When Google makes significant and wide changes to its search engine algorithm and systems. It is known to be a Google Core Update. The reason behind these core updates is to make sure that the user is served relevant, useful and trustworthy content. This makes sure that Google is in line with their mission of providing authoritative and relevant information.
In the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic Google announced its core update in May 2020. As soon as the core update was rolled and implemented, webmasters and digital marketers all over panicked due the fluctuations in the rankings. Many SEO myths were busted, the most common being that websites with higher domain authority (DA) will not be affected by the core updates. If we look closely we can see that the industries which were affected the most have been - Travel, Real Estate, Health, Pets Animals, and People and Society. The website ranking fluctuations were drastic with many smaller sites outranking the bigger sites and leaping in terms of rankings.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust, which webmasters all over the world have been saying that it is on the basis of E-A-T that Google decides the rankings. However many disagreed with this view but the latest core update from Google has proved that ultimately it is expertise, authority and trust that the Google search engine is looking for. We can see that with the latest update that many brand websites saw a dip in their rankings for e.g. Spotify, Creditkarma, LinkedIn, Legoland, Nypost and others. Many smaller websites saw a significant improvement in their rankings.
As a digital marketing and web development company the following list is our summary of observations regarding the latest core update from Google.
Relevancy - Google has always stressed on the importance of relevant content. Google wants webmasters to provide content which is relevant to the user's search query. Everytime a user searches on Google, he/she is looking for some specific information. Long and detailed content which serves more like a guide is not useful in these scenarios. Google wants webmasters and digital marketers to understand as to what the user is searching for and put out content as per that which will enhance user experience.
Expertise - After the core update there were many websites which saw excellent rankings and all of these websites had one thing in common. Most of the information, blogs and articles that helped the rankings had contained an element of 1st hand expertise. For e.g. product reviews, customer comments and so on and so forth.
Authority - While authority remains one of the important factors which affects website rankings. This particular aspect experienced a strange impact of the latest core update from Google. Many smaller websites who are considered to be experts in their fields saw significant changes and were able to outrank the most authoritative websites as well. We feel that Google has finally understood that it is extremely difficult for smaller websites to gain that elusive level of authority despite putting great content and optimized keywords. In order to make the playing field more even, Google has made sure that the recent update helps smaller websites as well.
Trustworthiness - As happened with the most core updates the trustworthiness signals that Google uses to determine the E-A-T were also assessed. This also plays an important role in the rankings of a website and the traffic that it generates.
Link Quality - The recent update saw many websites lose their precious rankings just on the basis of their link quality. Many of these websites had unnatural links or links which can be termed as made for only SEO purposes. These kinds of practices are considered grey hat and Google hates it like anything. Google wants webmasters to use appropriate tags for the search engine to understand the quality of the link, whether it was sponsored or user generated (ugc). Google wants webmasters and digital marketers to follow ethical and useful ways of link building so that the user can benefit as well as the site owner.
Hope we were able to help you guys understand the latest core update from Google. If you want to know more about it, please do write back to us and we will be more than glad to publish another detailed blog.
