Google released a major core algorithm update last Wednesday, but a new report published by marketing data company Sistrix suggests that the impact was relatively small in scale and overall feels like a rollback on previous changes.
Google said in a tweet in March that a broad update had been rolled out with the aim of helping to “incrementally improve search”. Google said that there would be “little noticeable change” for many webmasters, and this largely appears to be true, though there were some “winners” and “losers”.
The study from Sistrix found that some websites did see up to a 50% drop off in the visibility index from one day to the next, including music and streaming site last.fm. However, health hub draxe.com was one of the winners as it saw visibility head to a similar degree in the other direction.
“The top losers in our data aren’t as strongly hit (in terms of percentage) as the winners. … among the losers there are many domains (70%) that were affected by previous core updates,” the report noted.
The fact that many of those who lost out had previously seen a boost in visibility adds weight to the theory that the update is a rollback of sorts. The rollout is the first major one of 2019 and several more are set to follow. Brands are encouraged to get to grips with the Google Quality Rater Guidelines and optimise content for search intent of visitors and user expectations to ensure that they have SEO best practices in place.
