The most recent Google core update appears to be one of the most positive updates that Google has released, especially for smaller publishers, specializing in user-focused content! Google has stated that,
“This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.”

In the last 2 weeks, we have seen numerous publishers experience increases in traffic, demonstrating the positive impact for those who prioritize user experience over search engine algorithms. 

To recover from a Google penalty or a significant traffic decline following a core update requires strategic action and can be a lengthy process, often spanning over months. However, core updates present a unique opportunity for recovery as websites are reassessed against the new guidelines. There is a strong reason to believe that the publishers who have invested in creating high-quality, user-centric content will see their sites rise in search rankings during these times.  

It’s important to adopt a proactive approach to website optimization rather than passively waiting for updates to change the game. Publishers should have a plan and a strategy that is being reviewed and implemented to ensure their website’s continued success. By implementing these guidelines below, publishers can capitalize on traffic gains and maintain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving search engine landscape.

1. Know your Audience.

Understanding your audience is paramount in creating content that resonates with them and is an essential key step to delving into your audience development strategies. Direct users are the most stable of traffic sources that take pressure off the rise and fall of search engines. This aligns with Google’s EEAT standards enabling you to produce high-quality valuable content that is curated specifically for your audience.

2. Track your Metrics.

Be proactive in investing time in evaluating your Google Analytics (GA4) dashboard to understand what content is performing well and those that are not. Knowing what content is performing better and those that are falling short, you can make data-driven decisions that can make or break your content strategy. Embracing a flexible approach and adjusting your priority based on performance metrics is key to maximizing the website’s traffic.

3. Audit Existing Content

Avoid being hindered by outdated content that no longer meets current-day standards. Refreshing existing or evergreen content can be a relatively efficient way to keep your website content fresh and engaging.. If content is not able to be updated, placing a NoIndex tag can prevent it from being indexed by search engines, thus avoiding potential penalties

4. First-Party Data Strategy

Implementing a strategic approach to obtain your users’ First Party Data is critical to optimizing site revenue and owning your own audience. Gaining a way to target your audience can help with things like newsletters which can gain site traffic, surveys which helps you know your audience, and even integrating additional interactions on the site through voting systems. Furthermore, having FPD allows for optimized revenue through your ad partner (Freestar!) as CPM’s are higher when the ads are curated for the specific user. 

By following the above guidelines you can be in a place to be positively impacted when core updates are launched. While optimizing your site remains crucial, it should never come at the detriment of the user experience.  

More important than that, by following the above best practices you can improve your site and make the user experience better. You want to be a site that users are coming back to, are typing your site in their browser, have tagged and saved and used in their everyday lives. Google appears to be finally listening to the publishers and there are a lot of positive changes happening. Provide the best, user-first content that you can, and the traffic will follow!

Learn more on how Freestar can efficiently monetize your content while maintaining a positive user experience. 

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To gain further insights and strategies for managing publisher traffic and maximizing revenue, watch our recorded webinar, The Truth About Publisher Traffic

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The post The Current State of Publisher Website Traffic and How to Avoid Algorithm Penalties first appeared on Freestar.

Example of Google AI Overviews

Google will “do the searching for you” by crawling whichever set of trusted websites previously would have been at the top, and then generates an answer in a comprehensive and digestible manner.  Since publishing content makes you a publisher, this makes Google’s AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience) your newest competitor.

Although there is a possible glimmer of hope coming for HCU recovery if you’ve put in the work, publishers have largely continued to face traffic decline over the last 10 months. And now this.  

At Freestar, we’re built on the notion that the website is the main event, the most valuable real estate. For years, as attention increased for Facebook and Instagram, we held strong that investment was better suited for websites. We’re adtech, yes. But without traffic to websites, what will there be to monetize? The same advice to invest in the website is true today, and we believe there’s a positive future for publishers who’ve built sustainable businesses with clear user value.

How To Compete With AI Overviews

The post Meet Your Newest Competitor – Google’s AI Overviews first appeared on Freestar.

One of the most intriguing aspects of these consecutive algorithm updates is their impact extending beyond traditional organic search rankings. Freestar, the programmatic ad partner for over 1,000 enterprise websites, has observed a decline in traffic from multiple Google sources in certain cases. While Google has previously indicated that algorithm updates can affect visibility in Google Discover and other search result areas, the past three months have shown a more pronounced impact.

