A Second Core Update in Six Weeks

Two updates, six weeks apart

On Friday, Google confirmed another broad core update, which went live on Monday, April 16.

It is the second in six weeks. The first went out in the first week of March and was confirmed on March 12.

The confirmation was brief, pointing back to Google's March advice: such updates are routine, and there is nothing in particular to fix on pages that now do less well, beyond building great content.

For a business that watched its search traffic move in March and is watching it move again, the pull is to do something this week.

What people are tempted to change

One update can be shrugged off. Two in quick succession look like a pattern, and a pattern seems to demand a response.

• Rewrite the home page to copy whatever now ranks above it.
• Undo the changes made after the March update.
• Delete pages that lost visits, assuming they caused the drop.
• Publish a batch of short posts to look active.
• Change every page title at once.
• Buy links from someone promising a quick recovery.

The second is the trap this month sets. If traffic moved again after your March changes, it feels natural to reverse them, when the April update alone could explain the movement.

The others each add new changes to untangle, and the last breaks Google's guidelines outright.

Too many changes to read at once

Since the beginning of March, a typical small business site has been through two broad updates.

Google has also started moving sites to mobile-first indexing, reading the phone version of each page instead of the desktop one. Spring has shifted demand in most trades.

Easter fell on April 1 this year, against April 16 last year, which distorts any comparison with last April. And many sites have had edits of their own.

Any one of these can move search traffic. Together, over six weeks of data, they cannot be separated by looking at a graph.

Small sites have small numbers, too: a page with forty visits a week can lose ten and regain them the next week with nothing changed.

Write the dates down first

Before anyone changes anything else, put every relevant date on one timeline.

Analytics lets you attach a note to a date on its graphs, called an annotation. Add one for each update and each change made to your site.

If Search Console has told you that your site has moved to mobile-first indexing, note that date too.

It takes ten minutes, and it is the only thing that will let anyone say, in July, whether a change made today did anything.

Compare like with like

A single day tells you almost nothing, and Mondays differ from Saturdays in most businesses.

Compare whole weeks with whole weeks, and the four weeks after an update with the four weeks before it.

Comparing with last year is worth doing, carefully. Last year's April 16 was Easter Sunday, so the week of this update lines up with a holiday week.

The new Search Console, still in beta, keeps sixteen months of search data, enough to set this spring beside last spring.

Look at pages, not the whole site

A site-wide total hides where a change happened. Usually it is a handful of pages.

Search Console's Performance report shows clicks and impressions by page and by search phrase. Find the pages that lost most, and the searches they lost.

Then search those phrases yourself and read what now ranks above you, as a customer would. Often it is more specific, more current, and plainly written by someone who does the work.

A worked example

A boat dealer in an interior lake town noticed in March that search visits to its model pages had fallen.

The owner rewrote the home page heading and added a dozen short blog posts within two weeks. When the numbers moved again in late April, the rewrites took the blame.

Before reversing anything, the owner asked the company that maintains the site to look properly.

The review put both updates and every site change on one timeline, and Search Console showed the losses sat almost entirely on the model pages.

Those pages repeated the manufacturers' descriptions word for word, like many other dealers' sites, and offered nothing a searcher could not read elsewhere.

They were rewritten with what only a local dealer knows: which hulls suit the lake's afternoon chop, what moorage and winter storage cost nearby, and what servicing involves each season.

The rushed posts were merged into two useful ones, and a review date went into the calendar for July.

What quality means over months

Google's advice after both updates comes to the same thing: pages that serve searchers better tend to do better over time.

Read your important pages as a customer would. Thin pages, supplier text, out-of-date prices and posts written to fill a schedule are the usual findings, and none of them appeared in March.

Improvements take time to be crawled and reassessed, and may only show around a later update. That is why the judgement is made in months.

When something did actually break

Some drops coincide with an update by accident, and those have fixes worth making now.

Check that no important page has been set to noindex, the instruction that keeps a page out of search results, often switched on by a plugin or left over from the build.

Check Search Console for messages and errors, and check for hacked spam pages. A sudden loss of most search traffic points to something like this more than to an update.

The counter-case

Patience is not always the right answer.

If a page is obviously thin or out of date, you do not need an update to tell you. Improve it now, whatever the graphs say.

A young site, or one that gets little search traffic, lacks the data for these comparisons to mean much. There, the quality review is the whole job.

For the gradual movements most sites saw this spring, the advice holds: note the dates, compare like with like, and judge the pages over months.

This week

1. Annotate both update dates in Analytics.
2. Add your own changes to the same timeline.
3. Compare whole weeks, never single days.
4. Find the pages that moved most.
5. Rule out technical faults on those pages first.
6. Read what now ranks above them.
7. Set a review date three months out.

Step two is the one most often skipped, and without it every movement gets blamed on Google or credited to whatever was changed last.

The other change Google is making to how it reads sites this spring is covered in mobile-first indexing is rolling out.

Frequently asked questions

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