Talking about Core Updates can get very confusing, technical, looking at a lot of graphs, figures drop in site traffic and disasters experienced by certain sites in certain niches. But in black and white, simple terms, let’s just say that Google’s algorithms are complex. A system that is used to retrieve data at the speed of light from its search index to instantly deliver the best results to a user’s query.
The search engine uses algorithms and numerous ranking factors in a relatively unknown combination to deliver web pages ranked by their relevance on the search engine results page (SERPS)
At the beginning of Google, there were only a handful of updates, now there are thousands of changes every year, just this past month alone there have been five updates, yes five!
When an update is announced, there is a wave of panic that settles over everyone who owns a website or works on one, and the most panic, personally I would say, lands on the shoulders of the SEO technicians, making sure a site still ranks. Of the thousands, most updates go unnoticed. However, there is the occasion that a major algorithm update comes along that significantly affects the SERPS, often named settling names like Panda, Fred, Penguin, Pigeon and more recently taking on more serious names, with the most recent being called ‘The June 2021 core update’, broadly, but contained many an update under that umbrella.
Google’s broad core algorithm update rolled out throughout June and right into the beginning of July, therefore referred to as ‘The July 2021 Core Update’, with Google stating that:
“They intended to add more to the June core update but ran out of time.”
To recover from an update, Google is keeping their guidance the same as they do with any rollout,
Some people will know all too well as it has most likely caused them great stress, that recovering from a core update can take until the next core update to recover from, so I hope that for the owners, managers and SEO technicians that this is what they’ve been hoping for.
Here’s a recap of all the Google updates that have rolled out since the beginning of June:
- Google Broad Core Algorithm Update Rolling Out June 2, 2021
- Google Algorithm Update Targets Slander
- Google Page Experience Update Begins Rolling Out
- Google Rolls Out New Spam Algorithm Update
With a list like that, it is hard to diagnose which update did the damage, not all updates are applicable to everyone.
Reassess the quality of your content
Don’t fixate on updates. It is best to focus your energy on ensuring you’re offering the best content that you possibly can: this is what Google’s algorithms seek to reward – and what Google is attempting to ‘teach’ their crawlers to understand and document.
Focus on Page Quality
Google focuses on Expertise, Authority and Trust
Links remain important
Think about how and what your internal and external links – and on and off-site content – are communicating about your brand.
Structured data is a must
Whilst we should write with humans in mind, we also need our content to be readable by Google’s crawlers, the AI technology that reads and reports on them, we can do this through the use of structured data and the appropriate schema markup.
Page experience through web design efforts, mobile friendliness and the optimisation of your landing pages in terms of your SEO efforts or the content on them rather are all factors that really need a lot of attention. Overall, Google’s main aim is to return the web pages that most accurately answer the user’s query. They want the user to have a good experience and therefore have guidelines to follow so that your pages can rank for certain terms and queries. It is a competitive landscape, but with the right tools and knowledge, climbing your way to the top of Google has never been easier and getting businesses to the top of the first page of Google is something that we specialise in at Gekkoshot.