E-Commerce Recovery After Google Algorithm Update

Speaker 1 0:00

It doesn't matter what kind of e-commerce brand you're building . You still need a rock-solid way to grow and scale your company like clockwork . Welcome to 7 Figures and Beyond an e-commerce marketing podcast for D2C brand owners and marketers , looking for best practices that include proven strategies and tactics to grow an e-commerce brand to 7 Figures and Beyond . Bringing 18 plus years of marketing experience as an e-commerce brand owner and e-commerce agency owner , please welcome your host , greg .

Speaker 2 0:26

Shuey . Hey everyone , welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond e-commerce growth podcast . I hope that everyone is having a fantastic day today . I am really excited about our guest . Her name is Christine Schackinger . Did I get that ? You did ? Yes , that's good . Christine Schackinger , did I get that ? You did ? Awesome . So she is the founder of an agency called Sites Without Walls and they are , at least from what I understand , a full service concierge . Seo digital marketing group . Did I get that right ?

Speaker 3 1:01

Mostly , I'm not an agency anymore . That's when I had a business partner , but I do work . I'm just a consultant . That's cool , yeah , but I do work . I do bring people in when necessary .

Speaker 2 1:13

Cool , so I'm going to put you on the spot here . What on earth does that mean ? Concierge ? I've never heard anyone describe themselves in that way . So what is that ?

Speaker 3 1:23

Well , as a consultant , I have to distinguish myself from agencies , right ? So , agencies , you talk to me , but I don't do the work , right , got it ? The organization generally does the work With me . I act as a fractal SEO .

Speaker 3 1:37

So I come in and I work with you and your team and whatever shape or form it takes , so I don't have like , oh , we do this work for this much an hour and we do this many hours a month . It's like I have a retainer . I have so many hours at that month . They need me to do training , they need me to do an audit , they need me to do an update , help with the migration , whatever it happens to be , then I'm there to help them do that and walk them through it and educate them .

Speaker 2 2:00

Got . It Makes total sense , thank you for sharing that Got it Makes total sense .

Speaker 2 2:05

Thank you for sharing that , yeah . So our topic today is going to be quite serious , pretty important . We are going to dive in to how to help an e-commerce business recover from a Google algorithm update . I think over the last 12 years of running my agency , stride , we've had maybe two clients who've been negatively impacted by an algorithm update , but it does happen to brands all the time . So I think it's going to be a really great discussion today . So , christine , I know you're super busy . Thank you so much for taking 30 minutes out of your day to be with us .

Speaker 3 2:39

I'm happy to .

Speaker 2 2:40

It'll be fun . Before we dive in , could you take just a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you've gotten to where you are today ?

Speaker 3 2:49

Sure , I graduated with a degree in sociology and art , which meant I was a barista . When I got out of college I lived in the countryside of Virginia , so there wasn't even really tech jobs yet Interesting . There's not a lot of . There wasn't even really tech jobs yet , right , interesting . I'm getting my age away here . But it was before the two in front of the century , 1998 , 1999

Navigating Algorithm Updates and SEO Recovery

Speaker 3 3:12

.

Speaker 3 3:12

So I saw an ad in the paper for HTML and web designer and I was like , well , I don't know HTML but I think I can learn it , because I actually went to the bookstore to get the book on it . We call it online now today HTML for dummies , probably . I did yes , that's what I got . And I was like for those are not who were born after 2000 , you probably never saw word perfect . But back then word perfect had code in it and the code was similar to html . So I figured I could do it . And no , and I said to the person who's hiring me you know you can't teach someone design . I went to art school but you can teach me how to code . And so she did . And then after a year of that it was very small firm I left for another local firm , a publisher who did like martha stewart and um reba mcintyre and I got on with them and I did uh reba mcintyre site cool and I did a lot of code front end , code front end development , um , and then design .

Speaker 3 4:03

And then , uh , when I moved to vegas , um , I was doing , uh , we were spending four million a year in google clicks and I had been looking at this seo thing yeah and uh , for me it was new , older people in the industry , they started in the 90s .

Speaker 3 4:16

But um , and I was like , ask my boss . I was like , can I , can I do this ? And she's like , oh , I have an agency . But we've been live for six months with this other site we're launching and we're not been indexed . And she says , if you can figure out why , then I'll let you take it over because we're paying them $20,000 a month . And I said , okay , and so now today I would know instantly what to look for . But I didn't know instantly . It took me like a day . I'm like , well , we have this thing called a no index tag on the site that they never removed . And she's like what ? And I said , yeah , so we've been paying $20,000 a month for a site that's literally not indexable .

