Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond E-commerce podcast Greg Shuey speaks with Kristine Schachinger, an expert SEO consultant, about the complex process of recovering from a Google algorithm update. Kristine shares her journey from web design to specialized SEO consulting and explains her unique approach to recovery audits. The conversation delves into common misconceptions about algorithm impacts, differences between core and helpful content updates, and key steps for e-commerce businesses when impacted. She highlights the importance of thorough technical audits, internal linking, and site structure to avoid algorithm penalties, stressing that quick fixes are rarely effective. Kristine advises businesses to stay calm, prioritize structured SEO efforts, and continuously monitor key metrics during recovery, emphasizing that a comprehensive audit by an experienced professional is essential for effective recovery.
Key Takeaways
- Thorough Audits Over Reports: Basic SEO reports aren’t sufficient for diagnosing or recovering from algorithm impacts. Full site audits, including technical crawls using tools like Sitebulb or Screaming Frog, are essential for identifying deep-rooted issues that could affect rankings.
- Identify Update Types: It’s crucial to differentiate between core and helpful content updates, as each impacts different elements of the website (e.g., core updates often target technical SEO, while HCU targets content quality). Misinterpreting the cause of ranking loss can lead to ineffective recovery efforts.
- Site Structure and Linking: Proper site architecture, internal linking, and breadcrumb navigation are necessary to ensure Google can crawl and understand your website hierarchy. Poor structure can prevent important pages from being indexed, hurting visibility and rankings.
- Continuous Monitoring and Strategic Adjustments: During recovery, monitor Google Search Console for traffic trends and maintain patience. Google’s recovery timeline is unpredictable, so changes must be implemented well in advance of the next algorithm update to take effect.
- Avoid Quick Fixes: SEO concepts like “EAT” are often misinterpreted as quick fixes for recovery. However, they don’t impact algorithmic penalties directly. Kristine emphasizes focusing on proven SEO fundamentals rather than relying on speculative solutions.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Kristine Schachinger LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kschachinger-seo/
Sitebulb: https://sitebulb.com
Screaming Frog: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Google Incident Reporting for Ranking Issues: https://status.search.google.com
Search Engine Journal/Roger Montti – How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low-Quality Pages: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-compression-can-be-used-to-detect-low-quality-pages/530916/
Google Search Console (GSC): https://search.google.com/search-console
Google Ranking Systems Documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.154)
Hey everyone, welcome to the seven figures and beyond e-commerce growth podcast. hope that everyone is having a fantastic day today. I am really excited about our guests. Her name is Christine Schachinger. Did I get that? Awesome. So she is the founder of an agency called sites without walls and they are at least from what I understand.
Kristine Schachinger (00:15.945)
You did! Yes, that’s good.
Greg Shuey (00:29.214)
a full service concierge SEO digital marketing group. Did I get that right?
Kristine Schachinger (00:34.985)
Mostly, I’m not an agency anymore. That’s when I had a business partner, I do work. I’m just a consultant. Concierge consultant, yeah. But I do bring people in when necessary.
Greg Shuey (00:38.314)
Okay.
That’s cool. All right.
Greg Shuey (00:46.562)
Cool. So I’m going to put you on the spot here. What on earth does that mean? Concierge. Like I’ve never heard anyone describe themselves in that way. So what is that?
Kristine Schachinger (00:52.592)
Hehehe.
Kristine Schachinger (00:56.541)
Well, as a consultant, I have to distinguish myself from agencies, right? So agencies, agencies, you you talk to me, but I don’t do the work, right? The junior person generally does the work. with me, I act as a fractal SEO. So I come in and I work with you and your team and whatever, whatever shape or form it takes. So I don’t have like, we do this work for this much an hour and we do this many hours a month. It’s like, I have a retainer. We have so many hours at that month. They need me to do training. They need me to do.
Greg Shuey (01:00.514)
Fair enough.
Greg Shuey (01:05.526)
Got it.
Greg Shuey (01:10.624)
Okay, cool.
Kristine Schachinger (01:25.822)
audit, need me to do an update to help with the migration, whatever it happens to be, then I’m there to help them do that and walk them through it and educate them.
Greg Shuey (01:33.772)
Got it. Makes total sense. Thank you for sharing that. So our topic today is going to be quite serious, pretty important. We are going to dive in to how to help an e-commerce business recover from a Google algorithm update. I think over the last 12 years of running my agency Stride, we’ve had maybe two clients who’ve been negatively impacted by an algorithm update, but it does.
Kristine Schachinger (01:35.623)
Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (02:00.342)
happen to brands all the time. So I think it’s gonna be a really great discussion today. So Christine, I know you’re super busy. Thank you so much for taking 30 minutes out of your day to be with us.
Kristine Schachinger (02:09.833)
Sure.
I’m happy to.
Greg Shuey (02:15.222)
It’ll be fun. Before we dive in, could you take just a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today.
Kristine Schachinger (02:25.521)
Sure. I graduated with a degree in sociology and art, which meant I was a barista when I got out of college. I lived in the countryside of Virginia, so there wasn’t even really tech jobs yet. I’m giving my enjoy here, it was before there two in front of the century, 1998, 1999. So I saw an ad in the paper for HTML and web designer. And I was like, well, I don’t know HTML, but I think I can learn it because I got a
Greg Shuey (02:31.901)
Hahaha!
Greg Shuey (02:39.092)
Interesting.
Kristine Schachinger (02:54.921)
I actually went to the bookstore to get the book on it. We go online now today. And, yeah, I did. Yes. That’s what I got. And I was like, for those are not who were born after 2000, you probably never saw word perfect, but back then word perfect had code in it. And the code was similar to HTML. So I figured I could do it. And no, and I said to the person who’s hiring me, you know, you can’t teach someone design. went to four years art school, but you can teach me how to code. And so she did.
