Recovery From November 2019 Google Update

You know how Google says you can’t “fix” your way back to position one? That seems unhelpful but it’s actually useful. It helps one understand what not to waste time on. In my opinion, based on my experience, once you know what not to focus on, it will help you understand more productive areas to focus on.

Things to Fix

According to Google, fixing things won’t help you recover. What does that mean?

It may mean that the traditional things SEOs focus on, mainly technical SEO, have little to do with fixing an update that’s highly likely about relevance.

Some SEOs say that every site they audit that has experienced ranking drops has serious issues with technical SEO factors.

Well, that statement loses impact when you consider the fact most sites technically challenged, particularly with page speed. Did you know that page speed is getting slower?

If you check the top ranking sites, they’re probably not doing well with technical SEO factors yet ranking in the top three regardless.

Page Speed

Page speed is important. But even Google’s own John Mueller has indicated that page speed is one of many ranking factors, many of which are more important than page speed. If you have any doubt, check out how slow the top ranking sites are for any particular query.

In a Webmaster Hangout, a publisher was frustrated because his site was optimized for speed. But he was being outranked by slower web pages.

The publisher asked John Mueller:

“What about speed for the mobile version? …Why are a lot of the top sites still so slow?”

And John Mueller answered:

“…the good part is that we have lots of ranking factors. So you don’t have to do everything perfect.

But that also means that you run across situations like this where you say, Google says speed is important but the top sites here are not so fast therefore it must not be important.

So for us it is definitely important. But that doesn’t mean it kind of overrides everything else.”

That part about “overrides everything else” is important because in my opinion it alludes to things like relevance, popularity signals and other factors related to understanding what users want to see when they make a search query.

It simply does not make sense to rank a site lower because of slow speed if that site is the most relevant answer to a user’s search query. The number one goal is to satisfy the search query.

The fact is that mobile sites are getting slower. The following graph from HTTP Archive shows that the first contentful paint has actually increased by 24.1% from January 2019 to October 2019.

Anyone who tells you that a site lost rankings because of page speed, fact check them by checking the page speed of competitors who are outranking you. Odds are that their page speed may be  similar to yours.

I am not minimizing page speed. Page speed is super important for conversions, ad clicks and keeping visitors engaged.

I’m just saying that as a ranking factor, page speed has been vastly overrated.

Junk Links and Disavows

Every site that is top ranked has junk links. Google ignores paid links and junk links because what’s important is if a web page answers a search query. So if the page is good then Google will still rank the web page.

Yes, paid links may boost a normal site for. But after a short period of time, from days to months, those links stop working and the site drops back to where it formerly ranked. That’s an example of how Google ignores links.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/november-2019-update-recovery/335609/#close