Google’s Core Update in May 2020: What You Need to Know

Google started a rollout a major update to its algorithm on May 4th which is called as a “core” update. With this update bringing about a large change to their algorithm, it will have a major impact on a lot of sites.

Just to have an idea of how big the update is, you can look at the image which has been taken from SEMrush Sensor. It monitors the movement of results on Google. 
This chart tracks Google on daily basis. When there is green or blue for the day, it shows that there isn’t much movement going on but if it turns red, it means there is volatility in the rankings. 
Now, if you haven’t checked your rankings, better to see them whether they are up or down. You can also set up a project on Ubersuggest for free and track upto 25 keywords in case you aren’t tracking your rankings. 
As far as the traffic to your site is concerned, just log into your Google Analytics account and check to see where the movement of traffic is at the moment. If the movement is down or it has not picked up then there is no need to panic. We have important information to help you out. 
Firstly, we will talk about the industries that have been most impacted by this update. 

 

What are the industries that have been affected?

Please find a list of industries that have been most affected: 

It is clear from the above image that travel, real estate, health, pets & animals, and people & society saw the biggest fluctuations with rankings. You can also see that industries which are at the bottom are least affected like Sports, News. 
There was also a change in local SEO results, but that started before the core update. 
There is a big misconception among people who are new to SEO is that if you have a high domain authority or domain score (if you aren’t sure what yours is, go here and put in your URL), you’ll continuously get more traffic and won’t be affected by updates. However, this is not the case. 
Here are some well-known sites that saw their rankings dip according to the index at Ubersuggest: 

1. Spotify.com
2. Creditkarma.com
3. LinkedIn.com
4. Legoland.com
5. Nypost.com
6. Ny.gov
7. Burlington.com

It is important to note that, there are some trends on sites that got affected versus ones that didn’t. 
 

Update your content frequently

There are 4 articles which I publish in a month on this blog. , I publish a new post pretty early every Tuesday like clockwork. But do you know how often the old content gets updated? 

Technically, I don’t update my own content, but I have few people who work for me. They all look through old blog posts and update them. 

My team updates at least 90 articles in any given month. By update, I am not talking about just changing a sentence or adding an image. It is about adding a handful of new paragraphs, deleting irrelevant information, and sometimes even re-writing entire articles. 

My team will do whatever it takes to keep articles up to date and valuable for the readers. This is just like how Wikipedia is constantly updating its content. 

Some interesting statistics for you: We all know for certain that 641 sites that we are tracking are updating old content on a daily basis. Can you guess how many of these sites saw a search traffic dip of 10% or more? 

Just 38 out of 641! That’s 5.92%, which is extremely low. What’s more interesting is that 187 sites saw an increase in their search traffic of 10% or more. When we are calculating the estimates of organic search traffic, we look at the average monthly volume of a keyword as well as click-through rates based on ranking. Thus, for holidays such as May 1, which is Labour Day for most of the world, didn’t skew the results. 

To clarify this more, I am not talking about producing new content on a daily or even weekly basis. These sites are doing what I do on NeilPatel.com i.e. they are constantly updating their old content. 

Again, there is no predefined rule on how to update your old content as it varies per article, but the key is to do whatever it takes to keep the article relevant for the readers and ensure that it is better than that of the competition. 

For some more guidance on updating old content, here is what I tell my team: 
In case the content is no longer relevant to a reader, either delete the page and 301 redirect it to the most relevant URL on the site or update it to make it more relevant. 

Also, there ways to make the content more actionable and useful. This can be done by adding infographics, step-by-step instructions, or videos to the article make it more useful. It will be beneficial to do this. 

Moreover, check to see if there are any dead links and fix them. Dead links create a poor user experience. 

In case the article is a translated article (I have a big global audience), make sure the images and videos make sense to anyone reading the content in that language. 

You should look to see the 5 main terms each article ranks for and then Google those terms. Look at the pages ranking in the top 10 and see what they are doing really well that we aren’t? 

Can you make the article simpler? Just remove any errors or inaccuracies and avoid using complex words that very few people can understand. 

Does the article talk about a specific year or time frame? Just make the article evergreen, if it is possible, by avoiding the usage of dates or specific time ranges. 

If the article covers a specific problem that people are facing, it is better you look at Quora first before updating the article. Try to see popular answers on Quora as it will give you a sense of what people are ideally looking for. 

Is this article a duplicate? Check that are you pretty much covering the exact same concept as another article on your site. If yes then consider merging them and 301 redirect one URL to the other. 