Greg Shuey (02:58.459)
HTML for dummies probably right?
Kristine Schachinger (03:21.993)
And then after a year of that, it was a very small firm. left for another local firm, a publisher, who did like Martha Stewart and Reba McIntyre. And I got on with them and I did Reba McIntyre’s site. And I did a lot of code, front end code, front end development, and then design. And then when I moved to Vegas, I was doing, we were spending four million a year in Google clicks. And I had been looking at this SEO thing. And for me, it was new.
Greg Shuey (03:34.358)
Cool.
Greg Shuey (03:46.006)
Hmm. Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (03:50.161)
older people in industry, started in the 90s. But, and I was like, asked my boss, was like, can I, can I do this? And she’s like, go ahead and agency, but we’ve been live for six months with this other site we’re launching and we have, we’re not been indexed. And she says, if you can figure out why, then I’ll let you take it over because we’re paying them 20,000 a month. And I said, okay. And so now today I would know like instantly what to look for, but I didn’t know instantly. It took me like a day. I’m like, well, we have this thing called a no index tag on the site that they never removed.
Greg Shuey (04:13.804)
sure.
Kristine Schachinger (04:17.905)
And she’s like, what? And I said, yeah, so, you know, so we’ve been paying 20,000 a month for a site that’s literally not indexable. And I said, yep. And she goes, so she goes, you can take over the SEO. So I did. And that’s how I started an SEO. She paid for my first conferences. and then I was a director CTO of a company for a little while, or not CTO, but director. Like it was all merged together. And
Greg Shuey (04:24.81)
Yep, one line code.
Kristine Schachinger (04:44.937)
Then I went out on my own after there. So it was a startup that was insane. I was working 120 hours a week, so something had to give. Yeah. Yeah. So I and I started, it went out on my own around 2009, 2010. So yeah. And then I, I worked with Dave Davies. It was Beanstalk at the time for nine years. He started as my mentor and became a business partner. And then we just went our separate ways just cause that’s what happens sometimes. And I’ve just been doing it on my own ever since I concentrate on technical and because I coded for a long time, 14 years.
Greg Shuey (04:51.037)
Ugh, no. No!
Greg Shuey (04:57.708)
That’s awesome. Cool.
Kristine Schachinger (05:14.645)
and also do, you know, did CRO, UIX, developed UIX, all that sort of stuff. So I have a really good idea how websites should be put together. And I’m probably taking way too long to tell the story. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (05:26.304)
No, you’re good. I love hearing people’s stories. That’s fascinating to me. That’s a, that’s a fun history. So if you are listening to this today, chances are pretty good that you’ve been impacted by an algorithm update. mean, most people are probably going to look at that and be like, that doesn’t apply to me. But if you’re listening to that, like you’ve more than likely seen your rankings disappear. You’ve seen your impressions in search console tank.
You’ve seen your organic traffic take a nosedive and you’re probably in panic mode. So before, Christine, before we start talking about pinpointing specific issues and finding solutions, like let’s talk about how brands can really differentiate between normal traffic fluctuations and those caused by an algorithm issue or an algorithm update. Because I talked to a lot of people who come to me and they say, Hey, we’ve been nailed. Like we, got, we got penalized.
But when I did again, I’m like, no, it looks like these five competitors significantly benefited from the algorithm update and pushed you down. That doesn’t mean you’re penalized, right? That’s just someone doing better SEO and getting benefit from that. So can you walk me through that?
Kristine Schachinger (06:37.745)
Sure. First of all, you have to identify that you were hit at all by an algorithm update. So Google has a thing called ranking incidents. And it’s worded really, really when you go search, but just search Google, incident ranking. And they’ll tell you when they launched it and when it ended. So if it happened outside that window and there’s no update at that time, it is not an update. There may be something that tweets in the algorithms, generally when you’re hit by an algorithm update, you lose like 30%, 40 % minimum traffic.
usually 70 to 90 % traffic. So if you’re down 5 to 10 % and there’s no update, you might have gotten hit by a Google tweak during their algorithms because there’s a lot of those we don’t never hear about. But you weren’t hit by an update. Those will be announced. They’ll be on the incident ranking system. And you’ll lose a significant amount of traffic. You also have to make sure you know what update it is. So a bunch of people came to me in last six months. They’re like, we were hit by the HDU, the helpful content update. We don’t think we can recover. Everyone told us we can’t recover, not to even bother. And I go look at their dates. And I’m like, well, no.
Greg Shuey (07:14.604)
Sure.
Greg Shuey (07:21.324)
Got it.
Kristine Schachinger (07:34.089)
you were hit by a core update. Maybe not sure. So I had all of them came to me. Not one was hit by the HCU. They were all core updates. And then last year they ran the core update right after that, the HCU and then a core update. So if you’re not, yeah. Yeah. So if you’re looking at that and you’re like, no, your date is in like November. I think it was ended in November, the corporate, I’m not a hundred percent sure. Well, obviously it’s not the H, it’s not the HCU. So they’re like, really? And I’m like, no, and we can recover always, almost always can recover a core update.
Greg Shuey (07:35.544)
Maybe not true.
Greg Shuey (07:46.536)
I know, it’s super helpful.
Greg Shuey (07:54.402)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (08:03.564)
Yeah. Yep.
Kristine Schachinger (08:03.913)
devaluation. So you have to know the dates, you have to know what happened. So I had one site that came to me, they lost 90 % of their traffic, but there was no update running. We found that they had a significant technical issue that caused Google not to index their pages. And we fixed that and they got all the traffic back because it wasn’t an update. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (08:11.436)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (08:16.278)
interesting.
