These are the two biggest SEO updates that our Omaha SEO experts are reporting on for the month of September! 

Google Link Spam Update

This major update was reported on by our Omaha SEO experts on July 26th, 2021 and again in our August 2021 SEO notes. 

Google’s Link Spam Update was an effort to remove spammy backlinks referring back to websites. This process is known as backlinking, and in the backlinking industry, there are several different ways to monetize backlinks. There are also several ways to “hack” backlinks. 

Google’s update analyzed backlinks ensuring that guest posts and sponsored blogging posts were following the correct backlinking strategy. 

What is the proper way to use guest or sponsored blogging posts on your website? Search Engine Journal provides a great analogy. 

You go to a concert and there are two artists performing – the main artist and sometimes a lesser-known artist. The lesser-known artist gains traction from touring with the main artist. This is the same scenario that can be seen with backlinking strategies. 

What you don’t want to happen is guest blogging with a company that has low-quality content all over their site with spammy links referring back or improper internal linking. 

Another large segment of the update dealt with affiliate links. This provides ecommerce companies the ability to monetize their product review or shopping guides. As long as you are adding a simple piece to the code of your URL, use affiliate links all day!

TFR-BERT 

The TRF-BERT update is two Google updates that are now working simultaneously with one another. The BERT update was released in 2019 and now resides in the Hall of Fame with some of the other biggest Google Updates. 

BERT, formally known as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a natural language learning AI that continues to advance Google’s understanding of our search queries to provide the best search results possible. 

If you spell something wrong, BERT is able to correlate that with other phrases and provide the appropriate results. BERT changed search queries, results, and featured snippets in Google. With the TF-Ranking, the latest changes are title tags. 

The TF-Ranking is a natural language processing AI tool as well but evaluates data first and foremost. This update was released in 2018, one year before BERT, and they now work together with one another to build new machine learning architectures.

The biggest change that came from this update was the rewriting of title tags. A title tag is important in the SEO industry because it signals to searchers and search engines alike the purpose of the page. 

With Google rewriting title tags, and SEOs failing to override them, this meant that Google was taking the context of the page itself and putting in title tags it deemed appropriate. 

As an Omaha SEO company, it is important to stay up-to-date on all the latest changes in Google. (As much as we can.) These are the two most important updates that our experts will continue to monitor.