Anyone keeping an eye on the world of SEO should by now have heard of the mysterious Google “Phantom 2” update, that occurred around the beginning of May.

Most webmasters and search professionals spent the prior months anticipating the “mobilegeddon” on April 21st. Depending on how mobile-friendly their sites were, they were either frantically rushing to get a responsive website out, or smugly keeping an eye on competitors to see if they’d make it in time.

But while all this was going on, Google’s engineers were seemingly working on something that took everybody by surprise. Around May 3rd, almost a fortnight after the slightly anti-climactic mobile update, reports started flooding the web from sites that saw dramatic shifts in their organic search results.

As is normal, the ones who took hits were those who shouted the loudest. However, there are stories of recovery too, as I can personally testify as we saw our rankings jump drastically for our site after years of striving to improve its content and usability.


Image: FloridaTix.com

Google denied at first that there had been an update in May at all, causing SEO commentators to christen the update “Phantom 2”. However, the growing number of case studies from alarmed webmasters were difficult to ignore, and Google admitted to SearchEngineLand on May 19th that there were “tweaks” to its “core ranking algorithm”, related to how it assesses quality.

If you saw noticeable changes to your Google rankings or organic traffic around the turn of the month, it’s likely your site was affected by this quality “tweak”. While debate is still flying around about the update, several in the field agree there are some common themes among sites that have been hit – an over-reliance on “supplementary” content like ads, sidebars full of recommended click-bait articles, pages with thin content, outdated user-generated content such as old comments, and those where the content was hard to navigate.

So, if you’re one of the unlucky ones, you need to act fast if your website and business relies on organic traffic from Google that’s now disappeared. Below is a list that should get you started:

1. Do an immediate audit of your site’s content and assess it for “quality”, referring to Google’s official advice. Assess whether non-core content like adverts & “related article” recommendations really need to be there.

2. Use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl your website & filter by pages with low word count – these are the ones that could be deemed “thin” content. Either improve the content, or 301 redirect those pages into another relevant page.

3. If you have an in-house UX designer, or an external agency, enlist their help in assessing whether there’s anything present on your pages that could cause them to be difficult to navigate or create usability issues. Check metrics like bounce rates, exit rates, time spent on page, conversion rates, and try to diagnose issues.

4. Put yourselves in the shoes of the user – would they trust your site? Does its content answer their questions / meet their needs? Does anything appear off-putting or spammy?

Unfortunately, that is just the beginning. Be careful not to fall into the trap that so many do, and think of improving the quality of your site as a one-off project with an end date. The reality is that it never ends – you should be constantly analysing your site, tweaking, then analysing again.

Instead of trying to chase the Google algorithm, SEOs who are convincing their companies to genuinely strive to be the best brand and the most usable website in their space are the ones who will see long-term success. The Phantom 2 update is just the latest proof of this.

 

By Jamie Starr, Senior Traffic Acquisition Manager at FloridaTix.com.

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