Yeah, that’s awesome. Cool. So once a brand is fairly certain that they have been penalized, they’ve been hit by an update, what are the first two or three steps that they should take to figure out what their next steps are?
Kristine Schachinger (08:35.465)
Sure. Can I back stuff for just one second? The HGU and the corp update are applied differently. And we’re talking about the older one, not the supposed new one. We talk about the later, because I don’t think it exists, actually, the page level one. But the corp update is applied at the keyword level. So they say it’s your money or your life sites. But Google doesn’t know whether your site is money or your life. But they know the keywords coming to your site, because of their entity and knowledge graph, are your money or your life.
Greg Shuey (08:37.783)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (08:57.036)
Yeah. Yep.
Kristine Schachinger (09:02.375)
So it’s like medical, financial, e-commerce is considered your money or life because you deal with credit cards. So if it is not applied site-wide, if you look in Search Console and everything around those dates is down, then that is not a core of dates, probably, it’s you. But if you look and it’s only applied to certain pages, you’ll find that there’s core key terms. So you might have one term, there might be three, four, five words of that term, but there’s a core term. It’s usually two words, maybe three. And all those are down.
and rest are fine. That’s a core update. So that’s how you can tell the difference if you aren’t sure about the dates. You can look at how it was applied. It was applied last year. The one supposedly in April this year was supposedly page level. We can talk about that later. really don’t think that happened. Sorry, sorry. He’s going to to do me the backtrack.
Greg Shuey (09:45.186)
Cool. Awesome. you’re good. So like, what are those steps that they should start taking once they’ve been, okay, I’ve been hit.
Kristine Schachinger (09:57.097)
find a site, a site editor, like myself, it doesn’t have to be me, obviously, but find people to do real audits. And if someone’s giving you a semress report or an HS report, that it’s not an audit. That it’s never an audit. Even my Martin split from Google has come out and said, that’s not an audit. It’s not, it’s a monitoring tool, right? It’ll tell you like you have 500 errors or 400 errors and things like that, but it’s not an audit. No one is going into your site and deep diving on your, your pages, your content. You need to, you need to run a crawler. use site bulb and screaming frog.
Greg Shuey (10:07.266)
Okay.
Greg Shuey (10:12.32)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (10:18.038)
Yeah. Okay.
Kristine Schachinger (10:26.409)
Other people can. Yeah. site bulb is awesome. It screaming. Yeah. Screaming frogs like the down and dirty tool, but site bulb has visuals and graphs and they have even like learn more about this. So you can send to a client the link like, Hey, just look at this link. They tell you how they found it. What’s wrong there. they give deep dive reports. Yeah. It’s a really, really good tool. and it’s really cheap too. It’s under $50 a month. So.
Greg Shuey (10:26.72)
Sight bulb. I’ve never heard of sight bulb before. I’ll have to take a look at it.
Greg Shuey (10:44.833)
cool.
Greg Shuey (10:50.508)
Which is great because I’ve used DeepCrawl in the past and it has gotten so expensive. So, sight bulb it is.
Kristine Schachinger (10:54.035)
Yeah. Yeah. And they don’t charge you by pages. They charge you by just the product. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I have sites that are way too big for the other products. had to find something like that. So anyway, so they need to find an auditor because the people that created the issue, the people on your team now, your current SEO, just didn’t know. not saying they did bad. They did wrong. They just didn’t know site auditing and for update recovery is very specialized. not a lot of us.
Greg Shuey (11:01.59)
by the domain.
Greg Shuey (11:06.272)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (11:22.857)
But we’ve seen it, we’ve done it, and we know it moves the algorithms. And we know how those work, right? I don’t know everything in the algorithm, but I can tell you this will affect it, this will not. This is part of the core update. The core updates are almost 90 % technical. So you want to find an auditor. Don’t wait. A lot of people, by the time they get to me, they’re down to their last monies. They don’t have any. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (11:32.416)
Right.
Greg Shuey (11:44.93)
They’ve been grinding it out for 90 days, 120 days and are freaking out.
Kristine Schachinger (11:49.193)
no, even more than that. I’m talking six to nine months to a year. That’s the time when I first, yes, most clients I get, they’ve already been down six months or more. Yeah. And I’m going to, I’m going to say this. I know it’s going to be controversial for some people, but if someone says they’re going to fix your site for an update, any update by doing eat, that is not a thing. It is not an, Google even says now, like, is it in the algorithm? No, it’s not. So it’s a, it’s a great concept for creating content. It’s conceptual, right?
Greg Shuey (11:52.426)
Really?
Greg Shuey (11:56.736)
What? Wow, okay.
Greg Shuey (12:06.754)
That is not a thing, people.
Greg Shuey (12:12.578)
Ha
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (12:17.257)
But the things in it are not measured by Google. So you won’t recover. Because I’ve had people come to me, spent all their last dollars on someone doing EAT, and they get no recovery. And they come to me like, why didn’t we get recovery? And I’m like, well, I’m sorry. Those aren’t in the algorithms. Google actually has ranking systems documentation. I urge every SEO to go read it. Not the Quality Rater’s Guide, not the EAT, none of that. Go to the ranking systems documentation. They tell you basically what they’re looking for and how it works. So you need to find an auditor that has a lot of years of experience doing this.
