Google's November Update Hurting Sites in Travel and Food

It's late December and webmasters are still reeling from Google's November update. Google said the update wasn't anything major and they didn't issue any announcement, but it had a major impact on many sites. What has publishers concerned is that their white hat tactics are not being acknowledged anymore with high rankings. Their site are being replaced in the top spots by sites with thin content and sometimes by outright spam sites. Traffic is down significantly in many cases, affecting publisher's earnings.

The update hit travel and food blogs the hardest. The top results are not nearly as useful as they once were. Google says they focus on returning the most relevant results but not on sites which stuff keywords, even if the keywords are relevant. Their software understands natural language so publishers can simply produce useful content without worrying about using keywords unnaturally. Some people have theorized that food and travel blogs were hit the hardest because it's impossible to have recipes and destination descriptions without using the main keyword a lot. Imagine an article about visiting Chicago without mentioning the city name multiple times. Nearly every major landmark has the word Chicago in it.

Organic search is down for a number of publishers who claim they are being outranked by sites with stolen content. Several publishers have mentioned this on forums. Sometimes, they content comes from their site. This naturally has people worried.

Unfortunately, it goes to show publishers can't put all their eggs in one basket. While Google has the potential to drive enormous amounts of traffic to sites, so can social media and backlinks from high traffic sites. Don't stop optimizing for Google, but anytime you depend on one platform for all your traffic, you are at their mercy whenever they do an algorithm update. Diversify as much as possible. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/ecsrhb/anyoneelsestillfeelingtheeffectsofthenov/.