How to Recover from a Google Core Update?
What is a Google core update?
A Google core update happens when Google makes significant and broad changes to its search engine algorithm and systems. These updates aim to improve the search experience for users, providing more relevant, useful, and trustworthy content.
Usually, core updates happen several times a year and receive confirmation from Google.
Core updates involve broad, large-scale changes to the search engine algorithm as well as system functionality.
Some website owners won’t notice much of a performance difference, but others may notice sweeping gains or losses.
How Often Are Google Core Updates?
When we look at the Google Core Algorithm update schedule over time, some trends emerge.
The busiest year for Core Updates was 2018, with 4 Core Updates. Then from 2019 to 2021, there have been 3 core updates per year, and then back in 2016 (when Google started calling them “Core Updates” officially), there were 2.
Tips to Recover a Google Core Update:
Update your existing content
One of the easiest things to start with is updating your articles with the latest information.
Add new data to the old posts, making them fresh and current again. For example, if there are recent statistics available–include them. If opinions have changed, reflect that in your article. Are there new, better ways of doing things?
Ensure your readers know that your content can keep up with the changes in the industry.
Audit your articles
By auditing your articles, you can ensure your content quality, relevancy, and search intent, providing the best experience for both–users and the Google algorithm. You need to look for things like keyword cannibalization issues and thin marketing content.
Keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages target the same keyword with similar content. You make it harder for yourself to gain more traffic and outperform your competitors harder if you’re competing with yourself at the same time.
Work on your on-page SEO
You can make your content better and more accessible for readers and Google by improving your on-page SEO.
To do that:
- Ensure that all your images have a meta title
- Ensure that filenames reflect what the images are about
- Optimize titles so they’re not too long or too short
- Resize your images to serve them faster to the readers
Create a consistent content strategy
To continue improving your content, create a consistent content strategy. Then, perform a competitor analysis by doing a content gap audit using tools.
It will enable you to see what your competitors are writing about that you aren’t but should. Concentrate on your target audience’s interests and pain points.
Organize your articles in content clusters–it’s an excellent way to ensure you cover all the important subtopics of a larger topic. Then, create a new content strategy to support your existing one and add marketing topics you should write about.
Audit your internal links
Create an organized structure and approach for internal links digital strategy to promote related articles, create content hubs and increase page rank.
A consistent internal linking strategy will also maximize your link-building efforts by ensuring that the benefits from incoming external links flow to your other pages.
Audit your backlink profile
Google core updates don’t specifically target bad link profiles. However, a poor backlink profile still affects your website’s ranking in the SERPs. Therefore, keep an eye on your digital backlink profile and avoid low-quality backlinks.
Make sure you don’t have any spammy links linking to your website. Create and submit a disavow file to eliminate the links that may hurt your rankings and website health.