Greg Shuey (12:24.855)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (12:47.725)
And then let us, we need access to your GSC. Sometimes your GA, never your backend. It’s very rare I ever need, but sometimes I may need to look at your server. And then we’ll run crawlers over it and it can take anywhere from three to like eight weeks, depending on the size of the site. And then we do deep dive into the data and we look at first, everything common that we know could be wrong for that algorithm update. Every algorithm update is different. So core update can be all the ranking signals.
but tends to be technical, tends to be large technical issues that have been on the site for a while and Google didn’t seem to care. And then Google comes along and is like, no, psh. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think they use it as a way to save money. If they find that there’s a lot of cruft on sites, they run a core update and those sites get hit and blah, blah. So you need that and you need to make sure that you allocate the time and resources for it. And then you have to…
Greg Shuey (13:23.432)
Mm-hmm. we’ve changed the rules and here we go. Yep
Kristine Schachinger (13:46.633)
to the team ready to go to because the, now sometimes someone’s too small and I can find them a resource to do the work, but you have to have it in before the next update. And it usually about 30 to 60 days before the next update. Otherwise you don’t get into that update. So you’ll think it failed and it didn’t necessarily fail. You just did the work too late. Yeah. And I people that I’ll see them posting on Twitter, like when the updates running, they’re like changing things. I’m like, no, no, it’s too, it’s too like.
Greg Shuey (14:05.344)
you didn’t get it fast enough and yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (14:15.113)
because that’s not going to help you. But so yeah, you have to do it.
Greg Shuey (14:20.194)
Got it. So when you think about specifically e-commerce websites, are there certain platforms that you see get hit more often? mean, Shopify out of the box is pretty clean code. You know, when I look at algorithm updates, I say, you know, it’s usually technical or it could be link based. Most of the time, content’s really strong on an e-commerce website. So are there platforms that people should be more aware of that it could potentially happen to them or is it all across the board?
Kristine Schachinger (14:42.289)
effort.
Kristine Schachinger (14:48.841)
Yeah, it’s hard to say it’s platform because WordPress powers 60 % of the internet right now. Yeah, so you could say, well, I see a lot of WordPress sites, but also at 60%. So there’s far fewer Shopify sites out there. They all have their own issues. Like Shopify with e-commerce, I know of tools. There’s a tool, Audience Key, where they’ll go to the edge and add categories for you. And I know Shopify is going to add that. But not having categories is a problem for e-commerce on Shopify.
Greg Shuey (14:52.854)
Yeah. Yep.
Greg Shuey (15:10.784)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Kristine Schachinger (15:16.777)
So your auditor has to know the problems per platform, but basically speaking, it’s not a specific platform. It’s just what a Google find on that platform or in what you did that it was affecting in that update. And since it’s a core update, can be on many things. There was one site once they eliminated because just their domain name was POV. And POV is a porn term too. It’s just point of view. That’s all they meant was point of view,
Greg Shuey (15:40.53)
Interesting. Huh.
Kristine Schachinger (15:45.563)
Yeah, was a Shopify, but I have anything to do with Shopify. just had to do this at Google restricted that term because it’s associated with porn. So yeah. But I would say that sites in general are getting worse and worse. I’m doing audits right now, and I do project retainers. So I don’t charge anything after the retainer. Whatever I charge is what I charge you. If it takes me double the hours, then that’s my fault.
Greg Shuey (15:52.033)
my goodness. Fascinating. Okay.
Greg Shuey (16:08.586)
and you scoped it wrong and that was your fault.
Kristine Schachinger (16:11.353)
Exactly. Or something just as anomaly, a weird anomaly. And you know, it takes a lot of research, but they usually balance out. I’ll get some that are a lot of time and some that are quick. All the audits right now are taking double the time because once you get under the hood, there’s so many issues and they’re like basic issues, like just image weight. Like every site I check now, no one has compressed the images before load. And they’re like, well, can I just use a tool? And I’m like, you can’t, but they can only take 30 % off and your images are one.
Greg Shuey (16:22.956)
Hmm.
interesting.
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (16:40.361)
130 megabyte images. They had 8,000 images over two megabytes, right? So the tools can only take 30, 40 % off. It’s not enough. like with images, make sure your images are compressed before load. Make sure that you have the largest image, not that you’re putting in a 6,000 pixel when you need 250, because it resizes on the fly, but the weight’s the same, right? So yeah.
Greg Shuey (16:41.922)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (16:50.006)
Interesting.
Greg Shuey (16:59.33)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think part of that problem there is that we’re just all in a hurry, you know, to be able to take the time to be able to do those things.
Kristine Schachinger (17:10.153)
Well, I also think because of the tools that are out there today, people don’t have the knowledge creating it. So they may go get a WordPress developer that’s like local and says, I can do sites and you know, they, pay them 500 bucks to do it and you get a $500 site, right? Yeah. So, so a lot of the issues, titles and metas, people don’t fill them out or they, don’t fill them out. in it title and metas, like we, my family had a store for years, right?
Greg Shuey (17:23.596)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Kristine Schachinger (17:35.625)
You’re titling your meta with a sign on your store. When people are walking by, you’re going to drag them into your store, right? You’re going to get them to convert from the search and result page. You have to have titles and metas that’ll do that. So titles and metas are poor. Images are poor. Internal linking, which Google’s put a lot of weight on. These are things anyone has control over. We’re not talking about tiny class here, right? They don’t do good. I just did an audit at a site yesterday. 90 % of their sites have no links. They’re pages. And they’re like, why are we down? 90 % of your site’s not crawlable.
Greg Shuey (18:03.99)
Because yeah, who can’t get through your pages? They can’t find them all.
Kristine Schachinger (18:05.129)
They can’t find them. yeah, so it’s always good to and I don’t know if it’s still deductible, but as of like last year, it still was for small to medium business. You can do a site audit and deduct it from your taxes, your business taxes once a year. Yeah. Enterprise level I think is different. But if you’re a regular site, you should have a site health audit once a year. And then you should have a, if you’re an enterprise site, probably once a quarter because your developers put a lot of craft because
Greg Shuey (18:20.182)
Interesting.