The range of publishers experiencing negative traffic impacts in recent months spans various niches, sizes, and locations globally.

Now, let’s review the five significant recent updates. Although each update has its nuances, the overarching goal in all of them is to prioritize UX, content relevance, and helpful content.

Google Updates Between September and November

• September 14, 2023 — Helpful Content Update
  • Targets UX issues, aggressive ads, and content over-optimized for SEO.
  • Forces publishers and webmasters to consider what experience is genuinely helpful to the reader.
• October 4, 2023 — Spam Update
  • Targets thin, copied, misleading, and overly promotional content.
• October 5, 2023 — Broad Core Update
  • Encompasses a broad sweep of the entire index, re-evaluating sites against all their signals.
• November 2, 2023 — Broad Core Update
  • Broad core updates can impact Google organic, Google News, and Google Discover traffic.
• November 8, 2023 — Reviews Update
  • The last announced Reviews update, as Google claims the system is continuously improved.
  • Websites writing reviews on any topic may face algorithmic impacts due to low-quality penalties. Here is the extensive list of factors Google is looking for.

Publishers often dismiss spam updates as not applicable, but Google targets four key elements in spam updates regularly encountered:

1. AI-generated content lacking value.
2. Unpermitted article scraping.
3. False claims and clickbait headlines.
4. Thin affiliate content (listicles, roundups, review content).

Extreme Impact to Google Discover

The impact on Google Discover has been more pronounced than usual, with many publishers experiencing significant drops in traffic. Despite a glitch in early November affecting Discover traffic, recovery has been limited for most affected sites.

Discover traffic has historically exhibited inconsistency. I often advise publishers that experiencing 300,000 pageviews from Discover one day and then literally zero the next is considered “normal.” This personalized content feed, available in the Chrome app and soon on desktop, relies solely on the user’s search history. While all indexed content is eligible, there are methods to optimize for Discover compatibility, such as ensuring feature images are at least 1200px wide. However, there is no guaranteed method to optimize for increased traffic.

In a recent overview of her research on Discover declines, Lily Ray highlighted a staggering statistic. She noted, “Many site owners reported a significant drop in traffic, experiencing a decrease from tens of thousands or even millions of impressions to nearly zero. This includes drops from high daily figures, like 300,000 or 50-60,000 unique visitors, to almost none.”

In another statement, she emphasized the substantial “impact on well-established, authoritative sites.” Even websites with a longstanding claim to years of authority and quality content reported significant drops in traffic. This challenges the prevailing notion that authoritative sites are immune to the effects of Google updates.

The Future of Discover

Anticipating the transformative shifts orchestrated by Google in this domain, I predict that Discover will emerge as one of the most crucial traffic sources in the years ahead. Google has long expressed its aspiration for “query-less search,” aiming to seamlessly offer users the next article they need before they consciously seek it.

When contemplating “query-less search,” I draw parallels to social media platforms that craftily present captivating headlines, compelling me to click unexpectedly. This presents an opportune moment to compete with the waning reliability of Facebook and “X” (formall known as Twitter) as traffic sources for publishers.

A notable enhancement in Discover supporting this analogy is the recent introduction of the “follow feature.” Allowing users to effortlessly select publications for their feed with a single click harks back to the simpler times of Facebook and X.

For those aspiring to enhance their content’s visibility in Discover, Google provides the following guidance.

The substantial adjustments in Discover and the imminent SGE (Search, Google, Ecosystem) have given rise to uncertainty. However, for industry insiders questioning the future of SEO (yes, it will evolve; it always does), publisher traffic, and the enduring value of websites, I can confidently declare: we are just scratching the surface.

The post Google’s Algorithm Overhaul: These Updates Are Impacting Much More Than Just Search first appeared on Freestar.

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The post SEO Trends For Enterprise Publishers in 2023 first appeared on Freestar.

Read more about the changes in 2022 and what we predict will be the biggest SEO trends embraced by publishers in 2023.

Search engine algorithms are a complex topic, and much about it is kept within the walls of Google. We educate our publishers best we can, and work with them to keep up to date on UX trends, content strategies and SEO best practices but admit there are times we don’t fully get why a site took a dive with a broad core update.

The information below is specific to the larger, more noticeable updates. Google releases smaller algorithm adjustments hundreds of times a year. The signals gathered from these tweaks over time are processed by machine learning, which dictates the weight of signals and the search rankings associated.

