On March 7, 2018 Google rolled out one of the biggest algorithm updates I’ve seen in a long time, which I called The Brackets Update. It reminded me of Phantom 2 from May of 2015 on several levels. That’s when I uncovered a massive update that was ultimately confirmed by Google (after I was interviewed by CNBC). Google explained that they implemented a change with how they assess quality. And that statement was incredibly important, since Google is always trying to surface the highest-quality content for users. It was the first of many quality updates that had a significant impact globally.

Now with the March 7, 2018 update, Google also confirmed the rollout. And it was a big update. Many sites were impacted globally (across categories and countries). There was a lot of volatility when the update first rolled out, and then more with subsequent tremors. For example, there was a boatload of movement on March 14 with some sites reversing and others seeing more impact in the same direction (continuing to surge or drop). It was one of the most volatile few weeks I’ve ever seen.

Well, only a few weeks after the 3/14 tremor, we had yet another broad core ranking update that rolled out. It was on April 16, and there was significant movement across sites, categories, and countries. In this two-part series, I’ll first cover what we know about the algorithm update, Google’s comments about relevancy, a history of Panda and why that could be important, The Celebrity Update from December of 2017, and more. Then in part two I’ll cover what I’ve seen with the April 16 update, including examples of surges and drops, the connection to the March 7 update, and my thoughts about what you can do as a site owner or SEO.

A quick disclaimer:
I do not work for Google. I do not have access to Google’s core ranking algorithm, bamboo, Panda, or scary Phantoms. I’m just explaining what I’ve seen after analyzing many sites impacted by algorithm updates over time, and how that compares with what I’m seeing with the latest Google updates. I have access to a lot of data across sites, categories, and countries, while also having many sites reach out to me for help after seeing movement from these updates. Nobody knows exactly what Google is refining, other than the search engineers themselves.

Examples of Movement – Big swings.
First, I’ll provide some examples of the movement I saw when the April 16 update rolled out. I have access to a large dataset of sites, and many have had quality issues in the past, so I can often see a lot of movement when big updates roll out. In addition, there are always a number of companies that reach out to me for help after seeing impact from a new update. And I also track certain niche categories very closely. Based on that data, here are some examples of impact:

Gains:

Drops:

Connection to the March 7, 2018 Update
With the April 16, 2018 update, I saw several connections to the March 7, 2018 update. For example, there were some sites that initially dropped on 3/7 that either dropped more, or they reversed. I also saw websites that initially surged on 3/7, that surged more, or reversed and dropped back down. Danny Sullivan confirmed the update by explaining it was the same type of broad update released on March 7 which was benefiting sites that were previously under-rewarded. More about that point soon.

Based on Danny’s comment about the update benefiting pages that were being under-rewarded, it was interesting to see some sites reverse quickly with the 4/16 update (after seeing initial impact on 3/7). I guess they were only being rewarded for a few weeks, right? :) We know Google’s algorithms aren’t perfect, and there were clearly adjustments made after the March 7 rollout. I’ve seen this before with other major algorithm updates by the way. More about reversals later in the post.

It’s also interesting that Danny said “pages” when these updates clearly look like site-level adjustments. For example, many sites dropped or surged significantly. That’s not the effect of just certain pages being rewarded… that sure looks like a site-level adjustment. I’ll cover this when I explain John Mueller’s comments in the next section.

Relevance and site-level impact:
In a webmaster hangout video, John Mueller was asked a question about the March 7 update. He didn’t say too much about the algorithm update (which is normal), but he did explain that the update was more about relevance. When commenting about why certain sites dropped, John said, “maybe the sites aren’t seen as relevant in the overall picture of the web anymore”. And that sure backs a site-level adjustment. For example, that’s basically Google explaining that your site is not as relevant anymore for the queries at hand.