Kristine Schachinger (18:33.459)
There’s a hundred ways a developer can do something. And Google’s like, no, we have to. And I’m like, I’m the building inspector going, I’m sorry, that’s a great solution. It just doesn’t work for Google.
Greg Shuey (18:44.908)
So maybe this is a tough question to answer, but like if there’s five things that a brand should be focusing on that will help almost future proof them and help them survive algorithm updates, what are those five things? Is was image compression one of those big things?
Kristine Schachinger (19:01.851)
Image compression is really one of those big things because Google John came out and says core web vitals don’t worry about being 100 % that’s true. But in core updates, core vitals are almost always a part of the solution. Our page load issues, time to first byte. Most people probably don’t know what that is, but it’s the time it takes to get your first pixel back. Google wants it in 60 milliseconds. I haven’t seen a site under one second in the last six months. So you’re hosting a new serving, how it’s being served.
Greg Shuey (19:07.244)
Yeah. Right.
Interesting. Okay.
Greg Shuey (19:18.7)
Yeah. Yep.
Greg Shuey (19:25.654)
Dang. Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (19:29.737)
your images, your site structure. see so most of the people got hit by the helpful content update that are so upset, righteously upset about what Google did. I look at their sites and they’re not structured. They just have blog posts, blog posts, on the front page. They don’t have any landing pages with content. They have content that’s good, but the rest of the site architecture is a disaster. And then they don’t have any internal linking. So let’s imagine your homepage gets, and I know I’m use the horrible word page juice. The homepage gets all the page juice, right?
Greg Shuey (19:38.796)
Yeah. Yep.
Greg Shuey (19:45.11)
Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (19:51.17)
Hmm.
Kristine Schachinger (19:59.111)
not normal, let’s just say that juice has to make it, it only go three or four levels, but it has to make it three or four levels, right? So if you’re not internal linking properly, if you don’t have your site structure proper, if your nav buttons don’t have landing pages, then you’re not creating a good site. And so I would tell people to look up like a proper site structure. Anybody can do that. You don’t have to have technical knowledge. That’s making like a proper, like we did a site that was advocate for psychedelic mushrooms for
Greg Shuey (20:11.436)
Ciao.
Kristine Schachinger (20:28.841)
for depression and stuff. And they weren’t ranking for anything with mushrooms. And we looked at their site, they had no site structure that indicated their dominant topic was mushrooms. They sell out articles. So we put in one nav item for mushrooms and subcategories. And then within 30 to 60 days, the top 50 pages on their site getting traffic were all the mushroom related pages. Because now Google knew, you have a category mushroom, you have these subtopics, that’s related to your main topic, and then you have these pages. As long as you have a whole section related to these
Greg Shuey (20:35.586)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (20:50.304)
Hmm. Yep.
Kristine Schachinger (20:58.825)
terms on your site.
Greg Shuey (21:01.792)
I like to tell people three to four clicks max from any page. Google should be able to link through and crawl through and access any page. I think, I think that’s good recommendation.
Kristine Schachinger (21:15.301)
It is. If you’re a larger site, they have to be on the path within three or four, but it’s okay if it’s deeper, but you want to go much deeper. Also, it has to have a structure. So many sites say someone must have written a big article that’s really famous and like don’t put site structure in because it’s like these sites have no structure. And so people know Google disambiguates your actual domain name from the URLs and then it uses. they’ll say they don’t care about links, domain, like the URL itself. They don’t, but between pages, they look at the link structure to see what the pages are.
Greg Shuey (21:20.663)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (21:43.997)
Right? So when you put that in your anchor text, it’s like, these are about books. And then the URL says it’s about books and the next pages is about books. But if your whole site structure is all, yeah. And so they’re like, yes, we know this is about books, but if your whole structure is one level deep, then Google has no importance on any page. So they don’t know what you think is important for your site or what topic. Also, you do have to have links to your site and that is not part of the core update, but
Greg Shuey (21:50.198)
Yep. And then the title tag and the heading tag, it’s all structure. Yep.
Greg Shuey (22:07.52)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (22:10.365)
But someone told all the CMOs at Google this year at the Google Meet for them that they didn’t have links anymore. Google doesn’t use them. And I’m like, I got a site that’s been sitting there for six months with no links that has not gotten any more than 20 clicks a day because we have no links. yeah. Thanks, everybody.
Greg Shuey (22:23.35)
Yep.
Yep. So what are some of the best practices for link building after updates and just just regular link building? What does that look like?
Kristine Schachinger (22:36.009)
So link building, you need someone who’s really good at being creative. I do a lot of judging of the search awards and I see these super creative ways. I’m I wish I thought of that, right? A really interesting piece of content that you send out to publishers who don’t have enough staff to write content, right? So you give them a great study that you did or some research that you did. A lot of people had some really interesting stuff during the pandemic. Get them on podcasts. Don’t buy links. I mean, you can and there are some really good black hatters out there, but don’t do it on your cash register site because it’s…
Greg Shuey (22:40.706)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (22:49.878)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (23:04.418)
Yep. Yep.
Kristine Schachinger (23:04.937)
You get a manual action, you’re going to be sitting down for a while. And otherwise, they just devalue them and you don’t know that. So you go down and you think, I got hit by something. No, Google just went through, it goes through about every three or four months and it said, these links, we know these are no good. We devalue all the value. Exactly. So be creative, find someone who’s really good at creative link building. Digital PRs can also be helpful. But find opportunities. Once we had somebody on the small site, finance site.