Algorithm FAQs

We consider ourselves active in the SEO industry, regularly gaining insight not just from what Google chooses to release publicly, but from seasoned experts, SEO online communities, forums and even our own data. There is no way to predict what will happen to a website during an algorithm update, but there are best practices to implement that lessen the chance of severe decreases. Here’s what you need to know.

How does the algorithm work?

Often compared to a black box of mystery, the exact details of the beast are unknown. But here are the several unconfirmed tidbits that have helped me throughout the years.

– There are 200-250 individual factors included in the algorithm.

– There may be one “main algorithm” tied to organic search rankings, but there are 100s of “baby algorithms” running in addition. They do either share signals or results in some way, but no fully. For example, Google’s John Mueller has said that while Google organic search and Google Discover are two completely different areas, if a site is penalized in Google SERPs (search engine results page) they will often see a drop in Discover traffic.

– There is no hotline to call or support team to help you out of a penalization. If hit, review every piece of related documentation and begin improving any and all areas that may have been the cause. 

When was the latest Google algorithm update?

Dec 14, 2022

How often do they happen?

Google tends to release broad core algorithm updates 3-4 times a year.

Core updates haven’t always been a thing, they’re relatively new. Think of these updates as an overall adjustment to the system, or a tweak to the way Google processes search rankings. The new algorithm rolls out, it takes a minute for the dust to settle, and voilà, you have a new normal to where you appear in search results. These days, Google may even tweet when one is happening. There is no schedule for core updates, but if I had to pick months based on the past 5 years, I’d pick March, June, August and November. Six months between two is longer than normal.

What are they targeted at?

Google core updates don’t target any one issue, but are programmed to improve contextual results based on user intent. Google Search is a business with the goal of providing the best result for every single search query.

As algorithms became better at understanding user intent, publishers were relentlessly impacted, sometimes to no fault of their own. For example, if at one point in time your article on the “Health Benefits of Honey” ranked #1 for the search query, “honey”, over the years you likely saw your placement crowded out by local packs of honey farms, top stories of related news content, a large area of images and depending the user’s search history, perhaps rankings non-related to honey, the food.

A more action-oriented answer would be quality. Google is looking for a quality overall experience to the user, so one recommendation is to fully understand the scope of each topic you write about, and then present it to the reader is an easy to digest format.

How can I tell if I was impacted?

Use Google Analytics traffic data to review what organic search traffic looked like leading into the update and the month following. Typically, I attribute anything less than a 15% swing to be potentially seasonal or normal flux but look deeper when the drop creeps closer to the 20% mark.

There isn’t a checklist to confirm your suspicions, or even specifics on what to expect but overall amount of traffic coming from organic search is where you would start. The increase or decrease can be to one main page of the site, but more often it’s spread across many.

At every update, one of 3 things will happen. A site sees an increase, a decrease or traffic remains the same. One fun fact, it’s at the time of these core updates when a site may be rewarded for their efforts in the months prior, to improve site structure and user experience. Consider your site to be reevaluated on content quality, content relevancy, user experience and authority at the time of each core update.

What should I do now?

#1 Losing a large amount of organic traffic overnight can be devastating. Let the update come to an end before making adjustments to the site. It’s not uncommon for signals to balance out and recover on their own in the days or weeks following.

#2 Learn about the update and read industry sites to see what Google said about it. There won’t be much for core updates but for smaller updates, they may still confirm the area of interest. For example, in 2022 there has been at least one update targeting the quality of product posts and one targeting spam sites.

#3 Keep relying on the traffic data to look for patterns or trends. See if you can pinpoint the section or topic that was devalued. This may help you course correct at scale instead of having to look at the individual page URL.

#4 For the posts that dropped, google the main topic. Use live search results to infer what Google is valuing and the standards existing to rank at the top. This isn’t about copying, but about using directionally for quality inspiration. If your post that dropped from spot #3 to #13 had one feature image and was 600 words and the site now resting in your old spot is 950 words, has 2 images and a video, you’ll be better armed with knowledge as you create a new content strategy.

#5 Use resources at your disposal to learn SEO. Google has a set of search quality guidelines as well as an SEO Starter Guide. If you’re a Freestar partner, we offer SEO and content strategy assistance free to publishers.

What should I focus on long-term?