Here is the video of John explaining this (at 11:33 in the video):

Now, I don’t believe the entire update was about relevance (on both 3/7 and 4/16). Actually, it almost can’t be based on the data I have access to and some of the hits and surges I have analyzed. You can read my post about the March 7 update to learn more about all of the quality problems I saw across sites negatively impacted. I also cover sites that surged and the work they have been doing from a quality standpoint. So, there were either multiple updates pushed at once, or both algorithm updates focused on more than just relevance. That’s a good segue to my next section.

Reverse-Panda? Relevance, and the difference between “Medieval Panda” and “Current Panda”
First, when Google says anything about relevance, my Panda ears perk up. I’ve covered medieval Panda versus the core ranking Panda many times in my posts about algorithm updates. It’s an important point that I think many people miss.

Medieval Panda (pre-Panda 4.2) ate everything in its path. If your site was deemed low-quality, you better run for the hills and hope you don’t end up stuck in a bamboo forest. It wasn’t uncommon for sites to see a drop of 60%+ after medieval Panda rolled through. And the worst hit I saw was from a site that dropped 91% overnight. Yes, 91%.

Here’s an example of a severe medieval Panda hit:

But that was medieval Panda. Over the years, Panda went through a transformation and we saw the last old-school update on 10/24/14, which I picked up after Panda 4.1 rolled out. Then we saw nothing until July of 2015 with Panda 4.2. And it didn’t take long to see something was very different with our cute, black and white furry friend. For example, Google explained it was now rolling out slowly and would continually roam the web. That’s very different from rolling out on one day and having massive impact in a very short period of time.

Then in January of 2016, we found out that Panda became part of Google’s core ranking algorithm. For anyone tracking Panda closely, you could clearly see the changes. Sites weren’t getting hammered anymore, there were slight changes over time and Panda seemed to focus more on relevance than hammering sites that were low-quality. And yes, read that bolded word again. I said relevance.

Actually, Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed some of what we were seeing. During an interview with Bruce Clay, Gary explained that Panda wasn’t viewed internally as a “penalty”. It was merely trying to adjust sites that were overly-prominent for queries they shouldn’t rank for. Therefore, the days of dropping by 60% due to Panda were gone (replaced by what we called “quality updates”), and Panda became more of a relevance adjuster.

Here is a video of Gary explaining Panda adjustments:

The reason I took you through that Panda history lesson was because we might want to think of the new updates as “reverse-Panda”. Sites are benefitting since they are more relevant than other sites (which of course means that sites that are being leapfrogged are deemed less relevant).

And by the way, since Panda is part of Google core ranking algorithm, the changes that rolled out on March 7 (and now April 16) could have been a mixture of changes, which could have included Panda tweaks. We haven’t received any updates about Panda in a long time, yet we know it went through a major transformation when it became part of Google’s core ranking algorithm.

It’s hard to say for sure what exactly is going on, but don’t forget about Panda when Google talks about “relevance”. It may not be as nasty as medieval Panda, but it’s still there… and could very well be multiple versions ahead of the last Panda we knew.

Testing Celebrities: Remember The Celebrity Update on December 15, 2017?
On December 15, 2017, many official celebrity websites tanked. I wrote a post detailing my findings soon after the update rolled out. You could see those sites drop for queries directly related to the celebrity. The search visibility changes were significant, as you can see below.

The official site for Tom Cruise plummets:

Ditto for Charlie Sheen’s official site:

After sharing my post and what happened, Google’s Danny Sullivan said he would pass that on to the search engineers (or search quality team). And that he did…

SEO Inception – A swarm of quality raters to my site?
After Danny shared my post internally, I had a flurry of visits from what looked like quality raters to my blog post. There were 26 visits from raterlabs.com all to my celebrity post. That’s the first time I’ve seen that happen and it was a surreal moment. I’ve mentioned the Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) many times in the past, but I’ve never been involved in any way. Now my blog post was being read by quality raters after the celebrity update rolled out. Cool, but very Inception-like. :)

But guess what happened after that? Nothing changed. The sites that were impacted remained impacted. Therefore, the engineers were basically saying the update worked the way they wanted it to.

