilyes did say this:

“Some signals are very straightforward, such as site owner annotations in HTML like rel=”canonical”, while others, like the importance of an individual page on the internet, are less straightforward.”

Notably, this doesn’t mean that Google only indexes one version of the page to be used in all contexts. There are situations where Google may decide to show users a version of the page other than the canonical version.

“The other versions in the cluster become alternate versions that may be served in different contexts, like if the user is searching for a very specific page from the cluster.

To hear Gary Ilyes himself talk about the process, check out the full Google Search Central Video below:

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What’s The Deal With TikTok and Congress?

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This week, the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to ban TikTok unless its owner, Chinese company ByteDance, gives us control of the company.

While this does not mean the wildly popular social network is banned yet, it raises the heat on a long-brewing showdown between Congress and TikTok. Let’s explore why Congress is so concerned with TikTok, where the platform stands currently, and what will happen next.

Why Congress Wants To Ban TikTok

Since it started getting popular in the US, politicians have expressed concern about potential security issues that could put information on US citizens in the hands of the Chinese government. 

During Trump’s administration, the former president repeatedly railed against the company and pushed for it to be banned. (The former president has now switched his stance and opposes any efforts to ban TikTok following a closed-doors meeting with a major Republican donor who is also a ByteDance stakeholder.)

Since TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is based in Beijing, the app is subject to Chinese law. Most notably, it is required to give over any information requested by the government, including data on American users.

What Happens If The Bill Becomes Law?

If signed into law, ByteDance would have six months to divest its ownership of the platform. However, ByteDance would need permission from the Chinese government to go through with selling the platform and China has stated it will oppose any sale of the platform forced by foreign governments. 

If ByteDance does not divest its ownership of TikTok, the platform will become inaccessible through US servers and will not be allowed on app stores for devices. 

This would be a major hit for brands in the US who market to Gen Z, given that the platform draws in primarily younger users and creates a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach this generation where they are most receptive. 

What’s Next?

Although the House overwhelmingly passed the bill, it faces a less certain future in the Senate. Members from both sides of the aisle have expressed concern for a variety of reasons. 

Notably, some warn about potentially increasing tensions between the US and China, while some Democrats have also expressed worry about losing influence among younger votes – especially ahead of a major election. 

Ultimately, we will have to wait and watch as the Senate has yet to schedule a vote on the bill. If it is passed through the Senate, President Joe Biden has already said he intends to sign the bill into law.

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Apple Wants To Charge You To Boost Facebook and Instagram Posts

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Apple is poised to attach a fee when advertisers boost posts on Facebook or Instagram iOS apps, but Meta is offering a loophole.

Apple’s Plans To Charge For Boosted Posts

Starting later this month, Apple will begin handling billing when advertisers use the Facebook or Instagram iOS apps to boost their posts. This isn’t just a change in billing processors though. When Apple handles billing for online transactions, they attach a 30% fee on the total payment (excluding taxes). 

Since the iOS Facebook and Instagram apps often include exclusive features and new features before the Android or desktop versions of the platform, this could potentially mean Apple would be charging advertisers for access to these features.

Additionally, when Apple takes over billing it will change how advertisers pay for boosting posts. Instead of being charged after the boosted post has run, brands using iOS apps will be forced to pay upfront using prepaid funds added to their account. 

Meta Offers A Way Around Apple’s Hurdles and Fees

Thankfully, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has provided a way for advertisers to avoid these changes by ensuring all the features available in their iOS apps are also available in browsers and on desktop devices. 

This means that advertisers can avoid the fees, even when using iOS devices, by boosting their posts through their browser instead of the native app. 

As Meta said in the announcement:

We are required to either comply with Apple’s guidelines, or remove boosted posts from our apps. We do not want to remove the ability to boost posts, as this would hurt small businesses by making the feature less discoverable and potentially deprive them of a valuable way to promote their business.

We are committed to offering businesses flexible and convenient options to help them navigate this change and maximize the results of their ad spend. As part of our efforts to do this, we have invested in alternative ways to boost posts.

Specifically, advertisers can access Facebook.com and Instagram.com on both desktop computers or a mobile web browser to boost their content. When doing this, they will have all the same features as boosting posts from the iOS apps, except now they will avoid the Apple service charge.

