@tjrobertson52

Google search results are changing faster than ever, and I'm not even talking about AI this time. Google just put out a big core algorithm update at the end of June, but the rankings have actually been changing even more since that update went out.

So I wanna talk about one of the biggest trends we're seeing and how Google search results are changing, about what this means for business owners, and then talk about the one thing that I think most people are getting wrong about this trend.

So anytime Google puts out a big algorithm update, it takes at least a few weeks for the community to figure out what actually changed. One shift that I'm seeing over and over again is it pages that had a lot of keyword optimized words. These are pages targeting specific search terms, usually with big blocks of text, including variations of these terms and related terms.

Pages like this aren't ranking as well as they were before the June update.

Now, here's what people are getting wrong. Naturally, when you see your rankings go down for a page, your thought is that, oh, Google's penalized me, right? Google doesn't like what I'm doing on this page, so I need to respond now in some way that might even seem obvious.

But here's the thing. When you clean up those pages, when you remove the big blocks of text and you reduce the amount of times you're using keyword variations, you almost never see an increase in ranking. In fact, you'll often see another decrease in ranking.

So how could that be?

Well, here's the thing. Google actually isn't penalizing you for having a bunch of text and keyword variations on the page. It's just that that used to be more effective than it is now.

And this isn't a new trend. As Google's algorithms gotten smarter over the last few years, pages like this just rank a little bit worse every update.

I've actually had two businesses reach out to me just this week with the same problem, and once I explain that the text on the page with all their keywords isn't helping them rank as much as they used to, they always ask, so should we remove it? How should we change the page?

And my answer is always the same. I think you might as well clean up the page. Stop using this aggressive keyword stuffing tactic.

Make sure you're still including all the terms that that page could realistically rank for, but otherwise just focus on user experience. Not because you're gonna see a ranking boost, at least not in the short term, but because user experience actually does matter, and long term it probably does impact your rankings.

But then of course they wanna know, how do we get our rankings back? What works now to get more traffic to our website? Here's the thing, it's the same thing that worked before the update.

The only thing that's changing is that some of these spammy tactics aren't as effective as they used to be.

What still works now, and will continue to work for the foreseeable future, is building a strong brand and being as noisy as possible on the internet. This is why our focus is helping our clients build efficient systems to create high quality content at scale, addressing the main problems and needs of their target customers.

As we shift into an AI future, the winners are going to be the noisiest brands. So yes, SEO fundamentals are still important. If your website isn't following sound SEO practices, you should definitely prioritize that.

But otherwise, as with most Google algorithm updates, there's really nothing to respond to.