 

Fix your thin content

Here’s another interesting stat for you. On average, Ubersuggest crawls 71 websites every minute. And when I say crawl, users are putting in URLs to check for SEO errors. 

There is one error that our system looks at is thin content (pages with low-word counts). 

On an average, out of total websites we analyse there is 46% of them that have at least one page that is thin in content. Can you try and guess how many of those sites got impacted by the latest algorithm update? 

A bulk of those sites get very low to no search traffic as they are either new sites or haven’t done much SEO. Therefore, we don’t have enough data on all of the URLs. However, when we look at the last 400 sites in our system that were flagged with thin content warnings for pages other than their contact page, about page, or home page, and had at least 1,000 visitors a month from Google, they saw an enormous shift in rankings. 

We also checked that 127 of the sites saw a decrease in search traffic by at least 10% while 41 saw an increase in search traffic by at least 10%. 

The sites which had thin content saw a roughly 3 times higher likelihood of being affected in a negative way than a positive one. Although, majority of the sites with thin content saw little to no change at all, but still, a whopping 31.75% saw a decrease. 

If you want to know if you have thin content, go here and put in your URL. 

There will be a report that looks something like this: 

Just click on the “Critical Errors” box. 

 

You’ll now see a report that looks like:

Try to look if there are any “low word count” errors. If yes then click on the number and it will take you to a page that shows you all of the pages with a low word count. 

Don’t try to fix them all as you won’t be able to, as some pages like your contact page or category pages, which may not need thousands of words. 

And in some other cases, you may be able to get the point across to a website visitor in a few hundred words or even through images. An example for this would be if you have an article on how to tie a tie, you may not have too many words because it’s easier to show people how to do so by a video or a series of images. 

However, for the pages that should be more in-depth, you should fix them. You should have three main questions to consider when fixing thin content pages: 

It is better if you can get the message across in a few hundred words or through images or videos rather than adding more to it. Don’t add words when it isn’t needed. Think of the user experience instead. People would instead have the answer to their question in a few seconds than to wait minutes. 

How your page is different to that of your competition – look at similar pages that are ranking on page 1. Do the competition has more content than you or less? It will provide you an idea if you need to expand your page, especially if everyone who ranks on page 1 has at least a few thousand words on their page. 

Also, does it even make sense to keep the page – if it provides little to no value to a reader and you can’t make it better by updating it, you should consider deleting it and 301 redirect the URL to another similar page on your site. 

 

Fix your SEO errors

Another riveting finding that we noticed when digging through our Ubersuggest data is that sites with more SEO errors got impacted greatly. 

Now, this doesn’t mean that if you have a large number of SEO errors you can’t rank or you are going to get hit by an algorithm update. 

Infact, it was one type of error that hurt sites more than others. These were sites with duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. 

One thing to note that there are many sites that have duplicate meta tags, but when a large portion of your pages have duplicate meta tags, it usually creates problems. 

Hence, we dug up sites that contained duplicate meta tags and title tags for 20% or more of their pages. 

In general, most of these sites didn’t get much traffic, but for the 363 that we could dig up that generated at least 1,000 visits a month from Google, 151 viewed a decrease in traffic by at least 10%. 

Also, 89 of them also saw increases in traffic by 10% or more, but still, 41.59% of sites with duplicate meta tags saw a huge dip. In case, if you have duplicate meta tags you should get this fix. 

In order to double check if you do, put your URL in here again. It will load this report again: 

And then click on the critical errors again. You’ll see a report that looks like this: 

Try to look for any errors that say duplicate meta description or title tag. If you see any error, click on the number and it will take you to a page that breaks down the duplicates. 

Moreover, your site doesn’t have to be perfect and you’ll find in some cases that you have duplicates that don’t need to be fixed, such as category pages with pagination. 

But in majority cases, you should fix and avoid having duplicate meta description and title tags. 

 

Conclusion

Even if you do everything what has been mentioned above, there is no guarantee that you will be impacted by an algorithm update. Each of the salgorithms is different, and Google’s goal is to create the best experience for searchers. 

If you see at the above issues, you’ll find that fixing them should create a better user experience and that should always be your goal. 

SEO isn’t about winning on Google but it is about providing a better experience than your competition. If that’s your major focus, in the long run, you’ll find that you’ll do better than your competition when it comes to algorithm updates. 

So, Did you check how your traffic was during the last update? Did it go up or down, or stay flat?