Speaker 3 4:50

And I said , yep , yep , one line of code . So she goes , you can take over the SEO . So I did , and that's how I started in SEO . She paid for my first conferences and then I was a director CTO of a company for a little while Not CTO but director . It was all merged together and then I went out on my own after there , so it was a startup . That was insane . I was working 120 hours a week , so something had to get done .

Speaker 2 5:15

Ugh no .

Speaker 3 5:16

No , yeah . So I left and I started . I went out on my own around 2009 , 2010 . That's awesome , cool yeah . 2009-2010 . That's awesome , cool yeah . And then I worked with Dave Davies it was Beanstalk at the time for nine years . He started as my mentor and my business partner and then we just went our separate ways , just because that's what happens sometimes , and I've just been doing it on my own ever since . I concentrate on technical because I coded for a long time 14 years , yeah . And also , do you know , did CRO UIX , developed UIX , all that sort of stuff . So I have a really good idea how websites should be put together and I'm probably taking way too long to tell the story .

Speaker 2 5:50

Oh , you're good . I love hearing people's stories . It's fascinating to me . That's a fun history .

Speaker 2 5:57

Yeah , so if you are listening to this today , chances are pretty good that you've been impacted by an algorithm update . I mean , most people are probably going to look at that and be like that doesn't apply to me , but if you're listening to that like , you've more than likely seen your rankings disappear , you've seen your impressions in search console tank , you've seen your organic traffic take a nosedive and you're probably in panic mode . So before , christine , before we start talking about pinpointing specific issues and finding solutions , like let's talk about how brands can really differentiate between normal traffic fluctuations and those caused by an algorithm issue or an algorithm update , because I talk to a lot of people who come to me and they say , hey , we've been nailed , we got penalized . But when I dig in , I'm like , oh no , it looks like these five competitors significantly benefited from the algorithm update and pushed you down . That doesn't mean you're penalized , right , that's just someone doing better SEO and getting benefit from that . So can you walk me through that ?

Speaker 3 7:01

Sure , first of all , you have to identify that you were hit at all by an algorithm update . So Google has a thing called incidents ranking incidents and it's worded really weirdly . When you go search but just search Google incident ranking and they'll tell you when they launched it and when it ended . So if it happened outside that window and there's like no update at that time , it is not an update . There may be something that tweets in the algorithms , but but generally when you're hit by an algorithm update you lose like 30% , 40% , minimum traffic , usually 70% to 90% traffic .

Speaker 3 7:31

So if you're down 5% to 10% and there's no update , you might have gotten hit by a Google tweak during their algorithms , because there's a lot of those we never hear about , but you weren't hit by an update . Those will be announced , they'll be on the incident ranking system and you'll lose a significant amount of traffic . You also have to make sure you know what update it is . So a bunch of people came to me in the last six months . They're like we were hit by the HCU , the helpful content update . We don't think we can recover .

Speaker 3 7:57

Everyone told us we can't recover , not to even bother and I go look at their dates and I'm like to me , not one was hit by the HCU , they were all core updates . And then last year they ran the core update right after that , the HCU and then a core update . I know it's super helpful , yeah , so if you're looking at that and you're like no , your date is in like November I think it was ended in November , the core update I'm not 100% sure . Well , obviously it's not the HCU . So they're like really , and I'm like no , and we can recover almost always can recover a core update evaluation . So you have to know the dates , you have to know what happened . So I had one site that came to me . They lost 90% of their traffic but there was no update running and we found that they had a significant technical issue that caused Google not to index their pages .

Speaker 2 8:45

And we fixed that and they got all the traffic back because it wasn't an update . Yeah , yeah , that's awesome , cool . So once a brand is fairly certain that they have been penalized , they've been hit by an update , what are the first two or three steps that they should take to figure out what their next steps are ?

Speaker 3 8:59

Sure , oh , can I back step for just one second ? Yeah , the H2 and the core update are applied differently and we're talking about the older one , not the supposed new one . We talk about the later because I don't think it exists actually the page level one , but the one , the core update , is applied at the keyword level . So basically , it's your money , your life , sites , but Google doesn't know what a money , whether your site is money , your life , but they know the keywords coming to your site because of their entity and knowledge graph are your money or life , right ? So it's like medical , financial e-commerce is considered your money or life because you deal with credit cards . So if it is not applied site-wide , if you look at Search Console and everything around those dates is down , then that is not a corp date , it's probably HCU .

Speaker 3 9:42

But if you look and it's only applied to certain pages , you'll find that there's core key terms . So you might have one term , there might be three , four or five words of that term , but there's a core term . It's usually two words , maybe three , and all those are down and the rest are fine . That's a core update . So that's how you can tell the difference . If you aren't sure about the date you can look at how it was applied . It was applied last year , the one supposedly in april this year , supposedly page level . We can talk about that later . I don't .

