How my sites are doing with the core update

May 31, 2022 9:11 am

We can all get anxious about core updates, but for some reason, I felt more confident than usual this time. Maybe it's because it has been several months since the last one, there was a lot of time for general improvement in that time.


You might know by now that a few years ago I moved away from primarily working on affiliate sites to focusing on display ad websites.


I've seen a lot of people in some of the Facebook groups talking about taking heavy losses on their informational content, so it seemed an opportunity to go on the record about how mine have been doing.


So far it has been pretty good.


Around 75-80% of keywords with update-related movement have improved position.


Unfortunately, most of the position changes are outside of the top 10. There has been a small, but noticeable increase in top 10 positions on one of my sites. However, it's not had much of an impact on traffic.


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The majority of the positive movement has been keywords on pages 4 and 5 moving into pages 2 and 3.


Around 20-25% of keywords have lost some positions, but on further investigation, it reminded me of something from a few years ago...


One time I was doing a recovery audit for someone, not something that I do these days because people can become irrational (emotions understandably high), and a technical audit for them at the same time. It became clear that the site was quite good from a technical perspective, and the content itself was better than a lot of competitors. He had lost a huge amount of keywords and traffic though.


Once I got to the keyword analysis it was an "a-ha" moment because he had primarily lost non-relevant keywords. I mentioned it to him, but he didn't seem to care.


"My post about the 'best wigwams for camping' no longer ranks for 'wigwam?' This is an outrage! It's disgusting! Screeew youuu, Google!"


It went something along those lines...


I thought it was good news, while he lost a lot of irrelevant keywords the solution was simple. "All you need to do is create relevant content around those keywords, and you'll be fine," I said.


He would have been, but I don't think he ever listened.


Many losses in the updates are usually non-relevant keywords, it tells you something about your strategy, or can provide an opportunity, etc. Sometimes it shows how stupid Google was to rank us for those keywords in the first place. A little context goes a long way and after investigation, that's what my losses have been this time. Non-relevant keywords that I'll not miss, but then most of them weren't ranking... Even if they were, I'd not feel too hard done by about it.


So on the whole my sites are doing fine, not amazingly, but not bad with this update. I'm not massively buying into the informational content getting hammered narrative. I've also not seen too many forums popping up in my SERPs. There's been a lot of shouting about that hasn't there? In my niches, the sites with a lot of authority aren't bulldozing everyone else for once, which is a nice change. Hopefully, your site/s are doing well too!


What do you think about the update so far? I'd love to hear what people's thoughts and experiences are with this one!







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