Report: Last Week’s Google Update Benefited News & Magazine Web Sites

Last week, we reported that Google updated their core search algorithm once again. Supposedly, Google makes these changes all the time, but we noticed major changes with this past one, where Google said it was a normal update, not related to Panda, Penguin, SSL or other famously named algorithms.

Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics did a deeper analysis of this update and he noticed based on their dataset that this update may have been related to news related content. The data showed that “new newsworthy content” received a boost with this update.

He then shared analytics on how some major news publications saw a spike in search rankings in Google. Here are the ranking improvements seen across the board with these news sites:

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Even with my small SEO news site, seroundtable.com, SearchMetrics reports a 134% increase in keyword visibility in Google. The truth is, I track this only with referral data and I did see about a 25% increase in Google organic referrals week over week.

What is interesting is that Google launched a brand new and more real-time version of Google Trends last week, which may or may not be used in core search as well. So maybe since Google released this, it is better able to assess news-worthy content and baked it into their core search algorithm going forward? Or maybe it is just a coincidence?

This is all just speculation, since Google will not comment about the specifics around last weeks update.

Here are some charts from SearchMetrics:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.