Some Surprising Results Of Recent Google Updates

In November 2019, some webmasters saw their sites rank better than before, even though they had low quality backlinks. It could be the dust settling from October's BERT update or November's unnamed update, but it is confusing webmasters. They are wondering if their poor quality backlinks suddenly have merit.

In the middle of of November, SERP rankings shifted although Google didn’t announce any update. SEO experts speculate that it was one of the hundreds of core updates Google does each year. On Twitter, Google said there are several updates to its algorithm each week, but they only announce major updates so they can give webmasters actionable guidance. Google gave the page speed update as an example of something they would announce so webmaster can fix their slow loading websites.

There are some people who believe the SERP activity is from October's Bert update. Google's BERT update was an update to how their AI understands natural language in sentences. Now the AI can understand context instead of just individual words in a sentence. BERT should also improve voice search, giving smaller brands an advantage over major brands.

It's possible the sites webmasters mentioned had good content which Google's AI understood. The search engine could have ignored the low quality links. After all, the webmasters only mentioned poor quality backlinks; they din't say anything about their actual content. Google had said the BERT update would effect about 10 percent of all searches.

Most webmasters know their competition can use black hat strategies, like getting backlinks from a PBN, to outrank them. It's particularly bad in highly competitive industries. Could Google be ignoring not too bad black hat techniques in order top return the best content? It's possible, considering what is happening. Still, we discourage black hat SEO if favor of creating the best possible content. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/dx1mry/isblackhatlinkingbackafterthelastupdate/.