Every other week there’s an (unconfirmed) Google update that is widely discussed around SEO forums and communities.
What do you do when you hear about a potential Google algorithm update?
Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst discuss Google’s update and how to react to yet another one:
Question: What do you do when there’s another Google algorithm?
The short answer is: Nothing special.
There’s no point in going crazy about Google updates these days for two main reason:
- There’s something happening every week, if not day. It is impossible to keep up. It is smarter to use these efforts and resources elsewhere.
- At the end of the day, what’s the point in knowing when there’s an update because there’s no longer one clear fix to any of those.
Google is making changes every day.
Gone are the days when you were able to identify a type of Google update by looking at the day when you have been impacted. If it were Panda, there was something wrong with your content. If your site’s traffic declined on the day of one of Penguin updates, the problem was links.
These days it is all fuzzy.
First of all, for most updates you will not see a drastic change in traffic or rankings these days. It is a slow decline that happens over months.
If your traffic dropped considerably within a day, it is unlikely an update that caused the drop.
Google’s core updates cause a slow loss of rankings which is very hard (if not impossible to pinpoint it to one day).
And likewise it is impossible to identify one single thing to fix.
You have to look at everything.
What’s the user experience? Does your content serve a user intent? How are your backlinks?
It is the same process that works whether you were impacted by an update (or you think you were) or if you just want to hire an SEO agency to grow your organic traffic.
You have to apply all your knowledge about all past updates to every site and improve all aspects of SEO.
So whether your site was affected by Google or not, a consistent and comprehensive SEO strategy is what you need to do.
