Lee Funke

@rustybrick We have been working hard on our site and brand for over 15 years. Never in a million years did we ever consider that Google would ever turn on us and the entire web by doing anything like this.😔😔😔

Check this out! goto.target.com/zxEdW0

@glenngabe Both of my sites are trending up, but nothing revolutionary! FITFOODIEFINDS.com and cheeseknees.com 🌈🌈

Good Morning Google Land! This is the July 9th edition of "Core Update Notes". And do I have an interesting share this AM... Starting on 7/6 I'm seeing a number of sites impacted by the September HCU(X) surge. It's early and they are not back to where they were (at least yet)... but a number of them are surging which is great to see. I've also heard from HCU(X) site owners about rich snippets returning, featured snippets returning, showing up in AIOs, etc. Stay tuned. I'll have more to share about this soon.

@WiStrmChaser Shut up!!!

What a surprise driving home from fishing. Thought my eyes were playing tricks on me given the current solar data, then pulled over and camera confirmed a brief explosion of Aurora near New Auburn, Wisconsin 15 mins ago. A dandy walleye and a surprise Aurora, that was fun!!

@CharlestonCraft Can’t wait to hear about it!

on a plane to Mountain View California to hear what google has to say to small publishers they have removed from google search results this year. hope this lil chat is worth a 10 hour travel day today, a day of meetings, and the red eye back immediately after.

@lilyraynyc I WISH!!

Has any other HCU site seen a trend like this?

@rustybrick @tomcritchlow Well this is absolutely detrimental to recipe creators. 😖

Google is testing "Quick view" buttons that show your content on Google, leaving the searcher with little reason to click over to your site - not good Google seroundtable.com/google-quick-v… via @tomcritchlow

Just feed us your recipes and we will literally steal the information and do NOTHING in return to compensate you, thanks. It's heartless.

@searchliaison Hi Danny! Wondering how I can get an invite to the creator summit Google is hosting later this month. This would be such an invaluable opportunity to a small pub like myself! TYSM @searchliaison

We had this in our Search Central blog post, but it's probably worth highlighting that the helpful content system of old is much different now: developers.google.com/search/blog/20… "Just as we use multiple systems to identify reliable information, we have enhanced our core ranking systems to show more helpful results using a variety of innovative signals and approaches. There's no longer one signal or system used to do this, and we've also added a new FAQ page to help explain this change." The FAQ page itself is here, and it explains it's not just a site-wide thing now: developers.google.com/search/help/he… "Our core ranking systems are primarily designed to work on the page level, using a variety of signals and systems to understand the helpfulness of individual pages. We do have some site-wide signals that are also considered." So then to the all pages dropping questions. Pages could drop in ranking for a variety of reasons, including that we're showing other content that just seems more relevant higher. Sort of what I was talking about here: x.com/searchliaison/… If it's more than just moving down a bit, then I'd look to some of the pages that I'd previously gotten a lot of visits to and self-assess if you think they're helpful to your visitors (the FAQ page covers this). If you do, carry on. I mean, when I look for [healthy desserts] I see you ranking second. Which is pretty great. That's not typically a sign we see the page, or your site, as unhelpful. And then I saw the peanut butter cup oatmeal bar recipe on that page which made me think mmm but also hmm so I did [peanut cup oatmeal bars] and there you are first.

I keep getting advice from SEOs to "look at the pages with the biggest drops" and figure out why they dropped. If we were hit by HCU then the sitewide signal has made ALL pages drop, making it difficult to analyze helpful vs. unhelpful. Any advice? @searchliaison

Bucket list Aurora from an airplane! 937 CST on 8/11/2024 just south of Chicago! #northernlights

WALZ FOR VP LET'S GO!

@lilyraynyc Backed up by top web results AKA by all the randos and their moms on Reddit 😆

Well, Google finally responded to the AI Overview drama from last week. The response makes sense, but some of the things mentioned surprised me a bit, like this part: “Because accuracy is paramount in Search, AI Overviews are built to only show information that is backed up by top web results.” Is “backed up by top web results” different than “shown as evidence by the links we cite in the answer?” Because the cited links often… don’t rank anywhere in the top 100 results, which I (and others) have shown many examples of in the past week. blog.google/products/searc…

Not quite visible to the naked eye but Northern Lights are visible in Chetek, WI (Saturday 5/11 at 10:10PM).

BUCKET LIST Northern Lights!!!!!Norwood Young America, MN just SW of Minneapolis! 9:50PM

@homemadehooplah @lilyraynyc @sistrix Agreed!

@lilyraynyc @sistrix Certainly have felt this in the recipe space 😞

Should we start an Only Fans or have faith in Google? Organic traffic down 63% YOY. This last update has truly been detrimental to so many small publishers. @searchliaison @lilyraynyc @Marie_Haynes

Dear @googlesearchc. Please do more to help the website owners impacted by HCU and March Core. mariehaynes.com/dear-google-pl…

@lilyraynyc Thank you for advocating for small pubs! This has been detrimental to so many of us. 15 years of hard work gone overnight.

These are 5 travel blogs, and there are many, many more where this came from. These sites have tons of obvious first-hand experience, original photography of them at the places they traveled to, lots of evidence of E-E-A-T, etc. Are there many things they could still improve? Of course. But did they deserve a 95% reduction in visibility, akin to sites penalized by Panda/Penguin/pure spam or otherwise rampantly violating Google's spam guidelines? Should they truly be treated the same as AI content farms where the "author" has clearly never been to any of the places they write about (spoiler: usually they don't actually exist), the sites are full of stock photography and aggressive ads, with totally impersonal, generic content, etc.? Because I have been looking closely, obsessively at these sites for months, and there is a meaningful difference between the actual travel human bloggers and the AI spam, although it now sort of feels like Google's algorithms are not able to determine that important difference. Are we witnessing a case of machine learning going way too far?