As I mentioned in my post about the update, many of those official celebrity sites were terrible. They were thin, didn’t contain updated information, and were basically placeholders for the celebrity on the web. On the flip side, there were other sites providing much more in-depth information, like IMDB, Wikipedia, and more. Those sites jumped up in rankings while the official celebrity sites tanked.

When asked about the update, Google’s John Mueller explained that just because those were the official celebrity websites didn’t mean that’s what users always wanted. For example, users may be searching for more in-depth information that other sites could provide. He was basically saying that the celeb sites weren’t as relevant for certain queries (which is true). So, we had a relevance sighting with that update.

Here’s the video of John explaining this (at 13:55 in the video):

Looking back now, I’m wondering if that was the start of these newer updates like we saw on March 7 and April 16. Maybe Google started by testing this new approach with specific categories. I don’t know if that’s the case, but that update looked like a smaller version of what we are seeing now. It’s just an interesting side note.

Celebrity Recovery:
If you’re wondering if any celebrity websites recovered, they did. For example, Justin Timberlake redesigned his site in late December and bounced back in January. The new site contained much stronger content and included information about his new tour. Since Justin’s tour was coming up, and his site seemed to focus on that, it could have been seen by Google’s algos as more relevant for those queries now. And if that update was like the broader updates we are seeing now, it could provide some clues as to what you can do to bounce back.

Justin Timberlake Recovers From The Celebrity Update:

But Hold On! There Were Quality Problems Too…
We know the March 7 and April 16 updates looked like site-level updates. Both updates did not seem like they were adjusting one url on a site that was deemed more relevant now. We saw adjustments that had some websites surging and others falling significantly.

When I was analyzing sites that saw both positive and negative movement due to the 3/7 and 4/16 updates, you could clearly see a number of the sites dropping WERE RELEVANT. Not only relevant, they were some of the most relevant sites on the web for the subject matter. And when checking them out in greater detail, there were a number of quality issues present. Again, you can read my post about the 3/7 update to learn about all of the quality issues I surfaced when analyzing sites that were negatively impacted.

Now, I know John said relevance, but the quality problems were hard to ignore. And if quality issues were a factor, then the updates wouldn’t be focused entirely on relevance, but about quality as well. And “quality” can mean several things, which I’ve covered heavily in my previous posts about major algorithm updates.

For example, I’ve covered the usual suspects many times when writing about quality updates. From thin content to low quality content to low quality user engagement to UX barriers to aggressive and disruptive advertising, these are the problems I overwhelmingly saw while analyzing sites negatively impacted by quality updates in the past. The following slide is from my SMX West presentation about major algorithm updates.

And the March 7 and April 16 updates were no different. Sure, there were some sites being leapfrogged where the content wasn’t as relevant as other sites that were rising, but I also saw the most powerful sites in a niche drop. And you cannot tell me they aren’t relevant to the subject matter. That’s crazy.

For example, there were some behemoths in health, nutrition, ecommerce, entertainment, news, recipes, automotive, and more that were leapfrogged by others in the niche. It’s an important point I wanted to make to ensure that site owners focus on the big picture, which includes quality.

A quick note about links:
I know some people thought that links could be a significant part of the April 16 update. That’s always hard to tell, but after analyzing many sites impacted by the March and April updates, I don’t believe this was the case. Some of the most powerful sites link-wise were leapfrogged during the March 7 and April 16 updates. For example, key players in each niche with millions of links (including extremely powerful links from trusted sites), were impacted. So in my opinion, I don’t believe that links had a major role here.

Example of a site with a powerful link profile negatively impacted by the April 16 update:

Relevance Reversals – A number of reversals from March 7 – How’s that for a change in “relevance”?
While analyzing the 4/16 update, I found a number of sites that reversed (or partially reversed) from the 3/7 update. Danny tweeted that the April 16 update was another broad update just like the March 7 update and you could clearly see the connection with the sites that reversed.

