SEO News

In the fast-paced world of real estate, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. Dive into the latest SEO news, strategies, and insights tailored specifically for the real estate investor community, ensuring you’re always at the forefront of digital marketing innovations.

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2024 Google Algorithm Updates

August 2024 Core Update

Google has just rolled out its latest core update, starting on August 15, 2024. As with most core updates, it will take about a month to fully roll out, and search engine results may fluctuate during this time.

Key Changes
This update aims to improve the quality of Google’s search results by prioritizing content that is genuinely useful, rather than content simply optimized for search performance. Google has also responded to feedback from smaller publishers who were negatively impacted by previous updates. Early reports suggest that some of these smaller sites are beginning to recover.

Additionally, there are some other search-related developments coinciding with this update, such as an expansion of AI overviews in search results, which may impact how users interact with your content.

How Carrot Members Should Respond

Monitor Your Data: Keep an eye on your site’s performance using Carrot’s Analytics Dashboard and Domain Overview Tool. Look for trends in traffic and rankings that may be connected to the update.
Audit Your Content: Revisit your existing content, especially pages that may have been affected. Focus on improving valuable, personalized content that resonates with your audience, and consider removing low-performing, generic pages.
Boost Off-Site SEO: Strengthen your site’s authority by building backlinks and citations. Use Carrot’s backlink analysis tools to gain deeper insights and identify opportunities to improve your off-site SEO.
Stay Calm: Ranking fluctuations are normal during core updates. Avoid making quick, reactive changes, and instead focus on SEO results over the long-term.

Questions about SEO or the latest Google update? join the conversation in our Evergreen Marketing Facebook Group for insider tips and weekly trainings!

March 2024 Core Update

March 5th

This latest core algorithm update aims to target spam and elevate content quality.

In this video featuring Mallory, Carrot’s Customer Education Manager, we’ll dive into what has changed, why it’s significant, and how you can maintain your site’s ranking.

Here’s the essence of it: Google is actively working to enhance search results by reducing unoriginal content by 40% and cracking down on spammy and unhelpful content. Their focus is on providing searchers with genuinely useful content.

So, what steps should you take? You’re on the right track if you’re already delivering high-quality, personalized content. Keep leveraging testimonials, videos, and unique expertise to differentiate your website, establish credibility, and boost conversion rates. For Carrot members, continue customizing the pre-made content to align with your style, whether manually or using our AI Rewrite tool. Utilize resources like the credibility bar and content checker to ensure your content remains fresh and authentic.

Questions about SEO or the latest Google update? Visit Carrot’s Evergreen Marketing Community at community.carrot.com for insider tips and friendly discussions. Stay ahead of the curve and climb those search rankings with your website!

2023 Google Algorithm Updates

Oct. Core Update

Oct. 5th – Still rolling out.

Core updates involve large changes to Google’s algorithm aimed to make the results better. They’re generally focused on E-E-A-T or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete.

How to Recover: Plan for the Future

There isn’t any reactionary “fixes” that they can do to regain rankings until the next Core Update happens. You could always work on getting more reviews on your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), optimizing your About page, and adding more credibility throughout your content though!

If you were impacted by a Core Update, you should get a refresher on the SEO strategy that we teach in the 30 Day Challenge and/or review the factors that contribute to EEAT.

Oct. Spam Update

Oct. 4th – Still rolling out.

This update to Google’s spam detection systems will improve their coverage in many languages and spam types. It aims to clean up several types of spam that were reported in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages. It targets cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam. The update will take a few weeks to roll out.

Some key things Google considers spammy or misleading include:

Hidden text or links that users don’t see but search engines do.
Automatically generated content with little or no added value.
Large-scale article scraping without permission
Pages loaded with distracting ads that provide a poor user experience
Affiliate pages with thin content focused heavily on monetization

Google may also tag sites as spam if they engage in practices like cloaking, sneaky redirects, or creating “doorway” pages. Any attempts to deliberately trick search engines will cause issues.

Additionally, Google’s guidelines advise against overly aggressive commercial tactics like false claims, and misrepresenting products or services.

How to Recover: Edit Your Automated Content Library Posts

Make sure that you’re getting the maximum amount of benefits from your ACL blog posts by editing them to be 50% or more of unique content. If you’re finding it hard to add unique content, then try sharing some of your personal experiences within the blog posts. Adding personal experiences, even from a different or seemingly unrelated industry, is a great way of improving your EEAT score and showing your website visitors that you have the level of expertise that they’re looking for.

Sept. Helpful Content System Update

Sept. 14th – Sept. 28th

The Helpful Content System promotes more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic. Google mentioned that this update improved the classifier.

Google made a few changes to its official helpful content page including:

Added new guidance about hosting third-party content and more explanation on what to do after a helpful content system update (perhaps you don’t need to do anything, or perhaps self-assess your content).
Added new points about removing content or changing dates to the help page on how to create helpful, reliable people-first content.

Sept. Helpful Content System Update Image

How to Recover: Self Assess

Google also added these lines, “If you’re producing helpful content, then you don’t need to do anything; in fact this system may be good for your site, as it is designed to reward helpful content.” And this one too, “If you’ve noticed a change in traffic you suspect may be related to this system (after a publicly-posted ranking update to the system), then you should self-assess your content and fix or remove any that seems unhelpful.” This self-assess advice was from earlier this week.

August 2023 Core Update

Aug. 22nd – Sept. 7th

Core updates involve large changes to Google’s algorithm aimed to make the results better. They’re generally focused on EEAT or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.

How to Recover: Plan for the Future

If you were impacted by a Core Update, you should get a refresher on the SEO strategy that we teach in the 30 Day Challenge and/or review the factors that contribute to EEAT.