Google announced on August 26th (it was actually published on August 22nd) that they were rolling out a new spam update in late August. They further announced the update would affect all languages and countries and it was expected to roll out over the next “few weeks” following the announcement.
So, we’ve been quietly sitting here waiting to see if any of our clients’ sites and/or organic search traffic would be affected by this update. One of the tools we monitor is Google’s Search Console (SC), which shows search impressions, clicks, click-through-rate (CTR) and also shows the actual search queries and the pages displayed.
SC shows a wide range of other data, but for the purpose of this case study, we are focusing primarily on impressions vs clicks, with some data from G4 Analytics to support our thesis.
Big Drop in Impressions
Purge Digital manages multiple SEO clients and, starting on Thursday, September 11th, we noticed impressions starting to drop across all of our clients, including our own website. Just an FYI that the data displayed in SC is 2 days behind in Australia. See some examples below:
You will notice some of these drops are dramatic and scary at first glance (the purple line is impressions). Our SEO team had a catchup on Monday the 15th and identified all of our clients were experiencing dramatic drops in impressions. So, we started researching the update and reviewed what other SEO professionals were experiencing, however most of the existing content were just explanations of what people thought might be affected and everyone was referring to the Google Spam Guidelines.
This document lists a range of types of spam that Google has identified including cloaking, doorway abuse, expired domain abuse, hacked content, hidden text and link abuse, keyword stuffing, link spam (most SEO’s don’t think backlink profiles are affected by this update), machine generated traffic, misleading functionality, scaled content abuse, scraping, site reputation abuse, sneaky redirects, thin affiliation and user-generated spam.
Purge Digital does not participate in black hat SEO tactics, but we do provide link building as part of our SEO service, and use AI to generate content for our clients, so we were not too worried about this update until we noticed the drops in impressions. In fact, some of our clients experienced a slight increase in search traffic, which didn’t make sense based on what we were seeing in SC.
Having said that, SC does not exist in a vacuum, so we turned our attention to our client’s actual organic G4 analytics search traffic during the same period. Oddly enough, there were no dramatic changes to any of our client’s organic search results. So, impressions are way down and organic search had no dramatic change up or down.
There was also no drop in online sales for our e-commerce clients despite the big drop in impressions……hmmmm.
What About Clicks and CTR?
Well if you review the graphs above you will notice there was an increase in clicks (the clicks are the blue bar) and CTR across all clients. That’s a bit of a head scratcher…
So, the only thing we can surmise is the spam update didn’t just target spammy websites, but possibly also blocked a bunch of spam bots from scraping sites and skewing the impressions data. There isn’t any real proof of that supposition, however based on our analysis, this is really the only logical scenario.
Could it be the result of more actual “human” traffic, that did in fact click more often and buy the same amount of stuff, while the potential fake bots are limited in their ability to scrape and visit sites?
What Next?
Because everyone is in the dark as to exactly how the Google algorithm works, as SEO professionals all we can do is try to stay within Google’s guidelines while leveraging every SEO tactic we can identify and implement. I’ve learned through my experience, tenacity and 20 years of doing SEO, that you have to test and measure any potential option or tool.
You can read my case study on Disavowing Toxic Backlinks and the amazing results we achieved, despite Google’s AI telling us that disavowing links is no longer required….Wrong!
So, going forward, as long as our client’s organic search traffic is not disrupted dramatically up or down, we will just continue to monitor the situation as it rolls out and continue with our normal SEO work. Google normally announces when the update is 100% completed, so again we will wait and see. Now is NOT the time to panic!
I would suggest to anyone, who IS experiencing a dramatic drop in actual search traffic, to closely review the Google Spam Guidelines and determine if your site might be suffering from one or more of these abuses listed. It’s also a good idea to check for any manual actions taken against your site. You can check this in SC.
If there was a manual action, carefully read the issue(s), go away and fix them then request a review, but make sure to fix the issues(s) to the best of your ability before sending the request.
This was a helpful video so please check it out…