Focus on creating quality content within your core expertise. One interesting find in Glenn Gabe’s case studies after the May 2022 update was regarding an ecommerce site. This particular site was largely ecommerce, as the core niche but featured a blog with article content that was sometimes unrelated. The “fringe” content, which was the blog, saw a drastic decrease on May 25th while the rest of the site remained stable.

Another focus should be user experience. Sites that haven’t taken the necessary steps in the last decade to migrate to responsive design, to invest in a site experience utilizing every tool available to keep the user engaged and fed the information they’re looking for, has ground to make up. Users expect modern aesthetics, even in the least visually-dependent of niches. Your audience has high expectations and cannot be bothered with text too small to read and large blocks of text.

Other helpful resources:

Google’s History of Search

If you’re a publisher interested in working with Freestar to recover from an algorithm penalty, contact us today at marketing@freestar.com.

Originally published August 2022

The post FAQs on Google Algorithm Updates first appeared on Freestar.

2022 also closes out my first year working with Freestar publishers on SEO and other traffic growth strategies, which made it double-interesting. In certain cases, by the time I’d met with a publisher for consultation, it was too little too late. While large organic search penalties incurred, Google’s quality standards simultaneously tightened, making the recovery process harder than ever.

We met with publishers to discuss current SEO best practices, content strategies like updating evergreens and targeting seasonal trends, UX enhancements, taxonomy refreshes, structured markup, and more — all for the end goal of a better experience for the user.

Here are the SEO topics I talked most about in 2022.

Big Changes in 2022

Page Experience Algorithm Applied to Desktop

From 2015-2021, it was all-things-mobile. Mobile site versions, responsive design, mobile friendly, mobile first, hamburger navs, readability, all eyes on mobile. Google even launched a brand new search algorithm system in 2021, called Page Experience, but at the time it only applied to you guessed it — mobile!

So now, same algo runs on both and the 5 main metics it checks are the three speed related metrics in core web vitals (LCP, FID, CLS), disruptive interstitials and HTTPS.

The Helpful Content Update

Google favoring useful and usable content in the search results has always been the case, but introducing this as a signal within the algorithm seems next-level. The additional weight now applied to (per Google) “original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results”.

Here are #truths I’ve seen play out this year related to this update:

#1 Site that have a mix of content types and formats all related to their core niche have weathered the storm better than those who had only one. Sites that offered product roundups plus news articles plus informational posts + how-to videos, for example, were better off than a site solely publishing product roundups.

#2 Sites without a clear niche or solid expertise have struggled to compete. I’ve had some very real conversations with publishers on why their once successful strategy of paying their nephew’s college friend to post regurgitated news coverage is no longer working. Google’s Gary Illyes said 60% of the internet is duplicate. There’s a strong need for originality in research, analysis and ideas.

Product Review Updates

By far this area of content took the most drastic hit in 2022. Watching partners take 80% drops in organic search traffic for product reviews was painful, but the overused strategy of copying/pasting descriptions and images with no additional POV or insight had become painful too.

With three algorithm updates dedicated to product reviews (and the sites they appear on) in 2022, it’s easy to see it was an area of focus for Google. Creating content reviews will only work for publishers in 2023 if they bring something new to the table in an easy-to-process format.

This Google post on product review guidelines was my number one shared link in 2022.

Spam Updates

There were 2 Google updates this year related to better spam detection and penalty. Here are their official policies on spam. If you’re doing any of the following things, you may see a decline in organic search traffic:

• Buying links, selling links
• Using bot traffic to send artificial queries to Google
• Not using rel=sponsored or rel=nofollow tags in sponsored posts
• Not disclosing affiliate links to users or thin affiliate content strategies
• Improper redirects that take users to unexpected content
  
  

GA4

Another major shift was the announcement of deprecating Google Analytics Universal in lieu of the incomparable GA4. Most of the publishers I worked with this year had GA4 implemented and collecting data but had not switched to actually using it.

In more than one case, this switch to GA4 has publishers looking into non-Google analytic platforms. Monetization isn’t tied to traffic analytics, even in GA UA. Analytics reporting is used for editorial insight, content trends and to inform directionally about audience. There are many platforms doing this.

You can find more on all of these changes in Google Search Essentials.

Smaller (But Still Important) Changes

Core Updates

There were 2 core search algorithm updates in 2022, the first in May and another in September. Core updates are always sort-of-big, but they aren’t new. There is also never much information about them given. I’ve come to think of them as a sort of refresh or re-scan of the index, designed for Google to recalculate, add new signals and factors, adjust their weight within the search algorithm and reassess results. It’s also at the time of a core update that they would factor in a site’s prior recovery efforts.

