As an SEO marketing company, we are under the control of the search engine god, Google. There have been many updates over the years. Some have affected SEO more than others and oh boy, have we noticed! Here, we will be analyzing some of the most recent Google updates and their impact on search results.
January 2020 – Featured Snippet Update
The featured snippet update by Google restricts URLs that are shown in the featured snippet from being shown again in the top 10 organic results. Hence, anything in position “0” will not show up again below that. Position 0 is placed above all other organic positions and is a very valuable place for your website to rank for.
January 2020 – Broad Core Update
It is only a few times a year that Google rolls out broad core algorithm updates. So the first one in 2020 is quite a significant update to keep an eye on. Broad core algorithm updates bring about larger fluctuations in SERPs as opposed to regular core updates. Google suggests that the best way to recover from a broad core algorithm update is to continue to create and build high-quality content. Broad core updates are always focused on providing greater search results for users. Sometimes this can significantly rock the boat for webmasters who aren’t up to date with all the latest web design trends and algorithm changes.
October 2019 – BERT Update
Perhaps one of the largest updates that spread like wildfire among the SEO community was BERT. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. According to Google, the new BERT update will impact 10% of search results across all languages. This is quite a significant amount considering that Google processes 40,000 search queries every second. Because of its significance, it will be added to the notorious list of algorithm updates by Google like Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, and RankBrain. As mentioned before, Google is constantly updating to provide better search results for users. BERT will be analyzing words in relation to one another in a sentence as opposed to one word at a time. Thus, Google is making strides to understand the context of a search. The update affects 1 out of 10 organic search results and brings greater significance to voice search.
June 2019 – Diversity Update
As you may have noticed, differing pages of the same website rank in the top 10 organic search results. Similar to the snippet update in January 2020, the June 2019 Diversity Update provides more diverse search results aimed to combat this. Thus, you usually won’t see more than 2 results of the same website in the top results unless it’s especially relevant for a particular search. Google stated that “Site diversity will generally treat sub-domains as part of a root domain. IE: listings from sub-domains and the root domain will all be considered from the same single site. However, sub-domains are treated as separate sites for diversity purposes when deemed relevant to do so.”
SEO Experts
All this talk about SEO and Google can become overwhelming. Luckily, there are marketing agencies that specialize in this exact area. Social Eyes Marketing is a local Boise marketing agency that offers SEO services. We also offer much more, but we won’t go into depth. If you find that your business is not ranking well on search results, give us a call or fill out one of our forms. It’s important for your business to be noticed; just think about how many times you use Google to find a product or service!
