The meanings of words and brands can change over time. The terms can drift to different meanings. Term drift happens, although it is rare amongst words and less rare with rebrands – but still, it happens.
When it comes to SEO, managing term drift on your older content can prove to be an important task.
The phrase “term drift” seems to have been created by Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA) over here on X and it was in response to a brief case study shared by Glenn Gabe on X that explained and showed the importance of handling term drift within your content.
Glenn showed an example of where the core query for a page changed based on how people are now referencing the main topic. He said, “The original content referenced the old way it was being referenced. It was high quality content, but just didn’t reference the correct/current wording anymore.”
So what changed was to update the content based on how the world was referencing the new meaning of the word. He said, “the content was updated to reflect the new wording in the title tag, in the on-page title (h1), and then when it was referenced throughout the content. Basically just making sure the content wasn’t referencing the old wording.”
What was the outcome? The ranking stability of that page of content in Google Search became stable, whereas before it was all over the place. Glenn shared this chart to show the before and after impact of this outcome.
Glenn explained, “Look how stable ranking became for that query as soon as the page was updated. Literally the same day it was updated. Just a reminder to keep an eye on things like this. Quality was totally fine. The page just needed to reference the correct and current wording. Again, simple but powerful.”
Then Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA) replied with the phrase, “term drift.”
Here are those posts:
Uncovered this cool example recently. It’s so simple and obvious, but powerful. The core query for this page changed based on how people are NOW referencing the main topic covered. The original content referenced the old way it was being referenced. It was high quality content,… pic.twitter.com/XzkEE492hI
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 8, 2024
“Term drift”. I like that. 🙂
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 8, 2024
Other people have noticed this as well:
100%
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 8, 2024
No, I would never update the url for something like that. Overall, the actual url used isn’t really a strong ranking factor at all. Google has explained that many times and it’s what I’ve seen as well. And I wouldn’t risk changing urls in case something goes wrong there and…
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 8, 2024
What would be examples of this for some phrases? I am guessing maybe some of the following:
- Google AdWords to Google Ads
- Google My Business to Google Business Profiles
- Link building to content marketing
- Public relations maybe to Growth marketing
I mean, there are probably hundreds of examples of this over the years.
There is also “query drift”:
Believe @darth_na is referring to Query Drift as cited in IR documents like https://t.co/z5noOy16dE
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) November 12, 2024
Forum discussion at X.