Now, tremors are nothing new. Google’s John Mueller explained this to me back during medieval Panda days. That’s when Google can follow larger updates with smaller tweaks to ensure the results are as strong as possible. That means the 4/16 update could have been adjustments to the algorithm update rolled out on 3/7. For example, check out the screenshots below:

And regarding “relevance”, I guess those sites that surged back were less relevant for just a few weeks, and then became relevant again? Or sites that surged and then dropped back down had their “15 minutes of relevance fame” and then lost it? :) Again, I believe these updates were NOT just about relevance. As you’ll see in part two of my series covering examples of impact, I saw many of the usual suspects rear their ugly heads, including low-quality content, low quality user experience, aggressive and deceptive ads, UX barriers, and more.

But Glenn, Danny says to do nothing…
No, that’s not what he said. He explained there’s no quick fix you can implement to jump back up. That’s different than doing nothing. He also explained to “remain focused on building great content” and “over time it may be that your content rises relevant to others”. So don’t sit there and do nothing if you’ve seen a drop in rankings and you’ve been leapfrogged. IMPROVE YOUR SITE, CONTENT, UX, etc.  I’ll cover more about what I think you can do in part two of this series.

Summary: An important algorithm change that caused significant impact:
Whenever Google makes a key change to its core ranking algorithm, you can see significant impact globally. And that’s clearly what happened with the March 7 and April 16 updates. And just like with other big updates, we’ve seen some sites reverse course. Since Google’s core ranking algorithm is a black box, it’s hard to tell exactly what changed, but it sure seemed like we had clues leading up to initial rollout (which I covered in my post above).

One thing is for sure, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of these updates. Whether it’s relevance, quality, or a mixture of both, the impact to rankings and traffic is clear. In part two of my series, I’ll take a closer look at the impact from the April 16 update, including what I think site owners and SEOs can do if their sites have been leapfrogged. I hope to publish that post soon. Stay tuned.

GG

 

I promised I wouldn’t but I just gave it a name. :) Actually, it’s based on a tweet from Marie Haynes saying, “It’s March Madness!” after I posted screenshots of the wild tremor starting on 3/14/18. More about that tremor soon.

As many of you know, Google pushed a really big update starting the week of March 5, 2018 (with Google now confirming it started rolling out on March 7, 2018). Many sites saw impact on 3/9, but I started seeing impact before that date (internationally). I received the first calls and messages about major volatility on 3/8, and when digging into those sites, you could clearly see the jumps or drops starting on 3/8 and 3/9.

I started sharing screenshots of what I was seeing that weekend and then we received confirmation from Google’s Danny Sullivan that there was a big update.

First my tweet from 3/10:

And here is the confirmation from Danny on 3/12:

By the way, I love the transparency that Danny is bringing to site owners via the @searchliaison Twitter account. If you aren’t following that account yet, you should. We typically don’t receive confirmation from Google about major updates, so it was great to hear that from Danny. Also, he explained more about what he called “broad updates” that focus on quality versus “focused updates” that occur all the time. Anyone focusing on algorithm updates knows that there are several per year that are huge (and make the earth shake). And then there are many small updates that most people don’t even notice. It was great to hear Danny clarify the difference between the two. Barry Schwartz covered that in a post soon after.

The canary in the coal mine: Rich snippets
As the update starting rolling out, I received the first messages and emails from companies that were impacted (and from clients seeing movement). Again, that was on 3/8. And just like with several other major quality updates, the canary in the coal mine was the gain or loss of rich snippets.

Many aren’t aware of this, but there’s a quality threshold to rich snippets. Therefore, you can see sites gain or lose rich snippets when major quality updates roll out. Well, I saw that again with this update. And the first company to contact me was one working on improving quality after getting hit in December. They lost all of their star ratings when that update rolled out, but they gained all of them back with the March 7, 2018 update. Here’s a before and after shot of the percentage of queries yielding star ratings.

