Recently Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan was interviewed by Aleyda Solis – its around 47 minutes long interview and available on Youtube. I would recommend listening it all and if your like me probably good idea to just watch it on 1.5x speed.
I listened the whole interview last night and shared some of my initial thoughts on X.
I guess even Google is trying to figure out the helpfulness of content and I respect that Danny is honest about it 🙏
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) September 29, 2024
Regarding AI Overviews he mentioned that we might not get any sort of data tracking in the search console.
Also he mentioned content marketing and clearly said…
I think that I should do a blog post about it and share my thoughts about whole thing because I want to say a lot about what Danny said.
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) September 29, 2024
Also some of the things that Danny mentioned can be really helpful for me at least in upcoming client meetings over the next 4 weeks.
Direct…
And below are some interesting quotes from Danny which he said in the interview and for some of those quotes I have shared my thoughts as well.
Its just what I found interesting in the interview and to see the full picture I would recommend listening the whole interview.
Ranking Systems and Brands
“Our ranking systems aren’t saying, are you a big brand, therefore you rank… you could have something that is a big brand but not necessarily a good brand.”
I don’t know what to say about this one, because on daily basis I see brands getting far more ranking boost over other specific sites. Like I work with a lot of publishers and help them get visibility in Google Discover, its a long term up hill SEO battle for small to medium size publishers to get in Google Discover while the likes of Forbes can get away with lot or in sometimes anything random may show up in Discover as well.
Small Sites and Competition
“Your small site is a brand. You are a brand… the core of it isn’t really whether you’re big or you’re small, the core of it is whether you have the most useful, the most relevant, most satisfying information.”
To an extent I do agree with what Danny said there that if you are producing or creating most useful, relevant and actually satisfying information then you should be the one ranking and even with Helpful Content System that Google introduced in August 2022 that’s what their aim was and the document that they shared around creating helpful content had a lot of questions around what Google is considering as helpful content but given what has happened over last year starting from September Helpful Content Update And Google has decreased ranking of even some high quality sites which has not recovered yet even though it’s been almost a year.
I think that Google is struggling with identifying helpfulness of content at the page level and as of today is not able to rank the pages in search results accordingly.
Do I think that they will get good in it?
Yes of course.
But when I don’t know and I guess even Danny don’t know.
We just need to wait and see what happens over time.
Google’s Goals for Ranking
“We don’t want it to be only the very big things rank well.”
Danny clearly said that we don’t want to just rank big sites we want to have diverse search results where sites who are small or independent but doing really good work are also succeeding.
I work with many sites in this category and the only challenge for them is how they can keep on going from business perspective until when Google figure out that these sites are actually producing good content and should be ranking over other big publishers like Forbes.
But I am glad to hear that at least Google is focusing on this and trying to improve the things for small or independent sites.
Smaller sites not ranking well
“I am not taking away from any of the real concerns that are there, because they are there… we are certainly having some issues in some cases with some of these sites that I would like to see us improve on.”
This is a quite tricky one because on one side when I’m working with small publishers I see them spending so much resources in creating really good content and then their content is getting no visibility in Google Search and in Discover as well.
While other big publishers in some cases have far worse content compared to what my clients are creating doing really well.
I’m glad to hear that Danny clearly said that Google need to improve things from their side, at least Google is acknowledging that there is something wrong from their side and it’s not always the case that small sites are not creating good content.
User Generated Content (UGC) in Search
“I think there’s a huge value in what we’ve been doing in showing more of this kind of content because it is really helpful.”
We all know that Google has been pushing UGC content a lot in search results specifically Reddit it’s visibility has gone through the roof and it’s even affecting my SEO work these days.
Also recently I’ve noticed that Google is testing new search feature Recent Posts which also shows content from different social media platforms as a carousel in the search results.
From what I have seen and noticed I think that users are liking social media content a lot because they are spending a lot more time on these platforms so they kind of expect search engines (Google) to provide similar experience when they are looking for some information.
I’ve been telling my clients for years that you should be allocating part of your budget towards creating high quality social media content either it be Instagram Reels or TikToks.
I think that Danny clearly saying that Google want to have UGC in search results, it would be even easier for me to convince clients to allocate the budget for this.
Brand Advice for Small Sites
“If you were a smaller site that feels like you haven’t really developed your brand, develop it… probably the things that cause people externally to recognize you as a good brand may in turn… be alongside the kinds of things that our ranking systems are kind of looking to reward.”
Future of Search
“No idea, other than it’s always going to be changing.”
Death of SEO
“SEO is not dead. Absolutely not… Your job as an SEO… is that… you understand how people seek information… and then you understand what are the ways to help them access the information that you have.”
Advice for SEOs
“Just keep listening to your heart and doing what it is you think is the right thing to be doing… Our ranking systems are trying to reward great content that’s made for people.”
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