The Mountain View giant releases countless updates throughout the year, intending to respond more and more precisely to user needs. But what changes when we talk about a "broad core" update like the one that occurred at the beginning of August?
Let's analyse the latest update of the Google algorithm known to many as Medic Update.
Caffeine, Panda, Mobilegeddon, Penguin, Mobile-First, and the August 2018 earthquake, which for many will go down in history as the "Medic Update." These are just some terms that have filled web pages, ebooks, and books on SEO in recent years. But let's go in order and try to understand something more than the Google algorithm updates.
The Mountain View giant releases countless updates throughout the year, intending to respond more and more precisely to user needs. But what changes when we talk about a "broad core" update like the one that occurred at the beginning of August?
Broad core algorithm update: what changes?
This definition indicates an extensive update to the leading search engine algorithm. An event is undoubtedly more important than the many updates that follow one another over a year.
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In 2018 there were two updates of this kind announced by Google, the first in March while the most recent in August, a catastrophic event for many, especially for health and wellness-themed sites (hence the definition Medic Update), which have been downgraded in SERPs, in some cases almost totally losing organic traffic.
Google's comments after the Medic Update
But what was Google's response to the many questions that came through Twitter? Through his account, Danny Sullivan, one of the most authoritative representatives of Google, specified that there is nothing, in particular, to "fix," but once again reiterated the importance of producing quality content: "Have great content. Yeah, the same boring answer".
What to do? The advice is to re-read the Google guidelines, updated in July.
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Is there a correlation between Medic Update and Quality Rater?
Indeed, Google had been working for some time on the update in August. The release of the quality rater guidelines of 20 July 2018 may suggest a relationship between the two events.
The "medical" topic is discussed several times in the guidelines. In particular, as regards the EAT, or Expertise (competence) - Authoritativeness (authoritativeness) - Trustworthiness (reliability).
"High EAT medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation. High EAT medical advice or information should be written or made in a professional style and should be edited, reviewed, and updated regularly ".
Google clarifies that medical advice content should be produced by individuals or organizations with specific expertise and updated regularly. The same goes for websites that can be included under the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) category, i.e., sites where the user can find information that impacts life, family, and more in detail on the economic aspect.
What if Google does not recognize the authority and professionalism of your website?
Let's try to understand how to support the search engine in this understanding; here are some helpful guidelines:
- Enter a bio for each author; for YMYL sites, the author information should be much more detailed than other sites.
- Insert the Social links for each author and other links that can increase the writer's professionalism.
- Enter in the portal all the valuable information of those who manage the website.
Post update traffic loss: what to do?
Let's take the example of a loss of traffic on an e-commerce site after the Google update in March 2018: negative variation of -30% of organic sessions and -14% of keywords positioned in SERPs. A jolt that risks compromising the annual performance of a site.
In delicate situations, the first thing to do is to collect data. Nowadays, we hear more and more often about data-driven and about strategies built starting from data analysis. Current tools allow us to collect essential information, leaving little room for theories and assumptions.
A quantitative data collection will allow creating the foundations for multidirectional analyzes. Because the fascinating aspect of the analysis process is that you know the starting point, but incredible and unthinkable opportunities can emerge along the way, which can change the fate of a project.
The data must represent the starting point and the key to any subsequent development. The constant monitoring allows us to know our audience's more profound habits and passions, providing the ability to respond more promptly to their needs.
Conclusions
We talked about the latest update of the Google algorithm, showed the differences between a broad core algorithm update and the many updates that follow each other during a year. Finally, we indicated some suggestions for the websites that were affected by the update.
As mentioned above, no precise actions can allow you to recover lost traffic and restore a past situation. We need to start again, offering - as recommended by Danny Sullivan - quality content.
Deepening the guidelines published in July, interpreting Google's indications, and offering users a structure that can faithfully respond to their needs, this is the way of yesterday and will be the way of tomorrow because essentially nothing has changed. And no change, of course, has been made by the search engine, which continues to ask all those who populate the web to improve themselves for themselves and their users.
Author: Preeti Bala
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