Founder at Kern Media. Colorado #SEO, #Inbound, #ContentMarketing #TechnicalSEO Consultant. Father. Husband. Guitar sound maker 🎸.
Fort Collins, CO
Joined October 2008
- Tweets7.1K
- Following691
- Followers1.3K
- Likes5K
Everyone’s feeling a major Google update coming. Buckle up!
Just published my latest piece in Substack!
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably also connected the dots:
All signs point to a major Google update on the horizon.
This is especially true with Google’s recent communications and edits to their documentation this past week.
I believe they will be targeting low-quality, scaled AI content, tactics meant to manipulate AI search responses, paid/inauthentic mentions, and other deceptive approaches.
I put together a new Substack explaining why I’m predicting that a massive Google update is imminent - perhaps similar to what we’ve seen with Panda, Penguin, the Helpful Content Update or March 2024 core update.
Shout outs to @glenngabe, @Marie_Haynes, and @CyrusShepard, who have been sharing and predicting similar things.
open.substack.com/pub/lilyra…
Dan Kern retweeted
Heads-up: if you've checked your Google Search Console data today and you're noticing some unusual trends, you're not alone.
In particular, I'm seeing a noticeable decline in desktop impressions, resulting in a sharp increase in average position.
This is across many accounts that I have access to and seems to have started around September 10th when the change first begun.
After a quick inspection, the change doesn't appear to make a great deal of sense at the query level. Which either points to a data discrepancy or a change in how impressions are being recorded (considering clicks appear normal).
And it isn't just GSC that is being unusual, with it looking like rank tracking tools are having some difficulty with Google dropping &num=100: seroundtable.com/google-sear… and some tools not recording a ranking at all in some instances.
Either way, if you've just checked GSC and are noticing a significant drop to overall impressions in the past couple of days of data, you're not alone - we'll likely know more on this soon so stay tuned.
Definitely seeing some clients, who have been due for some ranking improvements, starting to see some nice ranking improvements. Bring it on, core update!
Big Google update coming soon, they’ve started testing it in smaller EU countries (usually the case).
Seeing big shuffles on every other DC I rank with rank tracker. One competitor page N/A -> #4, many other examples. If I had to guess, early Match a new core update it will roll out.
Dan Kern retweeted
Big Google update coming soon, they’ve started testing it in smaller EU countries (usually the case).
Seeing big shuffles on every other DC I rank with rank tracker. One competitor page N/A -> #4, many other examples. If I had to guess, early Match a new core update it will roll out.
Dan Kern retweeted
Said it before & I'll say it again..
In the age of AI: Mentions will be the new backlinks
Dan Kern retweeted
Chat GPT surpassed Bing's traffic in August.
It's also the biggest AI Chatbot by traffic - by a long shot. Forecast: growing.
Dan Kern retweeted
A new 🔥 Content Optimization tool is here: SERPrecon - Comparing your page against competitors using the same methods search engines use: Vectors, machine learning, and natural language processing, recommending what to improve to improve your content relevance.
Huge congrats to @RyanJones 👌 on the launch!
SERPrecon has a free trial, give it a go: serprecon.com/
Dan Kern retweeted
Google's approach to indexing content has evolved significantly.
Too many low-quality pages can hurt you in Core algorithm updates.
Understanding this shift is important for anyone making strategic SEO decisions: quantity is out, quality is in - also for indexing.
Love this. For 8 years running, I have paid my team as soon as I receive their invoice. Usually I try to pay with an hour. They love it and I appreciate them.
Years ago I worked for a CEO who insisted on paying all of our vendors' invoices the day we received them. It's the opposite of how most companies operate so I asked him why. He said...
"I want to be all of my vendors' best customer."
Over time I saw the brilliance in this simple tactic. We got...
—Better pricing (often the vendor would volunteer it to show their appreciation!)
—Priority service (hugely valuable when there's an urgent need)
—Lots of intangible benefits and goodwill
I adopted this tactic in all of my businesses and in my personal life and I can tell you that it's one of the highest ROI things you can do.
Dan Kern retweeted
Now in @ahrefs, if you look at an individual page, you can enable "Content changes" to see when the page content was changed and how the changes impacted traffic.