Greg Shuey (23:19.916)
These don’t matter anymore. Yep.
Kristine Schachinger (23:34.499)
And the guy was really good. His name is David Kong. And he got her on, got him on a podcast with a hundred thousand viewers. By the end of the week, we had like 150 links from like top, like, yeah, top bloggers, top, you know, publishers and things like that. Cause she, I mean, cause he was on that podcast. yeah, you someone’s really good at creative, finding creative ways to get you noticed. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (23:41.346)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (23:46.369)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (23:53.708)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (23:58.368)
Yeah, absolutely. And then that should happen all the time. Not just like a short term spree of getting links. Like you should be constantly working on that throughout time because like you mentioned, Google will ignore links. And so you’ve got to keep adding new links over time and finding ways to hopefully differentiate and get links that your competitors aren’t getting as well.
Kristine Schachinger (24:02.942)
Yes.
Kristine Schachinger (24:14.952)
Yes.
Kristine Schachinger (24:22.899)
Yeah, exactly.
Greg Shuey (24:24.514)
Cool. What value is there in looking into competitors who were positively impacted by algorithm updates or who were not hit by an algorithm update when you’ve been hit? Is there any value in that?
Kristine Schachinger (24:40.571)
Actually, I don’t find value in that. And I know it’s a little bit contradictory. Yeah, because you don’t know what they did. You don’t know what Google is evaluating. don’t know. don’t like one site once outranked my competitor and, you’re not paying unless you’re paying your auditor to do an audit on the other site. And that’s different, right? Cause then you see everything. But they put a, it was brilliant. got a site map link at the footer and that opened up a whole text based website that had all their content on it.
Greg Shuey (24:42.923)
Interesting.
Greg Shuey (24:47.05)
Yeah, fair enough.
Greg Shuey (24:51.084)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (24:56.256)
Got it. Yep.
Greg Shuey (25:01.622)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (25:05.324)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (25:07.401)
because they did e-commerce, were selling pajamas for adults, but their pages had nothing on it, just pictures and like sales. But behind that, they had this entire, and there’s nothing technically Google would say was illegal about that, because it was just a link and all the pages were just content and they weren’t hiding it. So you just don’t ever know what the competitor is really doing. Also, you don’t know their strength. So if I get hit and Forbes is next to me and Forbes doesn’t appear to get hit, Forbes also has like…
massive already profile. Plus they have links that outnumber me. so I don’t do much of competitors. Now, if I’m doing research for growth, yes, I look at competitors like one, one once they had only six major competitors, but they had no key terms that overlapped any of the major competitors. So they were not showing with the major competitors and they’re like, well, we can’t outrank them. said, no, but you’ll be like number three or four. And then people think you’re, you know, the authority cause you’re ranking with these guys, right?
Greg Shuey (25:37.323)
Yep.
Kristine Schachinger (26:03.217)
And they’re like, so yeah, so you have to make sure. When it comes to site auditing, don’t. Also, because even if they went down because they weren’t meeting the best practices, right? So I need to make sure they meet the best practice. And they’ll go up the next one. And the other people go down. So yeah, I won’t be able to identify unless Google tells us specifically what they’re looking at, what the other site did right or
Greg Shuey (26:14.743)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (26:19.138)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (26:26.294)
Got it. Cool. That makes sense. Total. Cool. So while you’re trying to recover, you’ve got that three, four month period. Like what are some of the key SEO metrics that you should be monitoring while you’re working through that?
Kristine Schachinger (26:44.905)
There’s actually not a lot to monitor. Just watch GSC. Do you get your traffic back? After that, you can monitor what traffic came back, how it came back, did everything come back that you wanted to. But when you’re down, you’re completely suppressed. By the way, you’re also suppressed in Discover. And if you’re in News, you’re just suppressed in News. You’re suppressed across the board. And your Google ad prices will go up. So yeah, it’s a suppressor across all things. So if I see it start to recover in Discover, then I know that the regular recovery is probably coming because it’s
Greg Shuey (27:04.737)
Got it.
Kristine Schachinger (27:14.089)
it appears first in Discover because it doesn’t have all the ranking signals after you reevaluate it. So, but you’ll see it start to come back and you know, some, and also I noticed, I know after the April update, a bunch of people thought they got hit again, like I had a client who did, but no, they were just, ranked, they launched some other algorithms and there was some stuff wrong on the site that was not affected by the core update. So they did get that recovery, but they got a bit of a reduction, about 30 % because they had other issues that we had to fix. So.
Greg Shuey (27:17.398)
Interesting.
Greg Shuey (27:27.106)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (27:36.908)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (27:41.405)
Don’t assume if you start to drop after recovery that the recovery didn’t work. It could be you just have other issues that Google is concentrating on. But yeah, but there’s really not much to measure because you’re down, you’re down, right? You will not see a spike. If it’s a new site, the top traffic you get is about the same as the dips before. So if you look at before the drop, you’ll see that your content only goes about as high as the lowest points on the previous before the drop.
Greg Shuey (27:48.598)
Got it.
Kristine Schachinger (28:09.137)
So, but you won’t get spikes and stuff. doesn’t happen. You’re suppressed. yeah. You’re not. Yeah. Fixed mode. Cause he just got to get it in there before the next update. And since we never know when that’s going to run, you know, that that’s why you want to just start fixing stuff.
Greg Shuey (28:12.834)
Okay, cool. So just go head down and fix mode.
Greg Shuey (28:25.186)
Cool. Awesome. As we’re wrapping up, do you have any suggestions or tips or advice that you would give e-commerce brands on just making sure that they are adhering to best practices and minimizing any kind of impact from future algorithm updates?