Speaker 2 10:06

I really don't think that happened so like what are those steps that they should start taking once they've been okay ?

Speaker 3 10:12

I I've been hit um , find a site editor . Um , like myself . It doesn't have to be me , obviously , but find people who do real audits , and if someone's giving you a semrush report or an HS report , that is not an audit . It's never an audit . Even my Martin split from Google has come out and said that's not an audit .

Speaker 2 10:28

It's not .

Speaker 3 10:29

It's a monitoring tool right . It'll tell you like you have 500 errors or 400 errors and things like that , but it's not an audit . No one's going into your site and deep diving on your . You need to . You need to run a crawler . I use sight bulb and screaming frog um bulb . I've never yeah oh , sight bulb was awesome . I'll have to take a look at it .

Speaker 3 10:48

Yeah , screaming frogs like the down and dirty tool , but sight bulb has visuals and graphs and they have even like learn more about this so you can send to a client the link . Like , hey , just look at this link , they tell you how they found it , what's wrong there . Um , they give deep dive reports . Yeah , it's a really really good tool and it's really cheap too .

Speaker 2 11:05

It's under 50 a month which is great , because I've used deep crawl in the past and it has gotten so expensive .

Speaker 3 11:12

Yeah , site bulb it is and they don't charge you by pages , they charge you by just the product by the domain yeah , yeah , because I have sites that are way too big for the other products . I had to find something like .

Speaker 3 11:22

Anyway . So they need to find an auditor because the people that created the issue the people on your team now or your current SEO just didn't know . I'm not saying they did bad , they did wrong , they just didn't know . Site auditing for update recovery is very specialized . There are not a lot of us , but we've seen it , we've done it . But we've seen it , we've done it and we know what moves the algorithms and we know how those work Right . I don't know everything in the algorithm , but I can tell you this will affect it . This will not .

Speaker 2 11:48

Right .

Speaker 3 11:48

This is part of the core update . This is not like . Core updates are almost 90% technical .

Speaker 2 11:52

Yep .

Speaker 3 11:53

So , um , so you want to find an auditor ? Don't wait A lot of people . By the time they get to me they're down money so they don't have any yeah , they've been grinding it out for 90 days , 120 days , and are freaking out oh no , even more than that . I'm talking six to nine months to a year . That's the time . Yes , most clients I get they've already been down six months or more . What ?

Speaker 1 12:13

yeah , and I'm gonna .

Speaker 3 12:14

I'm gonna say this I know it's gonna be controversial for some people , but if someone says they're gonna fix your site for an update , any update , by doing eat , that is doing eat . That is not a thing .

Speaker 2 12:22

That is not a thing , people .

Speaker 3 12:25

Google even says now , is it in the algorithm ? No , it's not . It's a great concept for creating content , it's conceptual , but the things in it are not measured by Google , so you won't recover . Because I've had people come to me spent all their last dollars on someone doing eat and they get no recovery . And they come to me like why didn't we get recovery ? And I'm like , well , I'm sorry those aren't in the algorithms .

Speaker 3 12:45

Google actually has ranking systems documentation . I urge every seo to go read it . Not the quality raters guide , not the , none of that . Go to the ranking systems documentation . They tell you basically what they're looking for and how . So , um , so you ? So you need to find an auditor that has a lot of years of experience doing this . And then we need access to your GSC , sometimes your GA , never your back end . It's very rare I ever need , but sometimes I may need to look at your server and then we'll run crawlers over it . It can take anywhere from three to like eight weeks , depending on the size of the site , and then we do deep dive into the data and we look at first everything common that we know could be wrong for that algorithm update . Every algorithm update is different , so core update can be all the ranking signals , but tends to be technical , tends to be large technical issues that have been on the site for a while and Google didn't seem to care and then , Google comes along and is like oh no .

Speaker 3 13:41

Oh , we've changed the rules and here we go yep yeah , and I also think they use it as a way to save money . If they find that there's a lot of cruft on sites , they run a core update and those sites get hit and blah , blah , um , so you need that and you need to make sure that you allocate the time and resources for it . Um , and then , uh , you have to have the team ready to go too , because sometimes someone's too small and I can find them a resource to do the work , but you have to have it in before the next update , and usually about 30 to 60 days before the next update , otherwise you don't get into that update . So you'll think it failed . And it didn't necessarily fail , you just did the work too late .

Speaker 2 14:21

You didn't get it fast enough .