Dan Kern retweeted
What do people click after each Google search?
A. Ads 💵
A. Nothing 🕳️
B. Another Search ↩️
C. An Actual Website 💻
D. A Google-owned property 💵
Terrific new zero-click research via @randfish & @sparktoro. You'll want to bookmark these graphics
Dan Kern retweeted
Excellent read if you work in SEO.
New research that compares the US vs. EU for Google searches, the rollout impact of AI overviews, zero-click searches & much more.
-> 2024 Zero-Click Search Study: US vs. EU by @randfish via @sparktoro sparktoro.com/blog/2024-zero…
Dan Kern retweeted
These are the top "Over-Optimized" SEO features we found associated with Google Update traffic declines 📉
1) Anchor Text Variety .337 ⚓️
2) Click-Baity Title Tags .420 🐟
3) Heavy Schema Usage .381 💻
4) Page Updated Frequency .455 📅
Importantly correlation ≠ causation 🧵1/3
Dan Kern retweeted
Google: "the small set of sites we've still been crawling with desktop Googlebot will be crawled with mobile Googlebot after July 5, 2024. After July 5, 2024, we'll crawl and index these sites with only Googlebot Smartphone. If your site's content is not accessible at all with a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable." - Read More: developers.google.com/search…
Dan Kern retweeted
Can't you keep up with all of the analysis, resources, and tools from the Google Search API Doc Leak? I've created a Google Sheet aggregating the best of them! Take a look here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets…
PS: If you want me to add one, just let me know by replying here too! Expect this and much more in today's edition of #SEOFOMO 😉🙌
Dan Kern retweeted
Blend your title tag and CTR data. ChatGPT can rewrite the title tags on pages lower than expected CTR.
@crestodina #MozCon
Uhhh…what? Most all of my clients have been in a growth trend all year and going back beyond last year. Most are small-medium sites with big results. But, they are real brands. We only focus on content and tech SEO. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
SEO should now be IGNORED as a traffic channel.
Google’s algorithm says if you’re not:
1️⃣ A mega-authoritative website (DR90+)
2️⃣ Reddit or other partner with a back office deal
3️⃣ A paid advertiser
… you’re not allowed in the search results.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve traveled the world and wrote years of first-hand experience on your travel blog. Travel advice belongs to AI and SGE.
Travel bloggers and other such little people were not surprised when the Google leak revealed their own special ranking factor for being a “small website”.
Similarly, it doesn’t matter if you’ve bought and tested 100s of air purifiers for your review website. That’s now Forbes' job to recommend subpar products.
The Google leak also showed the importance of domain authority, something that was always denied by Google reps.
That said, despite all this, I still have hope. I actually feel for Google right now.
They’ve never seen such a barrage of concurrent threats:
🔥 The anti-trust cases
🔥 The search algorithm leak
🔥 Social media taking market share
🔥 LLMs taking market share
🔥 And a general agreement that Google results are getting worse.
All of this gives me hope that Google will fix the current state of the algorithm.
Not because they feel it's the right thing.
But because they’ll be forced to. Else they’ll lose even more market share.
Dan Kern retweeted
One scary inevitability when SGE is released to the public, and as the world shifts more towards using AI tools to answer questions, is that SEO will evolve from simply influencing which websites appear, to also influencing which answers appear.
SEO will become more about controlling the narrative.
As I said in one of my SGE presentations last year, "is promoting consistent and reliable answers for AI the new linkbuilding?"
The past year+ that many of us have been demoing the beta version of SGE has revealed that so far, at least, it's not very difficult to affect what SGE says about someone or something. Especially for lower competition keywords (questions about individuals or specific questions about companies/brands).
I created a test using a number of random questions about me that I can now get SGE to display pretty consistently. It wasn't hard.
(It also works with ChatGPT, Perplexity and other tools, although it sometimes takes a little finagling).
I imagine that future SEOs will be tasked with "make sure SGE doesn't say that" or "make sure SGE says this." It's a new form of reputation management, digital PR, even PR crisis management.
Dan Kern retweeted
The Google March 2024 core update volatility deepens as we approach the end of the update, some really harsh hits continue to trend seroundtable.com/google-core… more via @glenngabe