Kristine Schachinger (28:45.993)
Well, one of the first things they really need to do is actually get someone who does a full crawl. I was working with a very large brand. Actually, I can say now because I’m out of the NDA. I was working with Zappos and we did a crawl because they had, actually I saw it first in GSC, but they don’t have the report anymore, had 2 billion pages that Google was aware of. And I counted it like three times. like, 2 billion, the site doesn’t have 2 billion pages or products, right? But we narrowed it down to a facet and nav issue.
Greg Shuey (28:55.682)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (29:02.071)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (29:10.818)
Right?
Kristine Schachinger (29:15.687)
So Google, because they’re using React and React is a JavaScript framework that doesn’t also doesn’t record pages. By the way, anyone out there working with e-commerce, working with React or anything that creates pages, tell them that that they have tell your dev team or IT team. have to record every page that is made because on this site, there are hundreds of thousands of pages made that had no record with the IT group. So there’s no way to like get a list. You just have to crawl and find them all. Right. Well, the problem was
Greg Shuey (29:33.739)
Interesting.
Greg Shuey (29:40.876)
Wow.
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (29:44.457)
This one we crawled, was on a terabyte drive, we couldn’t open the file. It was so big, right? Yeah, a terabyte drive. We crawled it, but we could not. So anyway, check your especially with faceted navigation, do a full crawl and see if you have a crawl leak, is what we call it. A crawl leak is when the crawler can create pages. And this happens a lot on e-commerce sites. Or it can fill the cart. So I had one.
Greg Shuey (29:50.679)
my gosh.
Greg Shuey (30:04.012)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (30:09.782)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (30:13.331)
where every time I hit the cart button, items in the cart, they weren’t buttons, they were links. So Google could fill the cart. And so when I did it, I had $300,000 carts, $40 items, because all it did is run through there, right? So you always want to get an auditor really to do a site health audit. But if you’re doing an internal, at least get like Screaming Frog and just run it and just make sure you don’t have fastened that. It’s a huge thing for e-commerce sites.
Greg Shuey (30:19.554)
Mmm.
Greg Shuey (30:23.483)
my gosh.
Kristine Schachinger (30:38.377)
Also, you need commerce site structure, making sure you things like bright crumbs, so that the crawler can get back and forth. If you have subdomains, make sure they’re only there for the right reasons, because subdomain has to rank on its own. And I see that happen a lot. like, have shoes dot, we have clothes dot, have whatever. And then now all these sites have to rank on their own, which you really don’t want to have to do. Yeah, and make sure your site search box can’t create pages that are indexable. That happens a lot. So once that I was working with,
Greg Shuey (30:49.686)
Yeah. Yep.
Greg Shuey (30:59.52)
No, it’s a pain.
Kristine Schachinger (31:07.913)
their site search box created pages, right? So every spammer in the world knew that and they would come put in the search and it would put the keywords in the URL, the title, the description and the H1. And then they’d send spam links to it. But because they matched the page, the spam links, including the 13 million Russian porn links that went to that site, but they matched the page. So Google said page match, we don’t get rid of these links, right? So, and then they also had a vulnerability where they were left. The person was able to redirect traffic to their site.
Greg Shuey (31:18.85)
Wow.
Greg Shuey (31:25.9)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (31:30.602)
No.
Kristine Schachinger (31:38.057)
through there. So make sure your site search box is always closed down to Google. And those results are terrible for Google. You don’t want that either. just make sure that it’s a business decision, but it’s usually better to have one item and then different variations of it than it is to have 50 variations of something. Because you don’t need Google to index that you have a brown top, a pink top, a yellow top. Unless it’s something really unique. And so you want to make sure you also have a proper canonical structure.
Greg Shuey (31:38.079)
my gosh.
Kristine Schachinger (32:06.397)
that you’re not sending Google down 1,000 pages of nothing. And one last thing, Screaming Frog will allow you to take screenshots. Do a crawl with screenshots on, because you want to check and make sure most e-commerce sites are using JavaScript. You want to make sure you don’t have blank pages. So the easiest way to do that instead of trying to go through the code, or if you’re not a coder, is do screenshots of JavaScript on in Screaming Frog in mobile and see if the pages are all full.
Greg Shuey (32:11.872)
I think those are some fantastic tips.
Greg Shuey (32:35.052)
Interesting.
Kristine Schachinger (32:35.123)
you’ll usually run across as part of the site where they put in JavaScript for the content and you can’t see it. Google can’t see it. You can also use their JavaScript content button or JavaScript button, forget which, and you can flip it and it’ll tell you the difference between the raw HTML and the rendered HTML. And sometimes that can be massive. It can be like the rendered is like a thousand more words, right? The problem is Google’s using the raw, right? And they’re not getting all that content in the rendered version.
Greg Shuey (32:39.745)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (32:44.63)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (32:51.168)
Hmm. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (32:56.832)
Right. Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (33:02.713)
or your canonical has to be in the raw. There’s things that has to be in the raw. So they show you the differences in screaming products. You make sure that that stuff is there. so there’s the biggest things for e-commerce. Everything else people know, like content, you know, make sure your product pages are unique and don’t just use what they give you out of the, you know, when I worked at Zappos, had writers that rewrote every product description, but we also ranked number one for most every important term. So yeah.
Greg Shuey (33:10.924)
Cool.
Greg Shuey (33:22.817)
so smart.
Greg Shuey (33:26.858)
Yep. I love it. Perfect. I that’s a great stopping point. Any, I guess any final words?
