Dear SEO's

Dear SEO's,

Any analysis of the update at the moment is useless because-

1) They'll be an adjustment deployed in ~2 weeks

2) It takes a solid 60-100 hours of work to do any real level of analysis and only a handful of people have both the skills, site portfolio/data to do so.

So if you've been hit:

STEP #1 - IGNORE SOCIAL MEDIA AND FORUMS

There are only a handful of people qualified to analyse the issue and that analysis takes time. Plus Google will release an adjustment anyway which makes any current analysis redundant.

The algorithm is an algorithm, it has no emotion and it's ruled by logic - you must be too.

STEP #2 - TAKE RESPONSIBILITY

One of the most common things I see is people blaming this thing or that thing and so on but trust me when I tell you...

...if you have been penalised the problem is usually much closer to home than you think. You must be able to accept both blame and responsibility for the penalty rather than trying to pin it on some external thought, feeling or belief.

This morning I've seen people blaming all sorts of things like expired domains and "EAT" signals or Google are out to get "them" personally but I haven't seen anyone talk about the last time they did an audit.

STEP #3 - AUDIT YOURSELF

Whilst you're ignoring all of the people caught up in the blame game you'll have plenty of time to get your hands dirty with an audit. This is often a sobering and humbling experience for many but allows you to at least get 1 foot back on the ground.

Start by getting your mobile phone and browsing around your site on a mobile data connection. Does everything work? Is it fast? Are there annoying popups that interrupt the experience? Do the sign-up forms work? Does the checkout work? What about those pesky floating social share buttons?

Audit the mobile experience top to bottom, not with a tool - but with your hands, eyes and brain.

Then start looking at things like site speed in more detail and things like internal linking (specifically which pages have the most internal links pointing to them, is this as expected?) as priority. You do have a current internal link building strategy, right?

Next look at Google Search Console, are there any errors? Is the index number as you expected? Have you got links coming from a staging site that got indexed? Do your internal links look right? Which pages were hit and which pages saw growth?

Then do a Google search for those winners and losers, observe the current top 10 on both your phone and computer - what do you see? What do they do better than you? Google is literally telling you what they want with their search results - so what do they want now that they didn't want before?

When did you last audit your structured data? When did you last audit your GMB listing? When did you last audit your content to check its current and up to date?

If you ask yourself all of those questions, you'll likely find the reason you got penalised while everyone else is still stuck playing the blame game.