AI-generated Content

Just as AI content tools were getting hot, Google released additional algorithm tech to better identify AI-scraped content. Not sad to see this go, and would recommend all serious publishers stay away from this content strategy. I will stress though, AI-scraped and AI-generated content is different than using artificial intelligence to gain insight on what people search for, or for brief building purposes. Many parts of AI can help content creates maximize the usefulness of their articles.

Continuous Scroll on Desktop

Just this month, continuous scroll scroll hit desktop search results. Historically, there has been give or take 10 first page organic search results on the page, and just under that a set of pagination to take a user to the next set of 10 results.

And as you know, getting the user to take action of a click is no small feat, leading to the strong assumption that nothing past the first page matters. I have two predictions of my own that I believe this change will bring.

* Click-through-rate optimization for search results will become a focus since users on desktop don’t mind scrolling through more images and descriptions as long as they don’t have to actually click to the second page of search results.

* Sites that have brand recognition but aren’t on the first pages of the search results will see an increase in desktop organic search traffic. This may then cause an increase in actual ranking, but main point is the gain in organic search traffic from desktop.

My theory is that by expanding to infinite scroll results, the user views more rankings, eventually having to choose one of the hundred delicious and similar brownie recipes they’ve just seen, and so by default falls back on a brand they know and trust like Martha Stewart or AllRecipes.

Recommended Publisher Priorities

Here are 4 tips to increase your organic search performance in the coming year.

1. Publish original information based on your own reporting and research.
2. Content can’t just include the obvious, reworded from one site to the next. Make sure to go beyond that to offer more insightful information.
3. Include clear evidence of experience and credentials across the site.
4. Know the top ranked sites for your target topics and offer the user more value than they do. Google the terms you care about and look at the quality and experience the sites ranked #1-3 offer the user, and then find ways to offer even more value.

As we head into 2023, publishers must continue down the path of creating the best possible content in their niche and the best on-site experience for their user.

The post SEO 2022, A Year in Review first appeared on Freestar.

Gleaning insight from more recent SEO trends, certain basics are no longer up for discussion if you want to be at the top of search results for competitive terms. You’ve likely migrated to a mobile-first approach, with responsive code, an appropriate font size, maybe a hamburger menu. You’ve put a kibosh on interstitial pop-ups, and passing core web vitals rivalled an entire pandemic for your focus in 2020.

But, what about the content?

If you’ve been listening to us this year, rest easy knowing the content on your site is unique and designed with the audience in mind.

What Publishers Should Have Been Doing

A lot can be told of a publisher from the way they approach content. For some, creating helpful content has always been the goal. They understood the long game, that for true longevity, the user was MVP.

What helpful content looks like may differ for every niche, but the direction to “write authentically” for the user was consistent to all. SEO advice received may have sounded like:

• Word count doesn’t matter, just thoroughly cover the topic.

• Use natural language, it’s good to include variations of the keyword.

• Keyword density is a thing of the past, just write naturally.

I wrote about working with HollywoodLife.com in 2019 to recover from a Google algorithm update. Glenn Gabe completed an SEO audit on the site, and uncovered a high ratio of thin, low quality content.

We removed thousands of thin webpages for a variety of reasons, including too short/partially written, speculative coverage, clickbait headlines, NSFW content, and image-heavy pages with no text. The reason we did this was to remove low-quality content that provided no value to the reader.

Earlier this year, our friends at ThoughtNova.com started updating outdated posts by adding photos, fresh information, and video. They took the time to improve quality of organic performers. Since the May 25 Google algorithm update, pageviews have increased over 20%.

Here are six other examples of how positive changes to content and UX lead to better Google results.

What Publishers Should Not Have Been Doing

Digital content methods that have been abused include, but are not limited to plagiarism, scraping, fake stories, clickbait headlines, over-optimization, and then the latest trend quickly gaining internet popularity: AI-generated content.

Google has covered thin content ad nauseam, but is thin content the same as unhelpful content? This page on developers.google.com covering thin content doesn’t have a post date, but the video on the page features Matt Cutts. Matt left Google in 2014, but take a look at the very top bullet under “If your site has been removed from our search results, review the following sections of our Webmaster Guidelines:”. First on the list: Automatically Generated Content.