So just be aware of this if you see rich snippets disappear, or if you suddenly gain them. There’s a chance that a broad quality update is rolling out.

Letters from the field – Examples of impact:
So we know a major update rolled out and we know that it was focused on quality. And all signs point to Google tinkering with its core algorithm with how it assesses quality. We can think of this update as a refinement of their previous quality updates. What exactly they refined is not known, but it does seem that Google is doing a better job at surfacing higher quality sites.

In this post I’ll cover a number of different examples of impact (including both positive and negative movement). I’ll touch on what those sites were doing and how those things could be negatively or positively impacting the sites algorithmically. Then I’ll cover some important notes for sites moving forward, whether your site was negatively impacted or if recently surged. Let’s jump in.

First a reminder: Significant improvement over the long-term.
I just covered this in my presentation at SMX West, and it’s an important point. When asked about major algorithm updates focused on quality, Google’s John Mueller has been clear several times. Google wants to see significant improvement in quality over the long term. That’s significant and over the long term. Here is a video of John explaining this:

This means that if you’ve been negatively impacted, you probably won’t recover in a few weeks. Actually, you probably won’t recover in a month or two. From what John has said, and what I have seen in the field, it’s typically months of hard work before you can see recovery. So drive forward with big changes. That’s how you can surge back.

Examples of positive impact:

Significant AND Long-term
The first surge I’m going to cover is an interesting one. It’s a site that contacted me a while ago for help and we have stayed in touch ever since. They were impacted negatively by several algorithm updates, including major quality updates. About eight months ago they began a serious remediation project. That included a number of important tasks.

Remember, there’s never one smoking gun when it comes to quality. There’s usually a battery of smoking guns. This site decided to go all-in and tackle several important problems.

First, they enhanced E-A-T by building more high-quality content by expert authors. And that new content helped attract links from well-known sites. That’s really important from an E-A-T perspective. Side note: Marie Haynes asked Gary Illyes at Pubcon about how Google evaluates E-A-T and he said that Google largely looks at links from well-known sites. Therefore, building killer content that attracts links from well-known sites is a really smart thing to do (on several levels, including from an E-A-T perspective).

Second, they highlighted the expertise of their authors. The site wasn’t doing that before and they wanted to make a point to emphasize this after seeing negative impact.

Third, they drastically cut down on aggressive and deceptive advertising. I’ve written about this many times before when covering major quality updates. The Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) mentions aggressive, disruptive, and deceptive advertising a number of times and I have seen aggressive, disruptive, or deceptive ads many, many times while analyzing sites negatively impacted during these broad quality updates. This company also labeled all ads clearly (to avoid deception), they cut down on aggressiveness, and more.

Last, they improved usability overall. They restructured their site so it was better organized, it was easier for users to traverse, etc. And all of this paid off. They saw a nice increase during the March 7, 2018 update.

Important point: It took them 8 months to see an increase like this. Remember when I mentioned that John Mueller said that Google wants to see significant improvement in quality over the long-term? He’s not kidding… and that’s exactly what happened here.

Battle scars remain – A long road of mostly positive movement.
The next increase I’ll cover is a long-term client of mine. I started helping the company back when medieval Panda and the original Penguin roamed the web. It’s an affiliate site and they have done very well over the years once they recovered from the algorithmic dynamic duo I just mentioned. But they recently started seeing a gradual decline in traffic. That decline looked very Panda-like to me based on the queries leading to the site that dropped.

With the March 7, 2018 update, they saw a really nice increase. I’ve been helping them over the past several months audit the site from a quality perspective (which takes a number of factors into account). For example, content quality, user experience, affiliate setup, and from a technical SEO standpoint. I uncovered some important findings over the past several months and my client worked quickly to make those changes.

They also made changes in how they produce content. So the combination of improving technical SEO, enhancing how they handle their affiliate setup, and enhancing content quality seemed to have paid off.