Kristine Schachinger (33:35.041)
I would just say, don’t panic, make sure you get it. Yeah. Even like I’ll even offer to people. I’m not promoting my service. I’m saying what other people let me do is we’ll offer the ability just to look at your site and tell you what your update issues are. Not like, not like the whole, you know, enchilada, but Hey, this is a core update. And I see that you have these issues. Now do you want to move forward with an audit? this is an HCU update. You may, and can we talk about it a second? Are we out of time?
Greg Shuey (33:38.188)
Don’t panic.
Greg Shuey (33:48.898)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (34:03.532)
No, you’re great. Yeah, keep going.
Kristine Schachinger (34:05.373)
So, HCU, the helpful content update ran in September last year, September, October. Those sites are, no sites have recovered. They, in April, March and April last year, they were supposed to take the site level off and put it at the page level, but no sites recovered. So, they moved it from site-wide to page level. Even if it was over 24 hours, you wouldn’t have all your pages affected anymore, right? So, site pages would have recovered.
Greg Shuey (34:19.136)
Mm-hmm
Kristine Schachinger (34:35.507)
But they haven’t. I don’t believe. And Danny said something, Sullivan said something odd about like it not being in the same form anymore now that it’s in the core. I think it broke. It’s machine learning. It broke mostly on small sites. There’s a story that came out from Roger Monte yesterday about a compression algorithm they use to see if you’re a spammer. And so I think they trained on spam sites and these small bloggers, small publishers have similar characteristics.
Greg Shuey (34:36.897)
entries.
Greg Shuey (34:46.498)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (34:53.334)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (35:03.66)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (35:03.921)
And so it took them down to, and they can’t lift it because it’s machine learning. Cause Matt cuts always said, I’ll never use machine learning because if it breaks, we can’t fix it. So those sites have not recovered. We do know if you have one of those from what I’ve seen so far, unlike Penguin back 10 years ago, people remember that they don’t transfer the devaluation. So in Penguin, if you made a new site within three to four months, you lost that site too. They transfer the devaluation in this one. The people have created a new site with a new domain, have not seen their sites go away. at this time, so if
Greg Shuey (35:10.583)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (35:31.404)
Hmm, interesting.
Kristine Schachinger (35:33.541)
Yeah, and I had one client that just added an S to their domain name. Now, unfortunately, they lost links. And if you’re a massive site, you can’t do that because you can’t just transfer all the links. But if you’re a smaller site, a small publisher, you can just put a site note on your old site, say, we moved here, and then start promoting a new site with a new domain. But don’t copy over all the same issues that you had. Have someone evaluate so they can tell you what you need to fix. So yeah.
Greg Shuey (35:53.908)
and Trist.
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (36:00.076)
Yep. That’s great.
Kristine Schachinger (36:02.313)
Just want to give a little hope to people that so far that does seem to work. There is hope. Yeah. for a year. For a year. None of them have recovered in a year.
Greg Shuey (36:05.91)
There is hope. Don’t panic, even though you are in panic mode because you’re losing money. Don’t panic. There is hope.
Greg Shuey (36:15.106)
Crazy.
Kristine Schachinger (36:16.413)
Yeah. And Google keeps just saying nothing that’s helpful. that’s my best guess on the theory right now. Because I took in about 50, 60 sites and looked at them and they didn’t have the same ad advertisers. didn’t have ads. There’s all sorts of things. But the one thing that I’m common was this very, these themes and templates that people use that are very similar to what the spammers use. And right before HCU came out, about six months, three,
Greg Shuey (36:22.22)
Huh.
Greg Shuey (36:31.714)
Yeah.
Kristine Schachinger (36:45.137)
affiliates came to me, they all had the same template and they were all dead in the water. And I thought that was very odd that three people with the same template came to me out of all the people in the world that do affiliate, they all had the same template. think Google looked at the template. But if you get a search engine journal and you look up Roger Monti’s article from this week, you’ll see the compression algorithm. And I think that’s what they’re using where they look at how much is really there that’s different. And then they use that to denote it’s spam site. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (36:50.082)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (37:05.814)
Yeah.
Cool. I’ll hunt down that article and make sure it’s in the show notes. So thank you for bringing them.
Kristine Schachinger (37:13.213)
Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, it’s a article. Well, thank you. That was painless.
Greg Shuey (37:15.872)
Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you so much. That was great, Christine. I really appreciate your time. I think we learned a lot and yeah, we’re super excited to be able to get this out. So to our listeners, again, don’t panic, but hopefully you’re able to pull some of these things out of here and start to make a plan. Carve out some time over the next few weeks. Reach out to Christine if you need some professional help. Like she mentioned, she can do.
Kristine Schachinger (37:23.515)
Okay, well thank you.
Greg Shuey (37:42.882)
Would you call it an initial audit? Is that what you would do?
Kristine Schachinger (37:46.473)
I have a 995 fee where I tell you if it’s recoverable or not. And if it’s an HTU, how you can move to a new domain. And if not, then you probably need a full audit, but here’s your general points. But, there’s also other people too, because I’m not here to just promote myself or anything. But I do know some other auditors that are also very good. But you definitely need an auditor, not just someone who does SEO, because SEO is an
Greg Shuey (37:52.226)
Cool.
Greg Shuey (37:59.586)
Perfect.
Greg Shuey (38:04.78)
Hahaha
Kristine Schachinger (38:14.247)
regular SEO is not the same as understanding how Google hit a site and why. yeah.
Greg Shuey (38:18.604)
Love it. Cool. So reach out to an auditor and start executing like crazy. Heads down, executing, and hopefully you’ll see a recovery on the next update.
Kristine Schachinger (38:29.971)
Yes, cross fingers. Okay, I’m waving it.
Greg Shuey (38:31.382)
Yeah, all right. Thank you everyone for joining. Bye.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
