From there, we initiated a task force to update old content with outdated information, which could have been delivering a negative user experience.
Interpreting Drops and Improvements after a Core Update
You can analyze where your content might be lacking in delivering valuable content and good experiences to your users. This way, it becomes easier to prioritize the continuous improvement of your content while meeting the requirements of relevant content deserving of the first page on search engines.
Preparing for these updates should happen both before and after they become official! Waiting for Google to officially launch an algorithm before understanding what you should do is a waste of time and can certainly harm your site.
As we mentioned, besides updating older content, it’s important to consider other points that Google itself guides us on:
- Identify pages with poor performance;
- Analyze which keywords led people to these pages;
- Plan to optimize these pages with better content.
Consulting Google itself about SEO updates is the most important point. Unfortunately, there’s a culture in the SEO field where most professionals don’t consult the primary source about these changes!
It’s never guaranteed that these improvements will aid in the recovery of SERP positions or that your pages will never change position. However, following Google’s guidelines is certainly a more informed approach than trying to fix your content blindly.
How to Prepare for Google’s Algorithm Updates?
The drops we observed could actually be related to adjustments made by the main algorithm update. However, remember that it’s necessary to prioritize the quality of your site above everything else, focusing first and foremost on the user experience. After all, that’s exactly what the Core Update is about!
It’s essential to keep updating yourself and striving for continuous improvements in your content and site pages.
How to Recover from the Update?
However, if it weren’t for our contingency plan, the results would certainly have been worse. How did we do it? By listening to Google itself!
With this, we faced the challenge of checking some important points: assessing the quality of information in our articles and gauging how helpful the information was.
It took a while, but Google has finally made the official announcement about the changes to its algorithm: the Core Update. Google’s aim with this major update is to further optimize search results for its users.
Since April, we’ve been observing high volatility in Google’s SERP. The company has made several minor updates amidst the main algorithm update, such as disabling the sitemap ping endpoint, changes to titles and site names, and modifications to frequently asked questions that we were used to seeing during searches.
Since the first update of this year, from mid to late March, there has been a noticeable significant shift in the SERPs. This movement started to impact sites even more intensely from April 2023, along with the review update also in April.
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