Speaker 3 14:24

And I have people I'll see them posting on twitter like when the update's running , they're like changing things . I'm like no , no , it's too late , because that's not gonna help you , um , but uh , so yeah , you have to do all those got it .

Speaker 2 14:37

So when you think about specifically e-commerce websites , are there certain platforms that you see get hit more often ? I mean , shopify out of the box is pretty clean code , you know . When I look at algorithm updates , I say you know it's usually technical or it could be link based . Most of the time content's really strong on an e-commerce website . So are there platforms that people should be more aware of that it could potentially happen to them , or is it all across the board ?

Speaker 3 15:04

Yeah , it's hard to say . It's platforms Like WordPress powers 60% of the internet right now . Yeah , so you could say well , I see a lot of WordPress sites , but also it's 60% . So you know there's far fewer Shopify sites out there . They all have their own issues , like Shopify , with e-commerce . I know of tools like there's a tool audience key where they'll go to the edge and add categories for you and I know Shopify is going to add that , but not having categories is a problem for e-commerce on Shopify . So your auditor has to know the problems per

Optimizing Website Health & SEO Strategy

Speaker 3 15:34

platform . But basically speaking , it's not a specific platform , it's just what did Google find on that platform or in what you did that it was affecting in that update , and since it's a core update , it can be on many things . There was one site once they eliminated because just their domain name was POV and POV is a porn term too .

Speaker 1 15:56

It's just point of view .

Speaker 3 15:57

That's all they meant was point of view right . So yeah , it was a Shopify , but it didn't have anything to do with Shopify , it just had to do with that . Google restricted that term because it's associated with porn .

Speaker 2 16:09

Fascinating , okay , yeah .

Speaker 3 16:11

But I would say that sites in general are getting worse and worse . I'm doing audits right now and I do project retainers , so I don't charge anything after the retainer yeah whatever I charge is what I charge you . If it takes me double the hours , then that's my fault and you scoped it wrong and that was your fault exactly or something just is anomaly , a weird anomaly , and you know it takes a lot of research , but they usually balance out . I'll get some that are a lot of time and some that are quick .

Speaker 3 16:35

All the audits right now are taking double the time because once you get under the hood there's so many issues and they're like basic issues like just image weight yeah like every site I check now , no one has compressed the images before load and they're like well , can I just use a tool and I'm like you can't , but they can only take 30 off and your images are one 130 megabyte images yeah 8 000 images over two right . So the tools can only take 30% 40% off . It's not enough .

Speaker 2 17:05

Interesting .

Speaker 3 17:06

So , with images , make sure your images are compressed before load . Make sure that you have the largest image , not that you're putting in 6,000 pixel when you need 250 , because it resizes on the fly , but the weight's the same yeah .

Speaker 2 17:18

I think part of that problem there is that we're just all in a hurry , you know , to be able to take the time , to be able to do those things .

Speaker 3 17:24

Well , I also think because of the tools that are out there today , people don't have the knowledge creating it , so they may go get a WordPress developer that's like local and says I can do sites and you know they . They pay them 500 bucks to do it and you get a $500 site , right , yeah , $500 site right yeah .

Speaker 3 17:40

Yep , yeah , so . So a lot of the issues titles and metas people don't fill them out or they they don't fill them out , like in title and meta is like we , my family , had a store for years . Right , your title and your meta are the sign on your store . When people are walking by , you're going to drag them into your store . Right , you're going to get them to convert from the search and result page . You have titles and metas that'll do that . So titles and metas are poor . Images are poor , internal linking , which google's put a lot of weight on . These are things anyone has control over . We're not talking about technical scra . Um , they don't do good . I just did audited a site yesterday . 90 of their sites have no links , their pages , and they're like why are we down ?

Speaker 2 18:16

I'm like 90 of your sites not crawlable because , yeah , you get through your pages , they can't your pages , they can't find them all .

Speaker 3 18:23

They can't find them . So , yeah , so it's always good to and I don't know if it's still deductible , but as of like last year it still was for small to medium business you can do a site audit and deduct it from your taxes , your business taxes Interesting . Yeah , on an enterprise level I think it's different . But if you're a regular site , you should have a site health audit once a year and then you should have , if you're an enterprise site , probably once a quarter , because your developers put a lot of craft , because there's a hundred ways a developer can do something and Google's like no , we have two and I'm like I'm the building inspector going . I'm sorry . That's a great solution . It just doesn't work for .

Speaker 2 18:58

Google . So maybe this is a tough question to answer , but , like if there's five things that a brand should be focusing on that will help almost future proof them and help them survive algorithm updates . What are those five things ? It was image compression , one of those big things .

