The September 2022 Core update is live! The helpful content update has finished rolling out. In this episode we discuss:

1) How the September Core Update and Helpful content updates may be related
2) What to look for in early analytics data to see if you’ve been hit
3) Google has told us specifically how to recover – It’s all about content and E-A-T
4) Why Google’s core update questions are so important – machine learning likely plays a role!
5) A bit on how we analyze competitors’ pages after a core update hit

Apologies for the pointer clicking as I was screensharing! I’ll mute that sound the next time I record my screen.
Links mentioned:
https://developers.google.com/search/updates/ranking
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update

Resources on E-A-T:
https://www.mariehaynes.com/resources/eat/
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

Marie’s newsletter:
https://mariehaynes.com/newsletter
Marie’s book
https://mariehaynes.com/book
Contact Marie
https://mariehaynes.com/contact

Timestamps:
1:17 Basic things to know about the September core update
2:08 Is the September core update related to the helpful content update?
4:57 Machine learning in Google’s algorithms
6:47 How to get clues about early impact of this update from your analytics
7:41 A spike in traffic late July to late August is probably bot traffic
9:37 Looking at hourly traffic
11:46 Is it just one page?
13:16 Recovery is possible
14:29 The most important thing is content quality
14:52 John Mueller on how core updates are about content
17:35 Google’s advice on how to improve content
19:45 Google’s content questions
20:48 Alan Kent on Google using machine learning to assess these questions
23:09 Doing competitor research following a core update hit
30:45 Join a cohort to discuss page quality and Google’s questions
32:48 How long before you start seeing recovery?