October SEO Notes: The latest in the industry

The month of September posed many challenges for websites and ranking in SERP with an update that seemed to last over a month, a new variation of the BERT update, and an expert SEO company has noticed drastically longer changes in Google’s search engine. 

Google Updates are more volatile for longer time periods

What is Google Volatility? 

Google Volatility is naturally changing updates happening in Google daily. There is no way to predict these changes, and since changes are happening every day, most websites and SEOs won’t notice these daily changes and development. 

When does an expert SEO company notice these changes? When Google Volatility is higher than normal. 

Google categorizes websites based on their industry, and within those industries, there can be updates that happen. These updates and changes can be based on Core Updates, or Google analyzing that industry itself. This is why sometimes certain industries are targeted during larger updates. 

There is nothing an SEO expert can do about these changes but monitor the situation and website for drastic modifications! 

However, have SEO experts noticed an increase in volatility for longer periods of time than previous years? 

The answer is yes! 

Research from Semrush shows that Google Core Updates are causing longer volatility on their search engine, and in return, websites can see a larger increase or decrease in ranking and backlinks for longer than normal. 

This research shows that mobile and desktop searches have increased up to 50 percent of their volatility on SERP versus 2020 where volatility was between 25-30 percent. 

Google Analytics October 18th outage 

Google Analytics reported that on October 18th, there was an hour outage on reporting and data that includes organic and paid traffic, and reporting metrics might not appear in any reports for that day. 

Google Ads Strike- Bowling 

In August, Google reported that their advertising guidelines would change based on a three-strike limit. In an ongoing effort to provide the best advertisements and experience for searchers, the guidelines provide users with the ability to promote products or services up to three times, and after the third disapproval, their account will be removed from Google Ads without the ability to create a new account. 

One of the biggest issues an expert SEO company has with this is that ads are being rejected even if they follow the guidelines. While it does take a significant amount of time to get banned from Google Ads, each strike will count, unless Google repeals it. 

Who monitors the ads? A new auditing tool called Bowling. Yes, bowling. 

Google Developers are now speaking about this disapproval as “3 Strike Bowling” instead of baseball. This new auditing tool is a Phyton script that will be run in audit and removal mode with Google’s APIs. 

For more information regarding these updates or to get SEO started for the new year, contact us today!