Machine written content has been on the rise in 2022, marketed as an efficient way to produce search-friendly articles, reliant on their own machine-learning for research and even editing. Tools like Jasper and Copy AI spit out optimized content, and from talking to many content creators about it, it sounds like it was working.

And if spun just right, it didn’t sound like the worst idea yet. Many publishers using this type content would re-write parts to match the voice of the site, shuffle around sections, add paragraphs of unique copy into the AI content, tactics to make it less robotic. Some ad management companies in the space went as far acquiring topic tools that use AI generation which are no longer beneficial given Google’s recent updates.

In April 2022, Google updated their Webmaster Guidelines to clearly state that AI content is against guidelines, when “intended to manipulate search rankings”. It makes sense that a continually-running signal be added to the algorithm to sniff it out.

Any SEO would have at least said there’s risk around using this method, and now we’re seeing Google introduce a new search signal to target content “written for search engines”. Sounds like AI-generated content is what Google is on the hunt for with this one.

Next Steps For Content Creators

There wasn’t much warning from Google on the rollout of this signal, and “helpful content” can be subjective. But that doesn’t change our recommendation for content creators.

If you’ve been publishing AI-generated content, pivot the strategy back to unique, human written content. You may also consider taking down this content if you start to see negative impact over the next two weeks.

It’s also time to identify poor quality content and either remove it, or find a way to make it valuable to the humans reading it. The number one tool at your disposal is live search results. See who is ranking at the top of search results for your keyphrase and look at the specific information included on the page.

TLDR;

If you have content ranking, that for whatever reason maybe shouldn’t be, this update may result in those posts dropping placements in the results.

If you have content ranking that by Google’s standard, “deserves” to be there, but you have a “high amount of unhelpful content overall”, the high-quality articles may drop placements in the results.

Keep creating unique content that your audience values.

More Resources

Google’s official post

Glenn’s post

The post Content Cleanup: How Publishers Can Survive Google’s Helpful Content Update first appeared on Freestar.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to lead the organic search strategy for Bonnie Fuller and the team at HollywoodLife.com. Decades of legacy work at glossy print mags like US Weekly, Glamour Mag and Cosmopolitan had eventually led her, in 2009, to Penske Media Corp, as EIC of newly acquired celebrity news site, Hollywood Life.

There were nuances with this project that were specific to the celebrity niche and since Freestar monetizes many publishers in this space, we’re sharing these SEO tips here!

By the time I came into the picture, Hollywood Life was a top property in the Penske portfolio but beginning in 2018 had taken a hit in each of the early Google broad core algorithm updates. Our goal was to identify the issues causing the decline, create processes to correct the issues and then, to recover the loss.

Throughout the SEO auditing process, much of what was revealed tied back to quality. Over the years, both editorial best practice and technical debt had taken hits, paired with the up-and-coming Google measurement of E-A-T, which left Hollywood Life dealing with low-quality content, a lack of brand authority and a questionable reputation of the publication.

If you’re a publisher in the celebrity news space struggling with SEO and revenue growth, read on for steps to take to change the trajectory of your brand.

How to Handle Old News Content

HollywoodLife.com had racked up some 25 million indexed pages, if not more by the time they were a decade old. Part of the celebrity news game is staying abreast of all the juicy details that boots-on-the-ground paparazzi unveil. This can result in re-coverage en-masse and depending the strategy, an excess of thin, low quality content stacks up over the years.

If nothing else, SEO trends and best practices have changed over the years and what once was above-board, now isn’t. For example, circa 2010 a content strategist/SEO person might have said that taking a topic, let’s say Kim and Kanye’s wedding, and breaking it up into as many separate articles as possible, was the best strategy. The editors would then publish one post on the proposal, one on the ring, one on what they were wearing, and so on. They may or may not have all been connected via internal links, and post length may or may not have been 150 words. But by 2015 longer, more comprehensive articles were beginning to see favoritism in the search results.

Audit Discovery: A high ratio of indexed content was thin, and poor quality.

Resolution: A project dubbed ‘operation content cleanup’ that involved the tech team, lead editors and data analysis. We received giant crawl files or URLs, by year on everything that was published from 2009 through 2017. Cross referenced by traffic, and sometimes article headline, we would decide what could be deleted.

