Google’s Page Experience Update Begins Rolling Out

We’re also bringing similar updates to the Google News app, a key destination for users around the world to get a comprehensive view of the important news of the day. As part of the page experience update, we’re expanding the usage of non-AMP content to power the core experience on news.google.com and in the Google News app.

Additionally, we will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content. You can expect this change to come to our products as the page experience update begins to roll out in mid-June. We’ll continue to test other ways to help identify content with a great page experience, and we’ll keep you updated when there is more to share.

If you’re looking for more details, take a look at the Core Web Vitals & Page Experience FAQs that we published on the Search Central forums recently. If you’re an AMP publisher, the AMP team has built an AMP page experience guide that offers tailored advice on how to make your AMP pages perform at their best.”

Only 10%? I’ve lost fifty percent since mid March so you’re actually lucky

I have then figured out the reason for this reaction. That celebrity and famous SEOer’s own SEO agency website & blog has been negatively hit at least once, and possibility again now in June by a Google core update.

I am talking here about an extremely famous mainstream white hat specialist who always appears top 3 in any “biggest industry experts” lists, speaks at every conference, etc. etc.

This person claims “high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates” while his own website was hit by one, possibly two, Google core updates. Awkward.

Also, do you know who else is getting consistently hit by Google core updates? There is a very famous person who focuses on E-A-T and google core update analysis and recovery. That person’s site and blog is even linked to from Google’s 2019 blog post about core updates and appears as an official Google recommendation for people seeking guidance about core update recoveries and E-A-T. I think most will know who I’m referencing here.

Here, it’s even worse. That person’s site is now probably being hit for the 4th time by a google core update.

I consider both these people to be genuine experts who provide some of the most advanced and most unique content in their respective fields. Real top of the top industry specialists.

I consider both of these sites to be of ultra high quality. Probably some of the best and most advanced industry blogs.

I do not consider these people to be bad at SEO. The contrary. I do not believe their sites are getting hit because they do a bad job.

Yet, both get consistently demoted by google core updates. Despite this, both these famous SEO personalities continue to push the “high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates” narrative.

So, what does this tell about core updates in general? It’s clear to me anyone can get hit by these updates and just having a high-quality site and content is NOT a guarantee for not getting hit.

Yet, a lot of famous SEO celebrities and industry experts ignore this aspect or even outright spread misinformation and false narratives that “quality sites cannot be hit”, while their own websites are getting hit by core updates.

If people who are truly and genuinely real experts (and linked to even from Google.com blog posts about core updates!) also have their sites consistently hit by core updates and aren’t successful at recovering them, then what can you or me expect?

They did explicitly say that this update is not a finished products and developments they planned were not finished yet, so they’ll do another core update in July.

I think the implication that sites impacted in June could see a reversal is two fold.

It could be due to the new changes they will be pushing out, but perhaps also simply because a new core update may imply refreshing all core update components again.

They will not confirm it obviously, but the latter would be very interesting to know. It would mean it’s using machine learning/AI gathered signals, so the same update run again a month later could generate significantly different results.

It’s what the generic template deems may be high quality content.

BTW I really dislike the term AI and how it is thrown around so loosely by companies and the media. Google (and others) is still far away from actually creating something that can truly understand what content on a page is about.

Or they just push a certain narrative not to push away potential clients. Admitting that core updates and recoveries may not be as much in SEOs control as they claim it to be is not a good way to advertise your services.

It is what it is. It’s clear to me that core updates are a completely different thing from the “traditional” old-school updates we used to experience in the past. Before, whenever you got hit by an update, usually there was always one or multiple specific reasons why and if you fixed those issues you generally recovered.

Core updates seem to be different in the sense that they may not even target specific sites themselves, but rather look at types of sites or sites that fall into certain patterns. So, if your site happens to fall into a template google doesn’t like now, you get hit. Even if your site individually on its own has no issues at all. And you won’t recover unless google decides not to hate that type of site anymore in a subsequent update or if you completely overhaul your entire site (even though it may be good as it is) in an attempt to guess what google may approve of now (which always changes after every core update).

What’s clear to me is that there is a lot of collateral damage. If Google is hitting site patterns now broadly instead of individual sites, then it’s very easy to accidentally fall into such pattern or for Google to misidentify your site belonging into such a pattern.