Speaker 3 19:16

Image compression is really one of those big things because Google , google John , came out and says core web vitals . Don't worry about being 100% . That's true , but in core updates , core vitals are almost always a part of the solution . Interesting , okay , or page load issues Time to first byte . Most people probably don't know what that is , but it's the time it takes to get your first pixel back . Google wants it in 60 milliseconds . I haven't seen a site under one second in the last six months .

Speaker 2 19:40

Dang .

Speaker 3 19:41

So you're hosting and you're serving how it's being served your images , your site structure , I see . So most of the people got hit by the helpful content update that are so upset righteously upset about what Google did . I look at their sites and they're not structured . They just have blog posts . Blog posts all on the front page . They don't have any landing pages with content . They have content . That's good , but the rest of the site architecture is a disaster .

Speaker 3 20:05

And then they don't have any internal linking . So let's imagine your homepage gets and I'm going to use the horrible word page juice . The homepage gets all the page juice right , not normal , but let's just say it did . That juice has to make it . It only go three or four levels . So if you're not internal linking properly , if you don't have your site structure proper , if your nav buttons don't have landing pages , yeah then you're not creating a good site and so so I would tell people to look up like a proper site structure . Anybody can do that , you don't have to have technical knowledge . That's making like a proper like .

Speaker 3 20:37

We did um , a site that was a advocate for um , psychedelic mushrooms , for depression and stuff , and they weren't ranking for anything with mushrooms . And we looked at their site . They had no site structure that indicated their dominant topic was mushrooms . They saw a lot of articles . So we put in one nav item for mushrooms and subcategories and then , within 30 to 60 days , the top 50 pages on their site getting traffic were all the mushroom-related pages . Because now Google knew you have a category of mushroom , you have these subtopics that's related to your main topic and then you have these pages . It's not as if you have a whole section related to these terms on your site .

Speaker 2 21:15

I like to tell people three to four clicks max from any page . Google should be able to link through and crawl through and access any page and I think I think that's good recommendation it is .

Speaker 3 21:28

If you're a larger site , they have to be on the path within three or four , but it's okay if it's deeper . But you want to go much deeper . Also , it has to have a structure . Yeah , so many sites say someone must have written a big article , is really famous , and like don't put site structure in , because it's like these sites have no structure . And so people know google disambiguates your actual domain name from the urls and then it uses . So they'll say they don't care about links domain , like the url itself they don't , but between pages they look at the link structure to see what the pages are about , right ? So when you put that in your anchor text it's like oh , these are about books . And then the url says it's about books and the next page says it's about books .

Speaker 2 22:03

But if your whole site's about books and the heading tag , it's all structure .

Speaker 3 22:06

And so they're like yes , we know this is about books , but if your whole structure is one level deep , then Google has no importance on any page . So they don't know what you think is important for your site or what topic . Also , you do have to have links to your site and that is not part of the core update . But someone told all the CMOs at Google this year at the Google Meet for them that they didn't have links anymore . Google doesn't use them . I got a site that's been sitting there for six months with no links . That has not gotten any more than 20 clicks a day because we have no links .

Speaker 2 22:38

So what are some of the best practices for link building after updates and just regular link building ? What does that look like ?

Speaker 3 22:46

So , link building , you need someone who's really good at being creative . I do a lot of judging of the search awards .

Speaker 1 22:51

Yeah .

Speaker 3 22:52

And I see these super creative ways . I'm like , oh , I wish I thought of that right , a really interesting piece of content that you send out to publishers who don't have enough staff to write content right .

Speaker 2 23:00

Yeah .

Speaker 3 23:01

So you give them a great study that you did or some research that you did . A lot of people had some really interesting stuff during the pandemic .

Maximizing SEO Recovery Post-Algorithm Update

Speaker 3 23:06

Get them on podcasts . Don't buy links . I mean you can and there are some really good black hatters out there but don't do it on your cash register site , because if you get a manual action , you're going to be sitting down for a while and otherwise they just devalue them and you don't know that . So you go down and you think , oh , I got hit by something . No , google just went through it goes through about every three or four months and it said these links we know these are no good . We devalue all the value . These don't matter anymore , exactly . So be creative . Find someone who's really good at creative link building . Digital PRs can also be helpful , but find opportunities . Once we had somebody on this small site finance site and the guy was really good . His name is David Kong and he got him on a podcast with 100,000 viewers . By the end of the week we had like 150 links from like top .

Speaker 2 23:57

Yep .

Speaker 3 23:57

Like , yeah , top bloggers , top publishers and things like that , because he was on that podcast . So yeah , disney's always really good at creative , finding creative ways to get you noticed .