A popular publisher debate related to this topic is whether or not old news content should be removed, from a journalistic integrity perspective. Feels a little like deleting the past. But if you feel like the quality of your old celebrity news content is low, and bringing down the value of your new and shiny editorial, there are options other than deleting. Noindexing or unpublishing posts are also strategies I’ve seen used, depending on how many 404s this will cause.

Maintaining Media Assets

Looking at HL on the page level, one commonality of those taking a dive were broken media assets. Entertainment news coverage tends to be centered around media in various ways, makes sense. Content generated from news that a celebrity released a product, a book, a song, posted something new on Instagram, or  updated their YouTube channel often times embeds whatever that media file is, directly on the page.

Over time, as the amount of indexed coverage added up, files on those pages became unavailable. An evergreen piece on Jen & Brad’s relationship timeline, long outdated, may have broken images, video links, or social embeds that have been removed. Depending on the amount of this, Google may deem your site a poor user exprience.

Audit discovery: Many pages across the site contained videos no longer available, social embeds that had been removed and broken links to affiliate products.

It was also discovered in the process that years prior, an image database was deleted, leaving blank or error-ridden boxes on thousands of pages.

Resolution: Crawls returned to us revealed (on the back end of the webpages, broken links can be identified) a set of URLs and the broken URLs. From there, cross-referenced with traffic, we determined if the ROI was worth fixing the broken image. Fixing it meant manually, their absolute badass managing editor, Dina Sartore-Bodo dug through the trenches with me on this one. Mostly, we ditched these pages, unless it was a relevant evergreen topic that could be refreshed and republished.

The Truth on Clickbait

Celebrity news is a competitive niche. Outside of Hollywood Life, I’ve worked with at least 10-15 lesser known brands that still manage to make $20k+ a month in ad revenue. Some of these sites were one-woman shows, monitoring sites like People, US Mag and others, exclusively re-covering their stories. It’s always encouraged to add your own POV if this is your strategy.

With such a lack of original content to publish, it became standard to highly exaggerate headlines to get the click. I’d bet the entire practice of clickbait originated from entertainment news!

Using language that would shock the reader, enticing them to click, was something Hollywood Life had used, to much success, but it was time to regulate. Crafting headlines that are both interesting, search-friendly and competitive is no small feat, but we recommend finding a way. Not only does Google attempt to weed this type of content out of the search results, Facebook and other platforms do also.

Audit discovery: Editorial frequently embellished headlines, resulting in high bounce rate, low time on page and a sour user experience.

Resolution: Dina was an advocate for quality content at every turn, and implemented guidelines within editorial to ensure content delivered on the chosen headline.

Brand Voice

If the brand voice of your celebrity news site includes sporadic eff-bombs, negative news that brings people down, and images of humans in their most vulnerable moments, the consequences are more extensive than a Google penalty.

Readers will at some point catch on to the fact that your brand is only recirculating garbage and will move on to another. In all the various ways we teach publishers audience strategies, creating content that is either positive or at the least, unbiased in how it’s reported will always be the better path.

Google News and Google Discover both have guidelines against violence, hate speech, and profanity, it would make sense that there are filters in place for flagging this in organic search.

This was also an issue when it came to HL landing direct deals. Targeting away from such massive social drivers impacted projections, but the highest paying advertisers often have lists of topics and words they don’t want to appear next to.

Audit discovery: Hollywood Life had gone to desperate measures for traffic throughout the years, publishing every wardrobe malfunction with the most colorful of language. It was recommended that they sponge the site for questionable content that might be impacting search.

Resolution: Dina and I request tech to crawl the site for URLs/body copy containing exact match phrases, like “nude”, “gossip”, “porn” and many others that I won’t type here. Hundreds of thousands of posts were returned and then the process was the same. Cross-check traffic, remove explicit instances if it was otherwise ok, or just remove the post altogether.

It’s Never Just One Thing

There is opportunity for all celebrity news sites to provide value to the user in their coverage. That said, when it comes to the trend of low quality coverage, it’s more common with this niche than any other I see. It’s time to commit to publishing quality content, positive news and accurate stories and in time, you will see audience growth.

Fixing technical errors and managing crawl spend were important then, and even more important as we head into future years with Google.

Don’t expect instant results, it takes time to fix and then time for Google to recognize, gain trust and reward that in tangible traffic results. Be patient, and pay particular attention to traffic around the time of Google core algorithm updates.

If you’re an entertainment site interested in Freestar monetization, contact us today. We offer private consulting with audience experts for SEO, editorial and newsletter programs.

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