Good morning search marketers, happy Friday!
Yesterday evening, Google announced an update to improve domain diversity in search results. With this change, Google won't show more than two listings from a single domain on a search results page, in most cases. Additionally, subdomain pages will typically be considered part of the primary domain.
A dynamic duo of Frรฉdรฉric Dubut, lead of the spam team at Bing, and Fili Wiese, a former Googler who worked on spam and manual actions, took the stage together to talk about search algorithms and penalties on Wednesday at SMX Advanced.
One way the two engines differ in their approaches is in spam removal and penalties. Bing, Dubut said, demotes and penalizes sites that don't adhere to its guidelines and policies and will promote those sites that do play fairly.
Google, meanwhile, takes the manual actions approach to help educate publishers and site owners about what is in accordance with the Google guidelines. It also takes manual actions to correct the search results but is focused on education, said Wiese.
Dubut and Wiese both said algorithm updates are not aimed at demoting specific sites but rather at showing the best type of pages for the query. In short, algorithm updates aren't penalties.
While we're on the topic of updates… The Daily Mail, the UK tabloid, appears to have been hit hard by Google's June core search update. Someone claiming to be the site's SEO director posted in Google's public Search Console forum that Daily Mail's UK site has lost 50% of its organic search traffic since June 3, the day Google started rolling out the update, and 90% of Google Discover feed traffic. It's rare to see a large site publically share the impact of SEO updates publicly like that. Sistrix data also showed large organic search visibility declines for The Daily Mail of 43% since June 3. Still, it's early to be drawing broad conclusions about the June update, but you should be monitoring your Google Search Console account for changes.
We'll have lots more follow up coverage of the sessions, themes and trends from SMX Advanced over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Read on for Search Shorts and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