Speaker 2 24:09

Yeah , absolutely , and then that should happen all the time , not just like a short-term spree of getting links , like you should be constantly working on that throughout time because , like you mentioned , google will ignore links , and so you've got to keep adding new links over time and finding ways to hopefully differentiate and get links that your competitors aren't getting as well .

Speaker 3 24:33

Yeah , exactly .

Speaker 2 24:35

What value is there in looking into competitors who were positively impacted by algorithm updates or who were not hit by an algorithm update when you've been hit ? Is there any value in that ?

Speaker 3 24:49

Actually , I don't find value in that and I know it's a little bit contradictory . Yeah , because you don't know what they did . You don't know what Google's evaluating . You don't know what they did . You don't know what google's evaluating . You don't know . You don't like one site once outranked my competitor and and you're not paying , unless you're paying your auditor to do an audit on the other site , and that's different right , because then you see everything , yep .

Speaker 3 25:05

But uh , they put a . It was brilliant . They had a site map link at the footer and that opened up a whole text-based website that had all their content on it , because they did e-commerce they were selling pajamas for adults , but their pages had nothing on it , just pictures and sales . But behind that they had this entire and there's nothing . Technically , google would say was illegal about that because it was just a link and all the pages were just content and they weren't hiding it .

Speaker 3 25:32

So you just don't ever know what the competitor is really doing . Also , you don't know their strength . So ever know what the competitor is really doing . Also you don't know their strength . Yeah , so if , if I get hit and forbes is next to me and forbes doesn't appear to get hit , forbes also has like massive already profile plus they have links that outnumber me . So so I don't do much of competitors .

Speaker 3 25:48

Now , if I'm doing research for growth , yes , I look at competitors like one one . Once they had only six major competitors , but they had no two terms that overlapped any of the major competitors . They were not showing with the major competitors and they're like well , we can't outrank them . I said no , but you'll be like number three or four , and then people think you're , you know the authority because you're ranking with these guys , right , and they're like , oh so , yeah , so you have to make sure , um , uh , when it comes to site auditing , I don't also , because , even if they went down , because they went down because they weren't meeting the best practices , right , yeah , so I need to make sure they meet the best practice and they'll go up . The next one and the other people go down , yeah , so , yeah , I , I won't be able to identify unless google tells us specifically what they're looking at , what the other site did right or wrong got it Cool .

Speaker 2 26:36

So , while you're trying to recover , you've got that three four month period . What are some of the key SEO metrics that you should be monitoring while you're working through that ?

Speaker 3 26:49

There's actually not a lot to monitor . Just watch TSC . Do you get your traffic back ? After that , you can monitor what traffic came back , how it came back , did everything come back that you wanted to ? But when you're down , you can monitor what traffic came back , how it came back , did everything come back that you wanted to ? But when you're down , you're completely suppressed . By the way , you're also suppressed in Discover and if you're in News , you're suppressed in News . You're suppressed across the board and your Google ad prices will go up .

Speaker 1 27:09

Got it .

Speaker 3 27:10

Yeah , it's a suppressor across all things . So if I see it start to recover in Discover , then I know that the regular recovery is probably coming , because it appears first in discover , because it doesn't have all the ranking signals after you reevaluate it . But you'll see it start to come back . And also I noticed that I know after the April update a bunch of people thought they got hit again , like I had a client who did . But no , they launched some other algorithms and there was some stuff wrong on the site that was not affected by the core update .

Speaker 3 27:40

So they did get that recovery but , they got a bit of a reduction about 30% because they had other issues that we had to fix . So don't assume if you start to drop after recovery that the recovery didn't work . It could be you just have other issues that Google's concentrating on . Got it , yeah , but there's really not much to measure because if you're down , you're down right . You will not see a spike . If it's a new site , the top traffic you get is about the same as the dips before . So if you look at before the drop , you'll see that your content only goes about as high as the lowest points on the previous before the drop . But you won't get spikes and stuff . It doesn't happen .

Speaker 2 28:16

You're suppressed , okay cool , so just won't get spikes and stuff . It doesn't happen , you're suppressed . Okay , cool , so just go head down and fix mode .

Speaker 3 28:21

Yeah , Fix mode Cause you just got to get it in there before the next update and since we never know when that's going to run , you know that . That's why you want to just start fixing stuff .

Speaker 2 28:29

Cool , um , awesome . As we're wrapping up , do you have any suggestions or tips or advice that you would give e-commerce brands on just making sure that they are adhering to best practices and minimizing any kind of impact from future algorithm updates ?

