In a series of tweets, Google’s SearchLiaison responded to a question connecting click-through rates (CTR) and HCU (Useful Content Update) to how Google ranks websites, noting that if the associated ideas were true, it would be impossible for any new website. classify
Are users voting with their feet?
Search Liaison’s response was to a tweet quoting an interview response from Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the quote being: “Users are voting with their feet.”
Here’s the tweet:
“If the HCU (Navboost, whatever you want to call it) is based on user clicks/reactions, how can sites affected by the HCU expect to recover if it’s no longer offered to us Google readers?
@sundarpichai “Users vote with their feet”,
Ok, I’ve changed my whole site – let them vote!”
The above tweet seems to connect Pichai’s statement with Navboost, user clicks and ranking. But as you’ll see below, Sundar’s statement about users voting “with their feet” has nothing to do with clicks or ranking algorithms.
Background information
Sundar Pichai’s answer about users voting “with their feet” has nothing to do with clicks.
The problem with the interview question (and Sundar Pichai’s answer) is that the question and answer are in the context of “AI-powered search and the future of the web.”
The Verge’s interviewer used a site called HouseFresh as an example of a site that is losing traffic due to Google’s platform switch to the new AI Overviews.
But the complaints on the HouseFresh site predate the AI overviews. Their complaints are about Google ranking low-quality “major media” product reviews on independent sites like HouseFresh.
HouseFresh he wrote:
“Major media publishers are flooding the web with low-level product recommendations that you can’t trust…
SEO experts at major media publishers (or third-party vendors hired by them) realized that they could create pages for “best of” product recommendations without having to invest time or effort in testing and reviewing the products first “.
Sundar Pichai’s answer has nothing to do with why HouseFresh is losing traffic. Your answer is about general descriptions of AI. HouseFresh’s problems are all about big, low-quality brands outselling them. Two different things.
The Verge affiliate interviewer misquoted HouseFresh in relation to Google’s platform switch to AI Overviews. Also, Pichai’s statement has nothing to do with clicks and rankings.
here it is interview question published in The Verge:
“There’s an air purifier blog we covered called HouseFresh. There’s a gaming site called Retro Dodo. Both sites have said, ‘Look, our Google traffic was zero. Our businesses are doomed.”
… Is that the right takeaway here in all of this: that the people who care so much about video games or the air purifiers who built websites and made content for the web are the ones who get hurt the most in the change of platform?
Sundar Pichai replied:
“It’s always difficult to talk about individual cases and, in the end, we are trying to meet the expectations of users. Users are voting with their feet and people are trying to figure out what is valuable to them. We’re doing it at scale, and I can’t answer site specific…
Pichai’s answer has nothing to do with ranking websites and absolutely zero context with HCU. What Pichai’s answer means is that users are determining whether general descriptions of AI are useful to them or not.
Response from Search Liaison
Restarting the context of SearchLiaison’s response, here’s the tweet (again) that started the discussion:
“If the HCU (Navboost, whatever you want to call it) is based on user clicks/reactions, how can sites affected by the HCU expect to recover if it’s no longer offered to us Google readers?
@sundarpichai “Users vote with their feet”,
Ok, I’ve changed my whole site – let them vote!”
Here is SearchLiaison’s answer:
“If you think about these kinds of beliefs, no one would ever rank in the first place if that was supposedly all that mattered, because how would any new site (including your site, which would have been new at one point) ever be seen?
The reality is that we use a variety of different classification signals including, but not limited to, “aggregate and anonymized interaction data” as described. here:”
The person who started the discussion answered with:
“Can you tell me if I’m doing well focusing on my site and content, writing new articles to be found through search, or if I should be focusing on some off-site effort related to building a public? It’s frustrating to see the traffic go down the harder I try.”
When a client says something like “write new articles to be found through search,” I always ask questions to understand what they mean. I’m not commenting on the person who made the tweet, I’m just making an observation about past conversations I’ve had with customers. When a client says something like this, it sometimes means that they are researching Google keywords and competitor sites and using that keyword data verbatim within their content rather than relying on their own personal experience and understanding of what readers want and need.
Here is SearchLiaison’s response:
“As I said before, I think everyone should focus on doing what they think is best for their readers. I know it can be confusing when people get a lot of advice from different places and then they also hear about all these things that Google is supposedly doing, or not doing, and they really just want to focus on the content. If you’re lost, again, focus on that. This is your touchstone.”
Promotion of the site to people
Next, SearchLiaison addressed the excellent question about off-site promotion where they strongly stated to focus on readers. Many SEOs focus on promoting sites to Google, which is what link building is all about.
Promoting sites to people is very important. It’s one of the things I see high-ranking sites do, and while I won’t go into specifics, I think it indirectly feeds into higher rankings.
SearchLiaison continued:
“On the issue of off-site effort, I think from what I know from before working at Google Search, as well as my time on the search ranking team, is that one of the Ways to be successful with Google Search is to think outside the box.
Great sites with content that people like get traffic in many ways. People go straight to them. They come through email referrals. They arrive via links from other sites. They get mentions on social networks.
This doesn’t mean you should get tons of social mentions or tons of email mentions because they’ll somehow magically rank you better on Google (they don’t, as far as I know). It just means that you’re probably building a normal site in the sense that it’s not just for Google, but for people. And that’s what our rating systems are trying to reward, good content made for people.”
What about false positives?
The phrase false positive is used in many contexts and one of them is to describe the situation of a high quality site losing rankings because an algorithm mistakenly identified it as low quality. SearchLiaison offered hope to high-quality sites that may have seen a decline in traffic, saying the next update may offer a positive change.
He tweeted:
“As for the inevitable “but I’ve done all these things, when will I recover!” questions, I’d go back to what we’ve said before. Maybe the next core update will help, as described here:
It could also be that, as I said here, it’s us in some of these cases, not the sites, and that part of us posting future updates is doing a better job in some of these cases:
This is more of a question for the creator/owner of the site, and the team working on it @googlesearchc — which is why I don’t respond to that sort of thing as much now. It’s not the main focus of my work (I usually do search). @googlesearchc generate our guide…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 5, 2024
SearchLiaison linked to a tweet from John Mueller from a month ago where he said that the search team is looking for ways to get more useful content out.
“I can’t make any promises, but the team working on this is explicitly evaluating how sites can/will improve in Search for the next update. It would be great to show more users the content that people have worked hard on and where sites have been considered for utility.”
Is your site high quality?
Everyone likes to think their site is high quality and most of the time it is. But there are also cases where a site editor will do “all right” in terms of following SEO practices, but what they don’t know is that these “SEO best practices” are backfiring them.
An example, in my opinion, is the widely practiced strategy of copying what competitors are doing but “doing it better”. I have been practically involved in SEO for over 20 years and this is an example of building a site for Google and not for users. It’s a strategy that explicitly begins and ends with the question of “what is Google ranking and how can I build it?”
This type of strategy can create patterns that overtly indicate that a site is not built for users. It’s also a recipe for creating a site that offers nothing new to what Google is already ranking. So, before you assume that all is well with the site, make sure that all is well with the site.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Michael Vi
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