by Dr. William Sen
| CEO and founder of blue media
How Do Recent Events Affect SEO?
blue media Newsletter
YouTube was the first Channel to see declines. There is a discussion in the SEO community about how Google has reacted to the recent news trend around this topic.
The first thing we could see is that Google immediately and without announcement demonetized all video content on YouTube that would even mention the word ‘Соrоnаvіrus’. On March 11th Google revised its decision and said it would review some of the videos and monetize them again, but would do that only on selected channels.
Demonetization process in YouTube means that videos are unlikely to have high visibility and most likely will be ranked down.
How Does This Affect SEO Content?
- Before we dive more into that topic, please note that Google has been ranking content down in the past that would increase the risk of jeopardizing public health, or prone to being taken advantage by unserious entities. A good example is the YLYM (Your Money or Your Life) algorithm that among others would rank down all content that would make wrong promises and sell shady products to people with certain health problems.
- It’s well-known in the SEO industry that Google ranks down websites and topics that are controversial or in some way prone to take advantage of a sensitive situation or topic.
In this matter, another discussion among SEOs has risen as to whether the keyword ‘Соrоnаvіrus’ should be a part of any content production at the moment.
The very recent development and the fact that Google would have to react fast to make changes in its algorithm is not good news from an SEO perspective: Tampering with the Google algorithm in such a haste from a Google perspective can increase the risk of being ranked down no matter what, just by mentioning the keyword ‘Соrоnаvіrus’.
Since these developments are very recent, there are no definite results in this matter. All we know so far is that Google has already reacted to various YouTube videos, since we can see these results right away after uploading a video during our YouTube SEO campaigns.
Our Recommendation
In order to stay safe from an SEO perspective, we do not recommend publishing or post anything related to the Соrоnаvіrus.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Note: If you’re wondering, how we used the keyword Соrоnаvіrus in this article anyways and got away with it — we used a black hat technique to prevent search engines from understanding the word. Simply copy paste ‘Соrоnаvіrus’ from this article and paste it to Google Search, and will see that Google won’t show you much results as it doesn’t understand it.
CATEGORIES Search Engine Optimization
William Sen has been an SEO since 2001 and is a Software Engineer since 1996, and has been working as an Associate Professor in Germany for the University of Dusseldorf and Cologne. He has been involved in developing custom SEO tools, large website and software projects. William has a PhD in Information Sciences and has been working for brands such as Expedia, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Bayer, Ford, T-Mobile and many more. He is the founder of blue media.
