Google keeps on updating its algorithm to offer increased efficiency in offering reliable results and information to the users. The Algorithm updates can influentially result in drops or improvements in SERP Rankings. This blog features various Google Updates of 2019 and some workarounds to eliminate the ranking impacts.
Google is one of the most preferred search engines in the world. We mostly rely upon it for the search results and information offered to us in numerous ways. Google also keeps on updating and bringing new features to its search engine algorithm to offer an improved experience and enhanced results to the users accounting towards genuine and reliable information. In terms of understanding the underlying concept behind its functionality, Google focuses more on fetching content-rich websites and pages to results based on the user’s query. This fosters google to influence brands and companies to push paid strategies in order to sell their products to huge masses like us but the content-based strategy can organically help them to direct a large number of visitors to their websites. Google keeps on tweaking these techniques and adding new functionalities to comprehensively achieve its goals by offering a genuine workaround to rank websites organically.
As per the stats released by Google in 2018, the search engine has made over 3,234 remarkable improvements which are quite larger than the figures combined since its release.
Why Google algorithm Updates should bother websites?
Google accounts for more than 90% of search queries from all over the world which is quite huge in terms of numbers and user base. This gives enormous opportunities to websites and brands to rank their websites on top results to drive traffic and revenue. As Google never officially claims proven ways to rank your website up, these algorithm updates can affect the ranking in various ways. It might also push your website to the top results while it may also result in downfall for some. This offers quite a tricky situation to webmasters to make constant efforts towards as per the updates to stay on the top.
(Source – Kuno Creative)
Identifying Impact on Website Rankings
It is quite important to analyze the websites on the basis of Google algorithm updates which can give you a clear insight into rankings. This will offer you an idea of which aspects the google rankings have been affected. The loopholes can vary from categories, tags, quality, content, etc. Various sites such as Moz, Rank Ranger, SEMrush, etc. can be used to access the rankings. The assessments by these sources can offer you ranking insight on the basis of a percentage to conclude the gains and losses.
Google SEO Updates 2019
Here is the list of Google SEO Updates 2019 which might help you to improve your SEO techniques in various ways to stay above your competitors.
1. January 2019 Update
Duplicacy and content redundancy is a big issue in terms of offering genuine articles. This update aimed more towards the news publishers to stay away from scraped or rewritten content. This update clearly stated that the duplicate content is a big no and should use canonical tags if the content is somewhat related to the pre-published blog or page.
Fix: Strictly Following EAT Guidelines to Generate Authority
Google has emphasized to follow the EAT guideline strictly in terms of ranking content. It focuses on on-page quality consists of expertise, authoritativeness and trust factors of a particular webpage or content. This algorithm has also taken care of websites catering to food, wellness, health, automotive, etc. to ensure that the information is genuine and valuable.
2. Google Core Update- March 2019 (Florida 2)
This update was officially a core algorithm update from Google which has taken a big toll on health websites as google has emphasized more on trust and value rather than just information. In terms of sensitive keywords and niche like- Health and wellness, Google has favored sites which have more visitors and pageviews rather than just information. The key learnings influenced more towards publishing valuable and expertise content.
Fix: Webpages & Content Should Serve the Purpose to Users
Google intends to influence webmasters to use the content on web pages which are intended to achieve a goal or serve a purpose to user’s queries. The web pages which are just developed to make money will not be ranked at the top anymore. Google has taken the concept of YMYL (Your money, your life) seriously in terms of listing up webpages.
3. Google June Broadcore Update 2019
This was a broad core update by Google which influentially rolls out some big changes in the search engine ecosystem. It has been found out that this algorithm has mostly targeted high authority sites like- Dailymail and coinbase which has lost its ranking overnight. Similarly, it has also targeted a few low-quality websites with low-quality scores. Google, however, stated that this update has “nothing to fix” which means that these updates are mostly focused on improvising the algorithm and may result in a drop for some of the websites.
4. Google Diversity Update – June 2019
The diversity update was focused on slashing out the multiple results from the same website to give more scope to other websites in the same keyword. The role of google reviews will also contribute towards the new algorithm system.
5. Google September 2019 Core Update
The core algorithm affected all major niche and categories as it was more focused on improvising the algorithm. This update has also affected sites with low-quality scores and influenced EAT guidelines. Apart from this, the websites from the financial and money category also saw a big drop in the ranking. It states that the content has a big role to play in the coming months and google definitely wants to improve the content quality to offer refined results.
6. Google Link Attribute Update Sep 2019
There are a lot of issues in terms of accessing the quality of backlinks but through the google link attribute update, Google has released ways to attribute backlinks on the basis of following, no-follow, sponsored and UGC(user-generated content). It also states that no-follow link may or may not be used as a hint for ranking purposes as well.
Google’s Recommendations to Keep Up with Rankings
Google recommended keeping websites updated with the essential guidelines and techniques to ensure that the webpages don’t see drops in their search results. Here are some of the crucial points to take care of in order to keep up with the rankings.
- SEO Essentials: It is quite important to make sure of basic SEO essentials like- Title Tags, Image alt tags, Webpage Speed Optimisation, Keywords, Headings and content to ensure that the google robots can crawl your website.
- Sitemap: The sitemap is quite useful in terms of telling web crawlers to crawl certain sections and web pages. This allows crawlers to rank your webpages in an efficient manner.
- Ensuring EAT Guidelines: The EAT guidelines ensure that the content is unique and genuine. It refers to expertise, authority, and trust to ensure that the web page is publishing original and reliable information.
- Refining Content & Presentation: The webmasters should work on improving their content as the google search algorithm mostly focuses on ranking pages as per the content quality along with some other factors.
- Improving Quality Score: The webmasters should improve the web page performance by fixing technical issues in order to improve the quality score. Increased page speed and mobile optimization can also help in improving search rankings.
Google quite frequently releases updates as per the needs and requirements to improve the algorithm and it can be seen that google might strictly bind webmasters and content publishers to abide the strict guidelines in order to influence the genuine ecosystem where users can get relevant desired and genuine information. This will definitely help in improving the search engine algorithm to offer more accurate and effective search results.
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