Speaker 3 28:49

Well , one of the first things they really need to do is actually get someone who does a full crawl . I was working with a very large brand . Actually , I can say now because I'm out of the nda . I was working with zappos and we did a crawl . Uh because , because they had actually .

Speaker 3 29:03

I saw it first at gsc , but they don't have the report anymore yeah at two billion pages that google was aware of and I counted it like three times . I'm like two billion sites doesn't have two billion pages or products , right , but uh , we , we narrowed it down to a faceted nav issue . So , google , because they're using react , and react , um is a javascript framework that doesn't also doesn't record

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Speaker 3 29:26

pages . By the way , anyone out there working with e-commerce , working with react or anything that creates pages , tell them that you that they have , tell your dev team or it team they have to record every page that is made , because Interesting , because on this site there are hundreds of thousands of pages made that had no record with the IT group , so there's no way to get a list . Wow , you just have to crawl and find them all right .

Speaker 3 29:47

Well , the problem was this one we crawled it was on a terabyte drive . We couldn't open the file . It was so big , oh my , was so big , oh my gosh . Yeah , terabyte drive . We crawled it , but we could not , we cannot . So , anyway , uh , check your your , especially a faceted navigation , do a full crawl and see if you have a crawl leak is what we call it . A crawl leak is when the crawler can create pages , and this happens a lot on e-commerce sites . Yeah , or it cannot fill the cart . So I had one where every time I hit the cart button items in the cart they weren't buttons , they were links .

Speaker 3 30:21

So google could fill the cart and so when I did it I had three hundred thousand dollar carts .

Speaker 3 30:27

Oh , my gosh , forty dollar items because all it did is run through there , right , so you always want to get an auditor really to do a side health audit , but if you're doing an internal , at least get like screaming frog and just run it and just make sure you don't have facets in that way . It's a huge thing for e-commerce sites . Yeah , um , also e-commerce site structure making sure you have things like breadcrumbs , you know , so that people , so the growler , can get back and forth . Um , if you have um subdomains , make sure they're only there for the right reasons , because subdomain has to rank on its own , and I see that happen a lot . It's like we have shoes , dot , we have , you know , clothes , dot , we have whatever , and then now all these sites have to rank on their own , which you really don't want to have to do no , it's a pain .

Speaker 3 31:04

Yeah , and make sure your site search box can't create pages that are indexable . That happens a lot , so one site I was working with their site search box created pages right , so every spammer in the world knew that and they would come put in the search and it would put the , the keywords in the url , the title , the description and the h1 and then they'd send spam links to it .

Speaker 3 31:25

But because they matched the page , the spam links , including the 13 million russian porn links that went to that site , um , but they matched the page . So google said page match , we don't get rid of these links , right ? So , and then they also had a vulnerability . Where they were left , the person was able to redirect traffic to their site . Oh my gosh , right . So make sure your site search box is always closed down to google , and those results are terrible for google . You don't want that either , um and um , just make sure that . Uh , it's all . It's a business decision , but it's all usually better to have like one item and the different variations of it than it is to have 50 variations of something , because you don't need Google to index that . You have a brown top , a pink top , yellow top , yeah , let's do something really unique . And so you want to make sure you also have a proper canonical structure , yep , that you're not sending Google down a thousand pages of nothing .

Speaker 1 32:16

And one last thing .

Speaker 3 32:17

Screaming Frog will allow you to take screenshots screen . Do do a crawl with screenshots on because you want to check and make sure most e-commerce sites are using javascript . Yep , you want to make sure you don't have blank pages . So the easiest way to do that , instead of trying to go through the code or if you're not a coder is do screenshots of javascript on and screaming frog in mobile and see if the pages are all full , because you'll usually run across this part of the site where they put in JavaScript for the content and you can't see it .

Speaker 3 32:45

Google can't see it . You can also use their JavaScript content button or JavaScript button , I forget which and you can flip it and it'll tell you the difference between the raw HTML and the rendered HTML , and sometimes that can be massive . It can be like the rendered is like a thousand more words , right . Problem is google's using the raw right and they're not . They're not getting all that content in the rendered version , or your canonical has to be in the raw . There's things that has to be in the raw , so they show you the differences in screaming frogs , so you make sure that that stuff is there . Cool , um , so those are the biggest things for e-commerce . Everything else people know like content . You know , make sure your product pages are unique and don't just use what they give you out of the . You know , when I worked at Zappos , they had writers that rewrote every product description .

Speaker 3 33:26

So smart we also ranked number one for most every important term .

Speaker 2 33:30

Yep .

Speaker 3 33:31

Yeah .

Speaker 2 33:32

I love it . Perfect . I think that's a great stopping point . I guess any final words .

