Time to read: 5 minutes
Ever see marketers online complain about core updates? Or wondering what might be causing your keywords to go haywire? When introducing new technologies and factors into its search ranking system, Google releases what they call a broad core update.
These updates are designed to understand relevance and page quality better. If you don’t stay up-to-date and adjust your site accordingly, it could negatively impact your site’s performance in search rankings.
Why Core Updates Happen
Core updates occur to ensure that searchers are receiving helpful and reliable results. The updates don’t target specific pages, but rather are broad changes. These updates happen so that Google can better understand page quality and relevance.
Google expects to serve the best results possible, so it often updates its algorithm to change what the SERP shows. You may be surprised to hear, but they implement algorithm tests and changes on the daily. Though many of them are small, core updates typically happen four to five times a year.
Types of Algorithm Updates Google Makes
Google algorithm updates fall under a few different categories, including:
Targeted Updates
These are updates that target specific types of content. These updates align with ranking systems and include review updates, spam updates, and link spam updates. These targeted updates can cause ranking changes for some website types and not others. Additionally, they are similar in the sense that they seek to reward sites making adjustments based on Google’s newest best practice recommendations for website management and user satisfaction.
Unconfirmed Updates
Google only officially announces a fraction of the changes that it makes to its algorithm every year. Rather than relying on confirmed updates, you can use keyword tracking tools to track these significant changes.
Core Updates
These types of core updates are when Google implements wide-ranging changes to how its algorithm works. Rather than slight modifications, these updates can impact domain-wide visibility. Core updates have impacted how search marketers think about content.
Who is Impacted by Core Updates?
When it comes to Google algorithm updates, anybody with a site could potentially feel the effects of it. Some sites may not notice that one has happened. If you have observed changes in your site’s traffic, it’s worth researching core updates to determine if they could be the cause.
Additionally, if you are seeing a traffic drop, you can use Google Search Console to determine if you need to make a change. You’ll want to:
- Confirm that the core update has finished rolling out – Take note of the start and end of the core update. You can check out the search status dashboard to help with this.
- Compare the correct dates – It is recommended to wait at least a full week after a core update completes before analyzing your site in search console. After a week, try comparing the current week to a week before the update started rolling out. This way you’ll be able to pinpoint what has changed.
- Review the top pages and queries – Assess how they were ranking before and after the core update – was it a small or large drop in position?
- Small – This is like dropping from position 2 to 4. There is no need to take drastic action here, and ultimately, we recommend avoiding making changes to content that is already performing well.
- Large – This would be like dropping from 4 to 89. In this case, you’ll want to perform a deeper assessment to further evaluate your content.
- Analyze different search types separately – By reviewing different types of search engines, you can understand whether the drop you’ve seen happened in web search, Google images, video, or news.
Tips to Keep in Mind for Changes
With algorithm updates, you want to ensure that these updates positively impact your site’s performance. However, it’s essential to approach these changes strategically and to keep some things in mind, which include:
- Avoid “quick fix” changes – Focus on making changes that are sustainable in the long term and beneficial in the sense for your users. Avoid making changes such as removing a page element just cause you heard it was bad SEO practice.
- Deleting content is a last resort – This is only a case if you think the content cannot be salvaged or that it is unhelpful content.
- Consider how you can improve content in meaningful ways – You want to create a positive user experience for people landing on your site, so if you rewrite or restructure content with that goal in mind, that can be an impactful strategy.
Stay Ahead of These Core Updates
You don’t have full control of everything that happens to your site; some rankings come and some go. However, what you can control is creating powerful content that is useful to your users. Be proactive by staying informed and don’t let these algorithm updates catch you off guard.
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