It is incredibly rare for a public company to admit they got hit by an algorithmic update by Google search. But Eun-Ji Noh, the data scientist in LinkedIn’s SEO department shared at SMX London that they did indeed get hit by the update and how they recovered.
They were hit by the February 7, 2017 update, which Google would not comment on but was classified by the SEO community has a phantom update. It was likely a core update, but Google did not confirm core updates back then.
Here is that slide:
Eun-Ji Noh explained how they recovered a few months later after implementing some machine learning techniques to find their lower quality content and make improvements to those areas. I think Eun-Ji Noh will be writing an article or two at Search Engine Land about this.
The transparency from LinkedIn on this was amazing and I’d love to see more companies be open about these issues. Of course, like I wrote on Search Engine Land about Cars.com vs CarGurus.com and how they discuss these items in their earnings report and how it impacts their stock prices.
Forum discussion at Twitter.