Infinite Spaces and a boatload of unintended low-quality content
The next example I’ll provide is a site that contacted me after reading my post about infinite spaces. In that post, I covered a case study of a site where I uncovered an infinite spaces problem impacting up to 10M urls. That’s bad, but a company reached out to me via my Facebook page after reading that post to let me know they are using the process I laid out to surface and address their own infinite spaces problem. And get this…. the problem was impacting up to 80M urls — yes, 80M. Wow.

Their SEO team began handling that situation correctly starting in early February and they just messaged me after the March 7, 2018 update to explain that they saw a nice surge. It’s awesome to hear that, although I think everyone involved knows they have more work to do. But it’s great to see a boost during a quality update when they rid their site of 80M urls containing thin content.

No way out… or is there?
Another company I’m helping is in a competitive niche and has seen continuous downturns during quality updates. They also saw a nice increase during this update. They aren’t done yet, since we aren’t far into the engagement, but it was great to see the increase.

They got hammered by the February 2017 update and saw more negative movement during subsequent updates. During my analysis (which I’m still neck deep in), I uncovered a number of quality problems ranging from thin content, low-quality content, technical problems causing quality problems, affiliate issues, and more. They are making changes quickly and moving down the right path, so it was awesome to see the increase.

Examples of negative impact:

The kitchen sink: A potpourri of quality problems:
The first example of a drop I’m going to cover spans the gamut of low-quality user engagement. When digging into this site, I saw many examples of problems that I would surface during an audit. First, the site provides massive amounts of low-quality supplementary content and ads on each page.

From a main content standpoint, the same content can often be found on other sites and the site does nothing to provide a value-add. The content was also split into tabs (which actually launched new urls), with no reason to do that other than to gain more ad impressions. There wasn’t much content, so splitting it across tabs made no sense at all. And to add insult to injury, the site bombards you with deceptive ads and low-quality supplementary content on each page (surrounding the mediocre main content).

And not only are there low-quality ads, they are deceptive too. There’s often no ad label contained in the ad units, which makes it harder to identify what is related content from the site and which are ads that will whisk you off the site downstream. I’ve mentioned deceptive ads many times in my posts about major quality updates and this site had this problem all over the place.

From an expertise, authoritativeness, and trust perspective, the site had NO E-A-T at all. I couldn’t even find solid contact information on the site. And the about section was literally the most general copy you could find. I didn’t see any solid author information either as I traversed the site.

In addition to the ad situation, there were affiliate links prominently displayed on certain page types with no disclosure that they were affiliate links  (very close to the main content). So again, there was a major deception component to the entire site. Like I said, this was the kitchen sink from a low-quality user engagement standpoint.

Giphy
I typically don’t name sites, but I’ve covered this one before (and I’m truly rooting for them). I’m a big fan of Giphy and hope they keep recovering after getting hammered on October 4, 2017 during the fall 2017 “hornets’ nest”. Here was the drop in October.

After getting destroyed as their search pages were deindexed by Google, they started creating new pages that weren’t simply internal search results pages. And that approach has been paying off. They have seen nice increases over the past two months as seen below. But… that just ended. They took a dip during the 3/7/18 update.

So Google’s revamped quality algos are not digging giphy.com. Just an interesting side note.

“Hell hath no fury like a user scorned.”
The next drop is from a site in a competitive niche I focus on heavily. It’s a big brand name in the niche and it just dropped heavily during the March 7 update. When checking out the drop, I noticed a sinister problem (that I’m assuming they know is going on). The site is essentially cloaking and showing users one thinner version of the content, but showing Google a much more robust version. There’s also an aggressive conversion tactic they are using, which destroys the user experience. Therefore, the site contains UX barriers, thin content, cloaking, and aggressive conversion tactics. And they got hit pretty hard.

And there are many more examples of sites improving or dropping during this update (globally). It was a huge update and I can’t possibly cover everything here. I hope these examples were helpful, though.