Speaker 3 33:38

I would just say don't panic , don't panic , yeah , even like . I'll even offer to people I'm not promoting my service , I'm saying what other people let me do I will offer the ability just to look at your site and tell you what your update issues are . Not like the whole enchilada , but hey , this is a core update and I see that you have these issues Now . Do you want to move forward with an audit ? Oh , this is an HCU update , and can we talk about it for a second ? Or are we out of time ?

Speaker 2 34:06

No , you're great , yeah , keep going .

Speaker 3 34:08

So HCU , the helpful content update ran in September last year , september , october . Those sites are . No sites have recovered . In April , march and April last year they were supposed to take the site level off and put it at the page level , but no sites recovered .

Speaker 3 34:26

So they moved it from site-wide to page level . Even if it was over 24 hours , you wouldn't have all your pages affected anymore , right ? So pages would have recovered . Recovered , but they haven't . So I don't believe . And danny said something . Sullivan said something odd about like it not being in the same form anymore now that it's in the core yeah I . I think it broke it's machine learning it broke , mostly on small sites .

Speaker 3 34:51

There's a story that came out from roger monte yesterday about a compression algorithm they use to see if you're a spammer , and so I think they trained on spam sites . And these small bloggers , small publishers , have similar characteristics and so it took them down to and they can't lift it because it's machine learning , because Matt Cutts always said I'll never use machine learning because if it breaks we can't fix it . So those sites have not recovered . We do know , if you have one of those , from what I've seen so far , unlike Penguin back 10 years ago , people remember that they don't transfer the devaluation . So in Penguin , if you made a new site within three to four months , you lost that site too . They transfer the devaluation . In this one , the people have created a new site with a new domain , have not seen their sites go away . So at this time , Interesting .

Speaker 3 35:36

Yeah , so at this time , yeah , and I had one client just added an s to their domain name . Now , unfortunately , they lost links and if you're a massive site , you can't do that sure but because you can't just transfer all the links . But if you're a smaller site , a small publisher , you know you can just put a site note on your old site say we moved here and then , and then start promoting a new site with a new domain and but don't don't copy over all the same issues that you had have someone evaluate so they can tell you what you need to fix .

Speaker 3 36:02

Just want to give a little hope to people that so far that does seem to work .

Speaker 2 36:06

There is hope . Don't panic , even though you are in panic mode because you're losing money . Don't panic .

Speaker 3 36:11

There is hope For a year . None of them have recovered in a year , that's crazy . Yeah , and Google keeps just saying nothing . That's helpful . So that's my best guess on the theory right now , because I took in about 50 , 60 sites and looked at them and they didn't have the same advertisers . Half didn't have ads , there's all sorts of things .

Speaker 3 36:33

But the one thing that I had in common was these themes and templates that people use that are very similar to what the spammers use . And right uh , right before hcu came out , about six months , three affiliates came to me . They all had the same template and they were all dead in the water and I thought that was very odd , that three people with the same template came to me out of all the people in the world , the two affiliate they all had the same template . I don't think google looked at the template .

Speaker 3 36:57

But if you go to Search Engine Journal and you look up Roger Monti's article from this week , you'll see the compression algorithm and I think that's what they're using where they look at how much is really there . That's different and then they use that to denote it's a spam site .

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Speaker 2 37:10

Cool , I'll hunt down that article and make sure it's in the show notes .

Speaker 3 37:19

So thank you for yeah , that would be good . Yeah , it's a good article awesome cool .

Speaker 2 37:21

Well , thank you . That was thank you so much . That was great , christine . I really appreciate your time .

Speaker 2 37:23

I think we learned a lot and yeah we're super excited to be able to get this out . So , to our listeners again don't panic , but hopefully you're able to pull some of these things out of here and start to make a plan carve out some time over the next few weeks . You Reach out to Christine . If you need some professional help , like she mentioned , she can do an initial would you call it an initial audit . Is that what you would do ?

Speaker 3 37:47

I have a $995 fee where I tell you if it's recoverable or not .

Speaker 3 37:51

Cool and if it's an HCU , how you can move to a new domain , and if not , then you probably need a full audit . But here's your general points , and there's also other people too , because I feel bad . I'm like I'm not here to just promote myself or anything , but I do know some other auditors that are also very good . But you definitely need an auditor , not just someone who does SEO , because regular SEO is not the same as understanding how Google hit a site .

Speaker 2 38:18

Love it Cool . So reach out to an auditor and start executing like crazy heads down executing and hopefully you'll see a recovery on the next update .

Speaker 3 38:29

Yes , cross figures .

Speaker 2 38:31

Yeah , all right , thank you .