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In this month's episode, we will talk about WordPress Security lapses, WordPress 5.4 Update, Google Search Console changes along with SERP Updates. Learn about the changes coming to you as part of WordPress or theme updates and how to handle your backlinking strategy with the changes in SERP. You can get more updates at MetaBlogue.
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As part of this month's Blogging updates, let's talk about Google's latest SERP update in Nov-2019. The update has negatively impacted many sites across the web and one of the most talked points for last month.
Blogging Monthly Episode 02
Hi Everyone, This month, there have been some major ups and down around Google SERP. So we are going to talk a lot about this update and the things which you can do to recover.
Google SERP Update Nov 2019
Last month, Google has released the SERP update called BERT which we have covered in the last episode. Many people have reported another unconfirmed update which was rolled out around 7th Nov. Webmasters have felt the impact across niches where the rakings have gone down for top-ranking pages.
Twitter and Webmaster forums are filled with people complaining about lost traffic and rankings. The impact is not limited to any specific niche or category. Most of the niches have felt the rank shufflings.
Impact of the Nov-2019 SERP Update
While there is no shuffling in the rankings for MetaBlogue, I have faced this issue on my other blogs. Mostly Tech category blogs, which have lost around 30% traffic.
I was expecting the traffic to increase due to the holiday shopping but rather than that, now I have reduced traffic and sales. The timing of the update has been one of the big issues as most of the webmasters were preparing for the festive season.
The impact is more visible on the small and medium-size affiliate marketing sites. The traffic drop for those sites is significant.
Search Engine General has published an article around all the different reports cited for this update.
Google has not confirmed any big update other than mentioning that they do regular core updates to the SERP algorithm and they have done the same in that week.
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1194365014703923200
According to them, there is nothing that is out of the ordinary in this update. These are just regular update which was targeted towards identifying better content and improved the ranking algorithm.
Their suggestion, nothing a webmaster can do to improve it's ranking other than following Google's guidelines to quality content. They have provided the content quality recommendations on their Webmaster blog, which is very generic and broad.
How To Recover From The SERP Update
There is no specific guideline or impacted areas which can give an idea on how to recover from the Nov-2019 SERP update. But, if you go through the link mentioned above by Google, you will see that many of their suggestions are towards improving the content quality and relevancy.
Google's idea is that the content should be better organized and give relevant information to the readers. The problem, with this update there are many complains of ranking spam or low-quality content on the web. If you look at the buzz around black hat SEO forums, people have gained rankings.
This is a big concern since Google is asking everyone to follow the quality content guidelines and then end up ranking spam or low-quality content. But, anyone who has done SEO for some time, they know how these things are. So, what can we do?
This is a good time to take a step back and do an SEO audit for your blog. Make sure the site is good on the technical SEO front.
Pinpoint The Problems
Let's start with finding the exact problem points. If you have lost traffic during the Nov-2019 SERP update, the first action should be analyzing the articles which have lost most traffic.
You can easily get this report by comparing last month's traffic with this month's traffic report. You would be using one or the other analytics tool on your blogs like Google Analytics or JetPack. Use that to generate the traffic report based on a per article basis and compare it with a similar report for this month.
Once you have that, you know the articles which have lost most of the traffic and needs some wor... -
Hey Everyone, With this post, I am starting a new chapter for MetaBlogue. For a long time, I was thinking to start a regular series on MetaBlogue and what's better than Blogging updates. So, I am going to do a monthly mashup about the latest news and updates around blogging and this is first of those.
This monthly mashup will not only contain things about Blogging but also things or services close to blogging and WordPress. Some of the things which will be covered are like updates to Elegant Themes, Genesis Framework, Hosting Services updates, WordPress Plugin Releases, etc.
Blogging Monthly 001
So let's kick off this month's update with one of the most important topics for every blogger - Google Search Updates.
Google BERT Update
Google has released its latest updated to Search Algorithms - BERT.
BERT update is specifically targeted towards a better understanding of the user queries context. It is going to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to better understand the query and map it with proper results.
This is good news for the people who do not like keyword stuffing and would like to write the content in more conversational language. With this update, Google will be able to better categorize the queries and map it with proper content by understanding the context of the queries.
The update is released around the 25th of October, so keep an eye on your SERP results and traffic. Let us know if you are seeing major changes around it. As per Google, this update affects around 10% of the search queries which is very high considering some of the recent updates.
BERT update improves the understanding of the on-page content and user search query with the help of natural language processors. So you may see some increase with the queries which might be related but the keyword is not directly mentioned on your pages.
Another point to notice about BERT is that it's targeted towards long-tail keywords. Short tail keywords will not have much data to process through the natural language processors. Though there can be some shuffling of results for short-tail keywords due to better understanding of on-page content.
You can get more details about it from Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land.
WordPress 5.3
The next update is around WordPress CMS. WordPress is already testing the next version (5.3) which will be released in the upcoming weeks. Currently, its under BETA testing and showing good progress. You can expect it to be available in the week of 11th November.
There are many changes that will help you better manage your WordPress installs including performance improvements for Gutenberg Editor. With this update, the Gutenberg Editor will reduce its response time and your content will load faster.
There are also many enhancements including Group block functionality which will allow you to select multiple blocks and create a group. Currently, I use Atomic Blocks to create a container to manage multiple blocks easily. The grouping functionality will help in easily manage it.
There are some updates to Site Health functionality, Gallery embeds on post/pages or cosmetic upgrades to Admin UI.
There are many other updates for other blocks that you can check in detail at this post on Kinsta. So, keep an eye on the public release of WordPress 5.3 in the week of 11th November.
Divi 4.0 Release
Divi from Elegant Themes is one of the best WordPress Page builder available in the market. Till now, you are able to design the pages and save generic elements in the Divi Library for reuse.
Elegant Themes has released a major update to Divi which makes it a complete solution to design WordPress Themes. Now, you can use the Divi and design almost all the pages or posts with the help of Divi Theme Builder.
There are new site-wide templates where you can design an element and assign it across your site. This will remove the need to edit each post individually...