But guess what? We haven’t seen the end of this update. Read on…

Google’s not done yet! The March 14, 2018 Tremor. And it was huge.
Just when you thought the volatility was done, Google pushes more changes. I started receiving the first emails about the volatility on 3/14/18 and the swings were huge. I’m not sure if this is a tremor (where Google pushes a large update and then follows with tweaks to that update or if this is something else). Based on what I’m seeing, it very well could be connected to March 7. I’m seeing sites that were impacted by the 3/7/18 update with more movement starting on 3/14.

Here are some screenshots of the wild swings:

And here’s an example of a huge increase in Google Analytics based on the tremor:

Here is a close-up view:

I’m digging into those swings now to learn more about the tremor. Some sites are seeing massive gains or losses, so whatever Google pushed was a significant change. I’ll reach out to Google’s Danny Sullivan to see if he can shed some light on the situation. I’ll post an update here after I do.

Moving forward. Be ready for the next broad quality update:
If you have seen negative impact during the March 7, 2018 update or the March 14 tremor, then I have some recommendations for you. Remember, the goal is to increase quality significantly over the long-term.

There is typically not a quick fix. There’s no meta tag or minor change you will implement that will cause a surge during the next broad quality update. Instead, you need to hunt down all quality problems and fix them as quickly as you can. That might take months by the way so “quick” is relative. Below, I’ve included some bullets with my recommendations. And if you’ve read my previous posts about major quality updates, the bullets should be very familiar to you.

• Perform a Crawl Analysis and Audit Through The Lens of Quality: This means crawling your site just like Google would and then surfacing all quality problems (which could include content quality, aggressive advertising issues, UX barriers, and technical SEO problems). Leave no stone unturned. I use DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, and Sitebulb when performing crawls. I’m on the customer advisory board for DeepCrawl, which is outstanding for running enterprise crawls. I typically use Screaming Frog for surgical crawls, although their latest update enables you to crawl many more urls (and faster). And then I use the “young punk” Sitebulb to polish things off. The combination of the three enable me to get a granular view of a site from a quality perspective.
• Keep creating great things: Continue publishing high quality content (10X). Don’t hold back on doing great things just because you are negatively impacted. Instead, drive forward and let Google know you are producing high-quality content written by experts in your niche, and that users love your site. A byproduct of doing this is that you might gain additional high-quality links. And remember what I said about E-A-T and how Google looks at that? It’s important to do this.
• Gain objective feedback: Get objective feedback from real people. Don’t ask your spouse to review your site, your kids, or your employees. Have real consumers go through your site and give them tasks to complete. Learn about their experience, if there were any annoying problems, and if they felt that your content met, or exceeded, their expectations.
• Nuke aggressive, disruptive, or deceptive ads: Surface and handle aggressive and deceptive advertising that’s running on your site. It’s ok to run advertising, but it’s not ok to overwhelm users with disruptive, aggressive, and deceptive ads. Don’t prioritize monetization over your users. There’s a good chance you’ll get burned if you do.
• Bumps in the road: Understand that you might see bumps in the road as you work towards recovery. Keep driving forward. Keep publishing outstanding content. Keep looking for ways to improve quality. And definitely run all changes through your SEO team, agency, or consultant. Don’t fall back to old ways… Remember, Google only rolls these broad updates focused on quality a few times per year. Don’t miss your opportunity to surge back.

Summary – The March 7, 2018 update was huge and the March 14 tremor was even bigger. Now your work begins.
This was one of the biggest updates I’ve seen in a while. It seems Google once again improved how it assesses quality, and with Google always looking to surface the highest quality content for users, that’s a really big deal. If your site has been impacted negatively, then follow the bullets I listed above. Work hard to significantly enhance quality over the long-term. Fix all of your quality problems. Don’t cherry pick issues to deal with. Tackle them all. That’s how you win. Good luck.

GG