Google is known for making significant changes to its search algorithms and systems several times a year, which are known as core updates. As a website owner, it's essential to understand how these updates work and what you can do to assess and improve your content. In this article, we'll discuss everything you need to know about Google's core updates.
How Core Updates Work
Google's core updates are designed to ensure that the search engine is presenting helpful and reliable results for searchers. These changes are not about targeting specific pages or sites; instead, they focus on improving how Google's systems assess content overall.
If your website experiences a change after a core update, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong with your content. It hasn't violated Google's spam policies, nor has it been subjected to any manual or algorithmic action. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better in search results.
To understand how a core update operates, you can think of it as making a list of the top 100 movies in a particular year. A few years later, when you refresh the list, it's natural that some new and wonderful movies that never existed before will be candidates for inclusion. You might also reassess some films and realize they deserved a higher place on the list than they had before. Some movies that were previously on the list may move down, but it doesn't mean that they are bad. There are merely more deserving films that are coming before them.
Assessing Your Own Content
If your website is experiencing a drop in rankings after a core update, there's nothing wrong that you need to fix. However, you can focus on ensuring that you're offering the best content you can to your users. Google's algorithms reward content that is helpful and reliable.
To assess your own content, you can ask yourself several questions, such as:
Is my content helpful and informative?
Does my content offer something unique and valuable to my users?
Is my content well-researched and accurate?
You can also consider an audit of the pages that were most impacted by the update. Look closely at these pages to understand how they may perform against the self-assessment questions. You can also ask others to provide an honest assessment of your content.
How Long Does It Take to Recover from a Core Update?
Broad-core updates tend to happen every few months. If your content was impacted by one of these updates, it may not recover until the next broad core update is released, assuming that improvements have been made.
Google is constantly making updates to its search algorithms, including smaller core updates. Although these updates are not widely noticeable, they can cause content to recover if improvements warrant.
It's important to keep in mind that improvements made by site owners are not a guarantee of recovery. Pages don't have any static or guaranteed position in Google's search results. If there is more deserving content, it will continue to rank well with Google's systems.
Conclusion
Google's core updates are designed to ensure that the search engine is presenting helpful and reliable results for searchers. As a website owner, you should focus on providing the best content you can to your users. By doing so, you'll increase your chances of ranking well with Google's algorithms. While improvements may not guarantee recovery in rankings, they'll undoubtedly benefit your website's overall user experience.