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Google Blocked 45% More Fake Reviews In 2023 With New Algorithm

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Thanks to a new review algorithm, Google says it has become better and faster at identifying fake reviews. In a new blog post, the company declared, “In 2023, this new algorithm helped us take down 45% more fake reviews than the year before.”

According to Google, it receives more than 20 million contributions every day to Maps and Search. This can make it very difficult to filter out the inauthentic or malicious contributions, so Google uses complex algorithms, along with employees, to help spot these fake contributions. 

The New Algorithm

The latest major algorithm designed to detect and remove fake reviews was added last year. In the blog post, the company describes the algorithm as “a machine learning algorithm that detects questionable review patterns even quicker” by evaluating “longer-term signals on a daily basis” to spot “one-off cases and broader attack patterns.”

For example, the algorithm may act if it sees that “a reviewer leaves the same review on multiple businesses or if a business receives a sudden spike in 1 or 5-star reviews.”

In one case, the algorithm noticed when a group of scammers began falsely claiming they could get people paid for doing high-paying online tasks like writing fake reviews or clicking ads. 

As the company described, the algorithm “quickly identified this surge in suspicious reviews thanks to its ability to continuously analyze patterns, like whether an account had previously posted reviews.” 

With this data, human review analysts were able to cross-reference the data with reports on merchants who had seen a spike in suspicious 5-star reviews to remove even more of the fake reviews. 

In just this one scheme, Google says it was able to remove more than 5 million fake reviews within just a few weeks. 

More From The Data

Along with highlighting how the new algorithm allows Google to identify fake reviews, the blog post highlights several other statistics about fake reviews and spam it had removed throughout 2023:

  • Google blocked or removed over 170 million policy-violating reviews in the past year (a 45% increase from 2022). 
  • Over 12 million fake business profiles were blocked or removed in 2023.
  • 14 million policy-violating videos were identified and removed (an increase of 7 million more than the year before).
  • Google prevented more than 2 million attempts from bad actors to claim Business Profiles that were not theirs (double the amount from 2022).

For more, read the complete blog post detailing how Google identified and removed spammy or malicious contributions to Business Profiles and online reviews last year. 

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New Social Media Survey Gives Insights To Reach Your Audience

A new nationwide survey conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that YouTube and Facebook may still be the most widely used social media platforms by adults, but TikTok is continuing to grow significantly.

Based on the survey results, YouTube and Facebook remain the most widely used social media platforms across the US. More than three-fourths of American adults (87%) reported using YouTube, with 68% saying they used Facebook.

Most other platforms have retained approximately the same level of usage from past surveys, with the largest (Instagram) seeing use from around 50% of adults.

TikTok, however, saw a jump from 21% of US adults using it in 2021 to 33% of adults in the latest survey.

Age Continues to Influence Social Media Use

Just as in past surveys, Pew found notable differences in social media use depending on age.
For example, adults under the age of 30 were significantly more likely to say they used Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok compared to older adults.

YouTube and Facebook, however, were more likely to be used by adults of all ages – leading to their overall dominance. At the same time, Pew noted that both platforms were still more likely to be used by younger adults than older respondents.

Demographics Also Influenced Social Media Usage

  • Along with age, the Pew survey identified notable differences in the demographics that used each platform:
  • Instagram: More usage among Hispanic and Asian adults, women, and people with some college education.
  • TikTok: Increased usage rates among Hispanic adults and women.
  • LinkedIn: Most widely used among Americans with higher educational attainment.
  • Twitter (now “X”): More likely to be used by those with higher household incomes.
  • Pinterest: Still most popular among women.
  • WhatsApp: Receives more usage by Hispanic and Asian adults.

Why It Matters

As a business, you must know where to reach your audience where they are already spending time. When scrolling social media, adults tend to be more likely to engage with branded content, connect with unfamiliar brands, and discover products that they will later purchase. By making sure you’re there when your ideal audience logs on, you can give yourself the best chance to turn strangers into followers and followers into customers.

For more insights you can use to target your audience on social media, check out the full Pew report here.

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