A big Google update !
Published on August 10, 2018
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
On August 1, Google did a broad algorithm update. They do this several times a year, but for this update, it appears to have affected the YMYL niches – "your money, your life."
Some health and lifestyle sites took a huge hit, and many sites that were ranking top 1-3 are now...not! The YMYL niche is a huge niche – especially for us mom bloggers.
What Google was looking for during this update (at least this is the speculation) was improved E-A-T – expertise, authority, trust (more on the trust factor for this update).
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Much of the E-A-T is based on external factors, but on-page is also important and when the quality reviewers come around they want to see signals like:
- There is a human or real company behind the site
- An about page
- Useful, unique content
- That you exist to provide value and not just for promotion (so not too many ads, or self-promotion for products)
So when a reviewer goes to Goodnightmybaby.com, for example, they clearly see it's a blog, there's a picture of me and my son, but I really need to put a mini bio on my main page. I also am wondering if I have too many ads - what do you think?
Since I am just getting traffic from Pinterest, and none of my articles are ranking number #1 yet.... I want to be careful of putting too many ads up everywhere, just not worth it right now until the dust settles with Google!
If your blog is ranking in Google for certain keywords or longtail keywords, here are some tips to help increase the trust of your site:
- Your About page is optimized for trust – you immediately mention what your blog is about and how you can help your readers and mention who you are to make yourself more credible in the niche you are writing about
- Each blog post has an author bio – I noticed this on alot of valid sites and I really wish I knew what plug-in to use so that I can have this as well.
- There's a real name on each post – so not using "admin," an email or your blog name as "your name" when you publish and reply to comments
- Your name redirecting to your About page – I also want to know what plug in to use with this, so if you click my name on a post, it will lead you straight to my About page, not to the default WordPress author post list, any ideas?
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