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by skilled 783 days ago
The article says March, which coincidences with this:

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-updat...

It's possible Tuta caught a stray here because they recently changed their name from Tutanota[0], including the domain name. This update has the SEO world up in arms, in fact - the update is still rolling out, nearly two months after it was announced.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Google Search team's offices to learn just how much machine learning is messing with the ability to properly understand intent -> rank content.

E: Semrush shows that they took a nosedive, but not a complete decimation[1].

E2: I take the initial edit back, looks like they got a classifier applied to their site, also known as the "Helpful Content Update":

https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-problem

It's a nasty classifier and not a single site has been reinstated from it[2] since Google began to apply it in Sep 2023.

[0]: https://tuta.com/blog/tutanota-is-now-tuta

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/E9ybteL.png

[2]: https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1781679769735545280

3 comments

> It's possible Tuta caught a stray here because they recently changed their name from Tutanota[0], including the domain name.

I was wondering about the similarity when I saw the headline; I can't imagine why would they do it. Why would they voluntarily destroy their own brand recognition?

> I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Google Search team's offices to learn just how much machine learning is messing with the ability to properly understand intent -> rank content.

I'm not normally the fan of ML (ab)use, but I think it's unavoidable here: ML worsening result is an unfortunate consequence of them operating in strongly adversarial environment. After all, SEO is just a polite way of calling actively poisoning the search engine rankings.

(Yes, SEO is also making your website legible to crawlers - in the same way advertising is about informing the customers about your offering. That's part of it, but not the part sought by customers of such services, or that makes most money.)

https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-problem

This article goes into much more detail about the issue.

Not so much detail about the key issue: "We have no idea why Google is no longer showing our website for thousands of keywords that we used to rank for in the past."
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co... makes it sound (to my ears)as if they try to distinguish between sites with a single or a few topics and sites that try to match lots of searches.

So... What are the thousands of keywords for which Tuta should rank high?

I see someone downvoted me, so let me try differently: what does "keywords" even mean, if Tuta has thousands of the things?
Changing the domain name should not affect ranking, as long as a 301 redirect is applied server-side to all pages. This way, pages indexed in Google won't 404. That is what could damage the ranking.