Travel and Recipe Websites Recently Hit With Google Algorithm Changes

This month, Google supposedly updated its algorithm which impacted sites in multiple industries, but it seemed to hit travel and recipe sites the hardest. There was also an update at the end of October 2019, which may affect November’s search results. At the end of last month, people were saying the SERPs were volatile. Non-webmasters were saying the results they got were unsatisfactory with Google returning five-year-old articles or articles with incorrect information.

Most Google updates make ethical webmasters happy by weeding out spammy websites, but this does not seem to be the case here. Most people are saying the latest changes in the SERPs are part of the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) Update. Simply put, Google says the BERT Update will allow Google's AI to understand language the way people understand it. The update will affect 10 percent of websites according to Google. Unfortunately, there's no way to optimize for BERT according to Google's Danny Sullivan who said Google just wants to reward sites with great content with higher rankings.

The most recent update affected high traffic blogs with some seeing a 30 percent drop in traffic. Food blogs were also suffering, especially recipe blogs. Google rarely targets niches; they prefer to improve relevance for everyone. The upshot is that we do not understand what is going on. The advice many SEO professionals are giving is to make your site, no matter what your niche, as authoritative and user-focused as possible.

E-commerce sites have always found SEO difficult. There's so much competition and Google is focusing on Popular Product images. Images, and image SEO, has become more important than ever.

Google algorithm updates concern every webmaster, however, there does not seem to be anything webmasters can do except concentrate on Google's published best practices and hope for the best. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/duofpn/asupposedlyunannouncedgooglenovember_update/.