Google Announced This Update in Advance

A day's notice

Yesterday, Google said that a broad core update to its search results would begin today. It called it the June 2019 core update, and described it as one of the several it makes each year.

Core updates are not new. The last one began in March.

What is new is the warning. For the first time, Google has said in advance that one is coming, rather than confirming it once rankings had already started to move.

A warning is only useful if it changes what you do. Here, it mostly changes what you write down.

What a core update is

A core update is a broad change to how Google assesses pages in general. It is not aimed at particular sites, industries or tricks.

Some pages rise, some fall, and many sites see little movement.

Google's standing advice is that a page which drops has nothing specific to fix. Other pages have been judged more useful, and the answer is to make the page better over time.

Updates also roll out over several days, so positions shift through the week before they settle.

What the warning is good for

• A clean start date for any before-and-after comparison.
• A reason to hold changes until the update settles.
• A baseline, saved from Search Console before anything moves.
• An explanation in advance for anyone who reads your figures.
• Calm, because any movement next week will have a known cause.

The first is most of the value. When earlier updates were confirmed only after they had begun, plenty of businesses compared from the wrong day and drew the wrong conclusions.

Note the date

Write June 3 down somewhere it will be found again: a line in whatever log you keep, and an annotation in Analytics, which places a small marker on the graphs for that day.

Note anything else happening at the same time. A promotion, a newsletter, a price change or a seasonal shift will all move your figures, and by September nobody will remember which was which.

The two weeks before the update included Victoria Day, a holiday that changes behaviour for many local businesses. That belongs in the note too.

Change nothing this week

The most useful thing to do this week is nothing, at least to the parts of the site that search engines read.

If page titles, headings or content change while an update is rolling out, any later movement has two possible causes and no way to separate them.

Daily positions during the roll-out are noise. Reacting to Tuesday's figures by rewriting a page on Wednesday is how a business ends up unable to say what happened.

Write the ideas down instead. A list of changes made in two weeks, with the comparison in hand, will be better than the same list made today.

Nothing does not mean neglect. Security updates, new hours, corrected prices and anything broken should be handled as usual.

Compare by page in two weeks

Two weeks from today, plus a couple of days because Search Console runs a little behind, open the Performance report.

Compare the two weeks from June 3 with the two weeks before, matching days of the week. Then switch to the Pages tab, which shows clicks and impressions for each page rather than the site as a whole.

Site-wide totals hide what matters. A drop in one popular article can look serious overall while the pages that bring enquiries have not moved.

For any page that did move, open its queries to see which searches changed.

A worked example

A driving school with three instructors and an office above a row of shops saw its search visits dip in the days after the March update.

That same week, the owner rewrote every page title and the home page introduction. Visits recovered in April, and nobody could say whether the rewrite had helped, hurt or made no difference.

Because the titles had changed, even the searches each page appeared for were hard to compare.

This morning the owner wrote the date in the office log, added an annotation in Analytics, and exported the last four weeks of Search Console figures by page.

A planned rewrite of the highway lessons page moved to the end of the month. The comparison will show which pages moved, if any, and the rewrite will start from that rather than from a feeling.

Reading what you find

If a page dropped, read it the way a stranger with that search would, and compare it with the pages now ranking above it.

They are often more complete, more current or more specific, which points to what the page needs over the coming months.

If many pages dropped together, the question is broader: whether the site as a whole is as useful, current and trustworthy as the sites now ahead of it. That calls for a proper review, not a weekend of edits.

If nothing much moved, which is common, there is nothing to do but carry on improving the site as planned.

Offers that arrive this week

Every announced update brings sales emails promising to recover lost rankings, often before the update has finished rolling out.

A core update has no specific fix, so a promise of one is a guess. Before agreeing to anything, ask what would change on which pages, and why.

Good advice this week sounds like wait, measure, then improve the pages that matter. It comes from somebody who has looked at your figures first.

The counter-case

Not every site will learn much from this.

A site with a few dozen search visits a week will see week-to-week variation that can swamp any update, and its comparisons will mostly measure chance.

Anything genuinely broken should be fixed today regardless: a page returning errors, a form that fails, a site accidentally hidden from search.

And a launch planned for this week, such as a new service page, can go ahead if it is noted alongside the update.

For everyone else: note the date, hold content changes this week, and compare by page in two weeks.

The next two weeks

1. Write down today's date as the start.
2. Add an annotation in Analytics.
3. Export four weeks of Search Console figures.
4. Hold title and content changes until it settles.
5. Keep security updates and fixes going.
6. Compare two weeks with two weeks by page.
7. Read any page that dropped as a stranger would.

Step four is the hardest, because a dip in visits makes everyone want to do something. Holding still for one week is what makes the comparison worth having.

The rest of that first week is covered in what to do the week a core update lands.

Frequently asked questions

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