Holiday Devastation: Understanding Google’s Latest Core Update and How to Recover

One of the biggest Google updates happened over the holidays... Let me explain...

As usual, Google has started and ended another big core update over the holidays.

Unlike popular belief, I don’t think it is some kind of evil plan to ruin more lives during festivities. I suspect Google always does big updates over the family holidays simply because fewer people use search, so if anything goes wrong, not as many people are affected.

Regardless, historically the biggest Google updates happen on Christmas, and they are devastating for many business owners who celebrate the holidays knowing they may be losing their businesses or will be forced to let many people go right after the festivities.

This recent update was pretty huge, as usual, so let’s try to explain it without making your head hurt:

Core Updates are updates to *the algorithm*, according to Google

Google keeps saying this: It is not about you, it’s about us changing how we see user intent and relevance.

So unlike spam updates, this one is supposed to be not penalizing. It is not about what you did wrong. It is supposed to be about fixing what the algorithm wasn’t doing well enough.

And yet:

Core updates are actually penalizing (Deranking sites with poor usability or with too many ads)

We’ve all discussed Navboost to death already, but we know that Google collects user engagement data and then uses it to reorganize search results.

In other words, if Google notices users are leaving your site too fast (or worse, returning to search results to click another one), its systems may assume your page is not serving them well enough.

In this case, that page will lose visibility, and it happens during Core Updates.

So what is that other than an algorithmic penalty?

The problem here: Only high-traffic pages get noticed by these systems. Unless you get enough clicks for Google to notice, you will not suffer a huge impact. That is why Core Updates may elevate spammy pages that didn’t have clicks before, as Glenn Gabe noticed in his fabulous analysis. That is also why Core Updates may be very impactful (and devastating): They hit pages they have enough data about.

Helpful Content is part of Core Updates

Let’s not forget this part: Up until this day, we don’t really know what the Helpful Content algorithm really wants from publishers. I covered it before, so if you were impacted by the Core Update, it is worth looking at your content helpfulness:

• Your Practical Guide to Creating More Helpful Content (Using Keywords)

• What Does the Helpful Content Update REALLY Mean for SEO?

• Helpful Content as Defined by Google’s Quality Guidelines

Helpful Content *is* a penalizing system. It punishes pages that are deemed unhelpful, so that is another reason to call Core Updates penalties.

The bad news is that the Helpful Content system can be sitewide (if Google finds enough “unhelpful content” on your site, it will hit the whole site). The other bad news is that this can make the analysis and recovery harder.

So, how to recover from Google’s Core Update?

If your site was impacted by the Core Update, the first things I’d look at are:

• Most impacted pages (those will be the pages that used to get the most traffic). Search Console’s “Compare” report is the first best tool to look at.

• Things you can do to improve those pages. In most cases: Restructuring the page to give the most important answers on top of it, adding structure (headings), demonetizing them, adding high-quality, real authorship (when it makes sense), etc.

If you need help, I am one free call away!