The November 2024 Core update

Everyone in the industry has now been… let’s just say - not that happy with how google has been ranking their content and even serving content in general. Last year’s Helpful content update was a bloodbath and people and SEOs in general have been pretty mad at google. Lots of publications and website owners have been severely hit by the core updates and have not been able to recover from the effects ever since.

This new update sort of wants to build over the helpfulness of the content uploaded on websites. To quote Google - “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.”

Why this update

Google has faced severe backlash over ranking overstuffed and salesy content that takes the searcher nowhere and poorly serves their queries, to combat all the backlash and to serve the searchers better {atleast what it seems like for now}

What’s going to happen?

Websites that have been formed to only push affiliate links are going to be hurt the most, other than this the websites which has been using some quick ‘hacks’ to get to rank faster without building on good content are also going to face some challenges.

What to do

Focus on creating content that is truly helpful for the people and not just something that you want to use to rank on Google (Even though everyone only needs this at the end of the day)

Other than that, if you are already creating high quality content that serves people’s queries pretty nicely then there isn’t anything extra that you need to do for this new update.

Microsoft’s Bing is now a priority

For years now, SEO has been equal to serving Google to make sure that you please their algorithm to make sure it stays happy and ranks your websites on its search engine. Not many SEOs have any other search engine other than google on their priority list.

Open AI introduced a new feature - on possibly the most famous AI product ever - ‘ChatGPT’- called ‘ChatGPT search’. And just like any other ChatGPT update this also took the internet by storm. What this new feature does is that it searches the ‘web’ for you and gives you the exact answer you might be looking for, without having to surf any websites at all.

Now, what many people won’t know is that Microsoft actually has a lot of money and resources invested in OpenAI. And what’s even more interesting is that to get the results for queries you search with ChatGPT search, OpenAI actually relies on Microsoft’s index.

What does this mean?

It’s pretty simple, if your website or content isn’t being indexed for Bing, then it pretty surely won’t show up in the results of ChatGPT search. Now, ChatGPT has it’s own algorithm that it uses to show results for queries, but it 100% relies on Bing’s Index to surf the web, Even if OpenAi could go solo and have their own indexing for their search functionality, it still would take some time and i don’t see it happening in the near future for atleast.

What to do?

Bing is pretty smart when it comes to ranking content on their search engine, a quick tip and action to take would be to go ahead and set up Bing Webmaster Tools for your website to make sure it is indexing on Bing without any major issues. If you see any issues with your website and content being ranked, the best advice for now would be to get it fixed and optimized for Bing to rank it.

Ending notes

Holidays are just around the corner, but I think SEOs are going to be packed with all the updates and opportunities to rank. Make sure to keep yourselves hydrated, and I will be back in the next edition of SEO {UNPKD}