The August Core Update and Health Sites

What happened this week

Google said on Wednesday that a broad core update went out this week, the third it has confirmed this year, after March and April.

Its advice was the same as in March: nothing in particular is wrong with pages that now do less well, and there is no fix beyond building great content.

What looks different is where the movement is concentrated. Early reports from people who track rankings across many sites suggest health, medical and wellness sites have moved more than most, in both directions.

It is early, and those reports will be refined. But the pattern fits the guidelines Google gave its search raters less than two weeks ago.

The standard for health pages

Those guidelines hold pages that could affect a reader's health to the highest standard of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

For medical advice they are specific. It should come from people or organisations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation, be written in a professional style, and be reviewed and updated regularly.

That is a higher bar than most small clinic sites were built to clear. Many were written to fill pages, by whoever was available, and never looked at again.

Where clinic sites often fall short

• Advice with no author, or one with no relevant qualification.
• Articles on conditions nobody at the clinic treats.
• Advice pages that sell, with a product box under every article.
• Promises about results no practitioner would make in person.
• Pages written years ago and never reviewed since.
• No plain statement of who runs the clinic.

The third is the one most particular to health. When an article about a condition ends by selling a remedy for it, nobody can tell whether the advice is there to help or to sell.

Write within your scope

A clinic's site cannot outdo hospitals, universities and national health organisations on general articles about conditions. They have more expertise and more reputation than any single practice.

What a clinic knows better than anyone is its own practice: who sees patients, what a first appointment involves, how long it takes, what it costs, and what to bring.

Write about the conditions your practitioners actually see, from their experience, and be clear about where the clinic's role ends. Leave the rest to the sources built for it.

Separate advice from selling

Many clinics sell products, and there is nothing wrong with that. The trouble starts when advice and sales share a page.

Keep products on their own pages, described plainly: what they contain, how they are used, what they cost. Keep articles free of buy buttons, and mention a product only where a practitioner would genuinely raise it.

Where the clinic earns anything from a recommendation, such as a commission on outside products, say so on the page.

Show the standard on every page

Every page that gives health information should name who wrote it and who reviewed it, with their qualifications and registration, and the date of the last review.

Add the sources behind any factual statement, and a plain line that the article is general information and no substitute for an appointment.

Practitioner pages should carry the detail a patient would check: training, registration, years in practice, areas of focus, and a real photograph.

A worked example

A naturopathic clinic with four practitioners had a blog of about sixty articles, most written by a hired writer years ago to attract searches from anywhere.

Most ended with a box selling a supplement from the clinic's online shop. Several covered conditions none of the practitioners treated, and none had an author or a date.

After the March and April updates moved its search traffic, the clinic reviewed the blog with the practitioners instead of rewriting the home page.

About twenty articles survived, rewritten by the practitioner who knew the subject, then signed, dated and given sources. The product boxes came off, and the shop's pages were rewritten as plain descriptions.

The rest were merged or removed, with their addresses redirected. The clinic will judge this week's update on several weeks of data, not its first few days.

Why there is still no single fix

It is tempting to read all this as a checklist: add bylines, remove the shop boxes, recover. It does not work like that.

Core updates re-rank pages relative to one another. No single element causes a drop by its absence and reverses it by its addition, and Google has not said its systems read a byline as a rater does.

The guidelines describe a result: pages a careful reader would trust with their health. The changes above help a page earn that, and count only as part of pages that deserve it.

The same patience as in the spring

The advice from March and April still applies to the numbers: let the update settle for a couple of weeks, compare whole weeks, and change pages one at a time with the dates noted.

What is new is where to look first. For a health site, that means the pages that give advice, and whether each stays within the clinic's expertise, before titles, layout or speed.

Sites that gained this week should do the same review. The qualities that appear to count are worth having whatever the next update brings.

The counter-case

Not everything with a health connection is judged as medical advice. A gym's timetable, a pharmacy's hours or a clinic's booking page give no advice at all.

A small clinic whose site is a handful of pages about its services and practitioners, with no articles, has less at stake and less to review. And some pages moved this week for reasons unrelated to health.

But wherever a site gives health information, keep it within the practice's expertise, keep it apart from selling, and show who stands behind it.

Over the next month

1. Note the update's date in Analytics.
2. Wait for two settled weeks before judging.
3. List every page that gives health information.
4. Cut articles outside your practitioners' expertise.
5. Take product boxes off advice pages.
6. Add authors, reviewers and dates to what remains.
7. Redirect removed pages to the closest one.

Step four is the hardest for a clinic proud of its blog, and the one that matters most. An article outside the practice's expertise cannot meet the standard the guidelines set, however well it is written.

The guidelines behind this are covered in what the rater guidelines say about reputation.

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