Glenn Gabe 🤖 Major Algorithm Updates 2023

Glenn is a digital marketing veteran with over 27 years of experience.
 
He specializes in algorithm update recovery, technical SEO audits, and SEO training.
 
He is a columnist at Search Engine Land and a contributor at Search Engine Roundtable.
 
He speaks at industry conferences and has been a guest on many leading industry podcasts.
 
Please welcome the founder of G-Squared Interactive, Glenn Gabe!

Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_o5-dfMiBE

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Transcript

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Welcome back SEO fans! I’m thrilled to share some major knowledge bombs from my conversation with the legendary Glenn Gabe. As you know, Glenn is one of the top technical SEOs out there, with over 27 years of experience helping companies recover from Google algorithm updates.

In this episode, I’ll recap Glenn’s advice on conducting delta analyses, improving overall site quality, and making incremental improvements over time. These are three critical strategies for recovering your rankings after a Google update.

Let’s start with delta analyses. This is one of Glenn’s go-to moves after a core update. A delta analysis compares your Google rankings before and after the update to identify the specific pages and queries impacted.

As Glenn explained, this helps you quickly determine if you have an underlying quality issue or if it’s just a relevancy adjustment. For example, if an older page on Brad Pitt ranked for his name pre-update, but dropped out post-update, that’s likely just a relevancy shift. Nothing you can do there.

But if you lost rankings for head terms and other competitive queries, that indicates a potential quality problem. And that’s where the real audit work begins.

Once you’ve identified impacted pages and queries, it’s time to drill down on overall site quality. This is where Glenn focuses most of his efforts.

He stressed looking at the big picture, not just fixing individual pages. Are there underlying technical problems causing quality issues across the site? How is your site’s user experience? How aggressive are the ads? What’s your affiliate setup like?

Glenn said quality issues can arise from many places – it’s not just about content. He looks at all these factors through deep technical and content audits of the site.

And that leads me to our third key takeaway: Make significant improvements over months, not weeks. Glenn warned against trying quick spammy fixes to recover traffic. That’s a surefire way to get further demoted by Google.

As John Mueller advises, Google wants to see steady, incremental progress in improving quality over time. So be patient. Do substantive work to clean up technical issues, improve UX, reduce ads, boost content. It takes time, but that’s how you’ll ultimately regain lost rankings.

Glenn shared a great example of an ecommerce site he’s been helping that got hit by multiple core updates over several months. But with his guidance, they made substantive changes and finally started recovering rankings with the latest update.

Beyond core algorithm updates, we also talked about Google’s helpful content updates. This is clearly a big priority for Google right now in fighting low quality and auto-generated content.

Glenn called December’s update “massive” and said the January update was like a core update in its breadth and severity. He’s seeing huge ranking drops - 50, 60, 70% or more in some cases.

And when he evaluates the affected sites, the content quality is extremely poor overall. Think thin, spammy, AI-generated content with tons of ads plastered everywhere. Not very helpful for users!

So if you want to avoid getting slammed by future helpful content updates, do high-quality, original reporting that offers real value for readers. Shortcuts will catch up with you, as many sites unfortunately discovered.

Those are just some of the knowledge bombs Glenn dropped on recovering from Google updates! He also shared amazing insights on reviews updates, gaining thought leadership through content, and how to specialize in technical SEO.

I learned so much from our conversation and I hope these takeaways help protect your site from future algorithm hits. If you enjoy this stuff, make sure to like, subscribe and leave a review. I’ll catch you next time for more juicy SEO knowledge bombs!