What to Do the Week a Core Update Lands

An update with no instructions

Google has confirmed a broad core update to its search rankings this week. Positions for many sites will shift over the coming days, some up and some down.

Unlike some changes Google makes, this one comes with nothing to fix. There is no new rule to follow and no tactic being punished.

That leaves owners whose positions dropped with a strong urge to do something, and nothing obvious to do.

This week, the right response is mostly to watch and write things down.

What a core update is

Google changes its search systems constantly, most days in some small way. Several times a year it makes a broad change to the core systems that rank pages, and says so.

A core update changes how Google weighs what makes a page relevant and useful for a search. It applies to everything at once, not to particular sites.

Google's line on these updates has been consistent: pages that drop have not necessarily done anything wrong. Other pages may simply be judged more useful for the same searches.

So a drop after a core update is not a penalty, and it rarely has a single cause you can remove.

What not to do this week

• Rewriting your best pages on the strength of a few days' figures.
• Deleting pages in bulk because their positions slipped.
• Changing page addresses or titles across the whole site.
• Disavowing links, telling Google to ignore them, without evidence they are the problem.
• Buying a recovery package from an unsolicited email.

The first is the most tempting and the most costly. Pages that brought you work for years were ranking for reasons, and rewriting them blind can remove those reasons too.

Why changing things now hides the answer

Rankings shuffle while an update rolls out, which can take days, and keep settling for a while afterwards.

Anything you change in the same week becomes tangled with the update. If positions recover, you will not know whether your change helped or the shuffle settled.

The only clean comparison is a site that held still: before the update against after it, with nothing else different.

Hold still for two or three weeks, and the data will tell you more than any theory circulating this week.

Write down the date

Start with a note, because in six months nobody will remember which week this was.

Add an annotation in Universal Analytics on the day the update began. Note anything else that changed on the site recently, such as a redesign, new pages or a price change.

Search Console already holds the weeks before the update, so the before picture exists. The after picture needs time.

Comparing properly in Search Console

The performance report in Search Console is where the comparison happens, once there is enough data. Its figures run a few days behind.

Use the compare option in the date filter. Set a period after the rollout settles against a period of the same length before it, with matching days of the week.

Look at clicks and impressions before average position. Position is averaged over every search you appeared for, so it moves when you start appearing for new, distant searches.

Then open the pages and queries tabs and sort by the change in clicks. A loss spread thinly across everything reads very differently from a loss concentrated on three pages.

Separate your name from the rest

One filter makes the picture much clearer.

Searches that include your business name come from people already looking for you. They usually move least in an update, and they can hide movement everywhere else.

Filter out queries containing your name and compare again. What remains is search traffic from people who did not know you, which is where an update shows.

A worked example

A pest control company serving a few suburbs had built up a set of articles over the years: telling carpenter ants from ordinary ants, recognising mouse droppings, when wasps build nests.

After a core update last August, the articles lost positions to larger sites. Visits from search fell noticeably, and the owner's first instinct was to rewrite them all.

Instead, the company compared the month before with the month after in Search Console, with its own name filtered out.

The losses were concentrated on searches from across the continent. Searches for pest control in its own suburbs had barely moved, and the calls log, kept by hand, showed no change either.

The service pages were left alone. Two articles that did bring local calls were improved slowly over the winter, and the rest stayed as they were.

The slower work, if a loss remains

Once the update has settled, a real loss may remain. The work then is slower and less specific than anyone would like.

Compare the pages that lost ground with the pages now outranking them, and ask honestly which a searcher would rather land on.

Google has pointed site owners to its published guidelines for the people who rate its search results, which describe what it means by expertise, authority and trustworthiness.

Improvements made in that spirit take effect gradually, over months rather than days.

When it is not the update

Not every drop this week is the update's doing, and the other causes do have fixes.

Check the manual actions report in Search Console, which says plainly if Google has taken action against the site, and the coverage report for important pages missing from the index.

A site that broke last week, lost its certificate or picked up a hacked page would show a drop now, update or not.

The counter-case

Sometimes waiting is the wrong advice.

If the site is broken, hacked or blocked from search, fix it today. Waiting only helps when the cause is the update itself.

If a drop is large, lasting and concentrated on pages that bring work, it deserves careful attention once the rollout settles, ideally from someone who compares before recommending.

A site with years of neglected content may find the update has simply made that visible. The answer then is a plan, not a panic.

This week, rule out breakage, record the date, and wait for clean data before changing anything.

This week

1. Annotate the date in Universal Analytics.
2. Note other recent changes to the site.
3. Check manual actions and coverage in Search Console.
4. Change nothing else for two or three weeks.
5. Compare equal periods before and after the rollout.
6. Filter out searches containing your business name.
7. Check calls and enquiries, not just positions.

Step four is the hardest and the most valuable. Only an owner whose site held still can find out what the update actually did.

Seeing every version of the site in one place before comparing is covered in one Search Console property for the whole domain.

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