June 2, 2019, Google pre-announce the algorithm update for June 2019 and started rolling it out from June 3. It went over a period of five ways till the rolling out was finished on June 8, 2019. Along with this core update, Google also came out with the diversity update which went on for three days till it finished rolling out completely.
This all event went over less a week, but its impacts are far-reaching. Even big houses like the Daily Mail and CNN saw a significant impact on their search rankings.
Here is what they said:
“We are working on compiling more data around this update and will share the fresh data in the upcoming days. Just keep in mind, most of these data snapshots give you insight into a limited fraction of the Google index and do not represent the full impact of these updates. Google has not given us data on how large of an impact these updates are, like it used to with some Panda and Penguin updates, but did say it announces these core updates because they are “noticeable.”
How does the update affect your website?
The June update was a core update and so its impact will have at large scale. Some sites got devastated. Websites saw a drop of 20% to up to 90% in their traffic. But for some these traffic losses can be like a disaster compared to those that depend on Google traffic less.
While along with the core update, Google also brought out the domain diversity update, and this just adds to the impacts on your website’s ranking and traffic.
Let us have look at how it impacted some websites and responses to the owner of these sites.
“I am getting regular keyword fluctuation, some time it shows at 2nd or 3rd page and same day or next day it’s not showing in Google at any pages,” says a Dev who runs an e-commerce website.
“My lowest quality pages are still on top, while heavy content ones, with legit backlinks from high DA, dropped 10 pages. And competitors’ websites which have many flaws such as duplicated content with bad backlinks still rank the number one for all major keywords in the industry,” says Gabriel Troisgros one of the website owners who suffered traffic loss due to the update.
With a few examples above, it seems even the sites well optimized have seen the drop in traffic. So it is pretty difficult to predict the factors that caused traffic loss. But for news publishers, it can be the quality of content as John Mueller says.
Here is what he said:
“But for a publisher whose core area is content news, doesn’t it signal that it’s probably the content, the quality or the quantity which triggered Google’s algorithm to lower down the quality signal of the content being put up on the website which could have led to a drop of traffic? “
Google’s John Mueller also, in a hangout chat, admits that there are no fixes and no major changes that need to be made to lower the impact.
Core Update, Relevance, and Quality
While John Mueller talked about the update in the context of relevance and quality updates, he did not specify whether it was about the relevance or just about quality. What they meant to say that in the indication of how these kinds of updates do not have specific fixes.
Here is what he said
“And with that, as you mentioned, you’ve probably seen the tweets from Search Liaison, there’s often nothing explicit that you can do to kind of change that.
He refers to a blog post which covers a lot of questions that you can ask yourself, about the quality of your website. He also suggests asking someone else opinion about the quality of your website.
Here is what John Mueller said:
“With a lot of the relevance updates, a lot of the kind of quality updates, the core updates that we make, there is no specific thing where we’d be able to say you did this and you should have done that and therefore we’re showing things differently.”
No specific things to fix to recover the impact
There is nothing that you can do to reverse the impact. But you can get the opinion of other people about how they see your site, and this may help you spot out some errors that might be reasons for the drop in traffic.
So what to do?
Here’s what John Mueller said:
“And with that, as you mentioned, you’ve probably seen the tweets from Search Liaison, there’s often nothing explicit that you can do to kind of change that. His advice is to ask a third party to tell you about how they see your site.
“So, often you as a site owner you have an intimate relationship with your website you know exactly what it’s perfect. But someone who is not associated with your website might look at your website and compare it to other websites and say, well, I don’t know if I could really trust your website because it looks outdated or because I don’t know who these people are who are writing about things, he said.
But these are just a tip of the iceberg, and you can do anything to your website HTML code or server setting.
It is more about the big picture, the whole spectrum of what may have an impact on your website traffic. Because. There is nothing relevant that you can do about your website.
However, as John Mueller suggests, it is good to ask in web communities, including the Webmaster Help Forums, to learn how others see your site, and if they could spot problems.
Here’s what he said:
“You can talk with other people who’ve seen a lot of websites and who can look at your websites and say well, I don’t know the layout looks outdated or the authors are people that nobody knows or you have stock photos images of instead of author photos. It’s like, why do you have that?
All of these things are not explicit elements that our algorithms would be trying to pinpoint but rather things that kind of combine to create a bigger picture. That is good advice, and you will certainly get some benefits.
So key points of effort to recovering include:
- See the Big Picture, considering all those that can affect website traffic.
- Get a third party review your site, this would help you find out the errors that you could not.
- Understand the algorithm and motive of updating it.
This June 2019 update is Google’s core algorithm update, which has a wide impact. Even big sites have got impacted. Worse, there are no certain things that you can do about your website to recover. However, doing these things that Google suggests can help you prevent your site traffic from dropping, and thereby improve it.