In a webmaster hangout on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller said that there are several things that you can do to react to Google’s June 2019 core algorithm update.
Many things influence the position of your web pages
According to John Mueller, there’s no single thing that has to be changed. There are many things that influence the position of your web pages:
“We we’re not focusing on something very specific where we’d say, like for example when we rolled out the speed update that was something where we could talk about specifically. This is how we’re using mobile speed and this is how it affects your website, therefore you should focus on speed as well.
With a lot of the relevance updates, a lot of the quality updates, the core updates that we make there is no specific thing where we’d be able to say you did this and you should have done that.
And therefore we’re showing things differently. Sometimes the web just evolved, sometimes what users expect evolves, and similarly sometimes our algorithms […] evolve as well. […] There’s often nothing explicit that you can do to change that.”
Your website should be trustworthy:
“What we do have is an older blog post from Amit Singhal which covers a lot of questions that you can ask yourself about the quality of your website.
That’s something I always recommend going through. […]
All of these things play a small role and it’s not so much that there’s any technical thing that you can change in your line of HTML or server setting. It’s more about the overall picture […]
[For example] the layout looks outdated, or the authors are people that nobody knows, or you have stock photo images of instead of author photos.“
Google’s previous advice still applipes
Several years ago, Amit Singhal posted a list of questions. If you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how Google evaluates web pages:
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
- Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- How much quality control is done on content?
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
- Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
- Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
- Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
Optimize your web pages now
The Top 10 Optimizer tool and the website audit tool in SEOprofiler analyze many signals that influence the position of your web pages in Google’s search results:
