On August 1, 2018 Google rolled out one of the biggest algorithm updates I’ve ever seen. It was huge and many sites saw significant volatility across categories and countries. The 8/1 update followed similar broad algorithm updates in March and April of 2018, which also caused significant volatility across the web. I wrote a 2-part series covering those spring updates, which you should definitely read. Google’s Danny Sullivan confirmed this was a broad core ranking update just like those updates.

Many sites across the web have been impacted by the August 1 update and Google estimated that it would take over a week to fully roll out. That seems to be correct, as I’ve seen a number of sites see much more impact Monday into Tuesday of this week. Also, Google confirmed yesterday that the update has fully rolled out, so it did take about a week.

I’ve been heavily analyzing the update since it rolled out and will cover a number of important topics in this post. Specifically, I’ll cover confirmed surges, including some of what those companies have completed after being negatively impacted in the past. I’ll cover fresh hits and what I’m seeing across those sites that were negatively impacted. And I’ll also cover important information from Googlers about this type of algorithm update (some of which has not been covered yet since the update rolled out).

So strap your battle helmets on. Let’s take a look at Battle Ground Google, The August 2018 Edition.

Significant AND Long-term + Relevance AND Quality
I help a lot of companies that have been negatively impacted by major algorithm updates. They are typically large-scale sites, but I do help some small to medium sized sites as well. The sites I’m helping have typically lost a significant amount of search visibility, rankings, and traffic during major updates, and sometimes have dropped over several updates (making the situation even worse).

As I’ve said in the past many times, broad core ranking updates take many factors into account. There’s never one smoking gun. Instead, there’s typically a battery of smoking guns. Actually, I tweeted that soon after this update rolled out based on what I was seeing across sites that were impacted. And it was awesome to see John Mueller retweet that! That makes sense, since John has communicated similar things a number of times during webmaster hangout videos.

Google is evaluating relevance and quality at the site-level. And “quality” can mean a number of things. For example, content quality, user experience (UX), aggressive, disruptive, and deceptive, advertising, technical SEO problems that cause quality problems, and more. Therefore, it’s important to fully understand all of the problems with your site and then form a serious plan of attack for remediation. Remember, Google is on record explaining they want to see significant improvement in quality over the long-term.

You will not recover by putting band-aids on the situation. You will not recover in a few weeks, or a month or two. You must implement significant changes to improve your site and make sure they stick around for the long-term. Don’t roll back changes after a few weeks or a month or two. That may not be long enough for Google… Note, I’ll cover surges soon and what my clients worked on to improve their sites (and how long that took).

Relevance, Which *Includes* Quality Overall – From John Mueller
After the Brackets Update on March 7, John explained that the update had a lot to do with relevance, and the industry went wild with that comment. But after analyzing many sites and helping a number of sites recover during the March and April updates, I explained that it seemed quality was a part of the updates as well. It was easy to see that after analyzing many sites impacted in both March and April. I wrote about this in my 2-part series about the updates in case you want to read more about that.

Well, it was awesome to hear John explain that relevance INCLUDES quality overall! And that includes how you present your website, like sites that provide ads above the fold. Yep, he said ADS. :) He explained this in another webmaster hangout video. I cheered from my office, literally. Here’s the video:

That made complete sense based on what I was seeing across sites, so it was great to hear him clarify his original statement about relevance.

A note about Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) and E-A-T
Many people have explained the amount of YMYL sites impacted during this update, and specifically, health and medical sites. Actually, Barry Schwartz saw so many health sites impacted based on hearing from site owners that were negatively impacted that he called it the Medic Update.

I agree that many health and medical sites were impacted during this update, but they weren’t alone! I have a spreadsheet of over 210 sites impacted by the August 1 update and many are NOT YMYL sites. For example, there are entertainment sites, coupon sites, lyrics sites, e-commerce sites, sites containing online games, and more. So yes, it does look like Google made adjustments that would impact YMYL sites, but the update didn’t isolate those sites.

For example, here is a lyrics site that was impacted and a coupon site that was impacted:
A large-scale lyrics site that dropped heavily during the August 1 update:

A large-scale coupon site that surged during this update:

But YMYL sites are extremely important to Google. They are held to a higher standard, since they can “impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.” Therefore, it makes complete sense that Google would always look to enhance its core ranking algorithm with regard to E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trust), site reputation, author reputation, etc. It does look like Google refined how this works in the latest core ranking update on 8/1, but again, there were many sites outside of YMYL that were impacted. It’s important to know that.

With that out of the way, let’s dig into some surges.

Surges – The Long And Tough Road Back
The first client I’m going to cover is in the entertainment space. They have been impacted by a number of updates over the years and were destroyed by the June 2016 update (which was a huge algorithm update).

When they contacted me, they explained that they had tried to fix a number of things, but they thought they could be missing some important items. They were simply not recovering during subsequent algorithm updates. So, I began a long-term engagement to help them root out all quality problems and form a strong remediation plan.

My audit and crawl analysis uncovered many problems across the site. In total, I sent 84 pages of findings in Word during the entire engagement covering everything from low-quality content to aggressive and deceptive advertising to affiliate problems to technical SEO problems to performance issues and more. There were many, many things wrong with the site from a quality standpoint. It’s always interesting to go back and see how many findings were sent when analyzing a large-scale site with many quality problems. And it’s important for other sites to understand that too. There’s rarely a single issue causing massive drops during core ranking updates.

My client’s team worked hard to implement those changes, including the always-tough conversation with the monetization team. When you’re down, the knee-jerk reaction is to increase advertising to make up for the loss of traffic. But I was telling them to drastically cut down on the advertising situation, which was over-the-top from a disruptive and deceptive standpoint. The conversations were tough, but they did tone it down greatly.

They implemented a boatload of changes over four to five months, but remember, Google needs to process these changes over the long-term. So they kept driving forward while hoping they would see positive movement during subsequent algorithm updates.  Remember what I said about “long-term” and “significant” from earlier?

The engagement ended in April and many items had been implemented at that point. I told them to keep driving forward, keep publishing killer content, keep enhancing the user experience, and to NOT fall back to old ways from an aggressive advertising standpoint.

Then August 1 arrived, and BOOM, they began to surge. It was awesome to see. Here is their search visibility trending from SEMrush.

According to Google Analytics (which I cannot share a screenshot of due to an NDA), they are up over 48% since August 1 (and specific areas of the site are surging more than that). That accounts for more than 822K additional sessions from Google organic alone in just the past week. Clicks and impressions in GSC are off the charts. My client explained that this is the most traffic they have seen in about two years.

Another Surge – YMYL Health Site
The second client surge I’m going to cover is a large-scale health site that has seen a significant drop in rankings and traffic over the past 18 months. They approached me after seeing multiple dips during major algorithm updates and wanted to surface more problems from a quality standpoint.

Similar to what I explained above, I dug in heavily and sent through 93 pages of findings during the first engagement and then 51 more pages through during a second engagement (for a total of 144 pages of findings). Yes, there were many problems with the site from a quality perspective. And the site contains so many different areas of content that I was surfacing more and more problems with every twist and turn. Again, it’s important to know the amount of work the company did to improve the site. Their team was great and moved very quickly to make changes. And they continue to make changes to this day, but many of the significant changes were completed months ago.

Similar to my example from earlier, they worked on a number of areas, including nuking low quality or thin content, fixing a very aggressive and deceptive advertising situation, improving the UX, fixing technical SEO problems across the site, and more.

And then on August 1, they began to surge across many key areas of the site. Here is their search visibility trending from SEMrush:

As of today, various sections of the site have increased anywhere from 20% to 60% since August 1. Note, they still have a long way to go to get back to where they once were, but this was a significant move in the right direction. It was great to see.

And it’s also worth noting that some site sections decreased! So, on a large-scale site with many different sections, you can definitely see ups and downs during major algorithm updates by directory. That might be obvious to site owners of large-scale sites, but I’m not sure everyone knows that.

Those are just two examples of large-scale sites seeing improvement during the August 1 update, but the moral of the story was the sites surging have completed a boatload of work to improve their respective sites. They didn’t find one smoking gun. Instead, they found a battery of smoking guns and worked their hardest to root out those issues and improve their sites overall. In addition, they kept those changes in place and kept driving forward with improving the site. They didn’t revert back to old ways, which is hard to do especially from an advertising standpoint.

Fresh Hits And Digging Deep(er) With Sites Negatively Impacted
Once the update started rolling out, it was amazing to see how many sites were being negatively impacted. And some weren’t just being hit, they were obliterated. That includes some of the largest sites and brands across the web.

Here are some examples of serious negative impact. I have many examples of this happening, but I’ll just provide a few:

When sites drop, it’s sometimes easy to take a quick look at them and try to figure out what’s wrong. But when you do that, it’s easy to miss serious problems that lie below the surface. Often, the only way to really see what’s going on is to dig deep, crawl the site, analyze the various areas across a site, etc. Remember, Google is on record explaining they take every page indexed into account when evaluating site quality. So, if you just look at five pages, you could be missing most of the SEO iceberg.

Therefore, in addition to reviewing top pages from sites that dropped during this update, I also crawled a subset of each site (10K pages per site). It’s not perfect, but that at least enabled me to see a bigger picture than just checking a few pages. And I’m glad I did. After crawling those sites, you could clearly see a number of problems across content quality, technical SEO, UX, aggressive advertising, and more.

And from a YMYL standpoint, you could clearly see sites ranking that probably shouldn’t have when it comes to important topics that can impact the “future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users”. Remember, the update DID NOT just target YMYL sites. Many different types of sites were impacted, but Google clearly was adding something new with regard to E-A-T, adjusting the threshold for YMYL sites, etc. Hard to say exactly what they did, but many were impacted.

Let’s go through some examples below. I’ll provide a few key findings per domain based on crawling and analyzing the site. Again, I didn’t crawl the entire site… I crawled a subset of each site (10K urls) to get a sample of what’s going on there. I can only imagine what I would find if I spent more time…

YMYL – Health Site

I surfaced hundreds of thin pages (650+) from just the crawl of 10K urls, so there are probably thousands like these pages on the site now if you take the entire site into account. Many of those thin pages contained a boatload of ads and very little main content (sometimes just a line or two of content, or just an image).

There were many thin user profiles indexed across the site. Some thin pages were filled with low-quality supplemental content, with very little main content.

The site also heavily uses popups, which can be extremely disruptive and annoying. I’ve covered disruptive and aggressive advertising many times while writing about major algorithm updates.

There were also a number of technical SEO problems including canonical issues.

And remember, this was only based on crawling 10K urls…

Reference Site

I surfaced over 6K near-empty or empty pages. It looks like a technical problem that is causing content quality problems. These pages are indexed now. And the pages are filled with ads. So you have empty pages (main content) but they are still displaying many ads. That’s not a great combination at all.

I then surfaced more content quality problems including pages containing just a few words of content with a number of large ads on the page. Again, not a great combo.

There were also annoying UX barriers that broke up the content. This was not done in an elegant way at all, and I found it extremely disruptive. I found myself scrolling to try and get to the rest of the main content.

From a SERP perspective, Google is returning a wider mix of results, and not just reference information that can be found on this site. Therefore, the site is battling quality problems, but it’s also dealing with what Google deems to be relevant based on query. So it seems Google was determining that users weren’t happy with the previous results (or that they were simply looking for something else).

Lyrics Site

I surfaced thousands of ultra-thin pages across the site, including blank pages containing ads. I also surfaced a number of pages returning a 503 header response code (by accident). This seemed like a technical glitch as the 503 is still in place now on those pages.

There’s a forum with many user profiles that are very low quality (and often contain very little main content).

There were also many empty artist pages that contained a number of ads. So there wasn’t any main content, yet many ads on the page. I saw this a number of times while analyzing the update. Remember, Google takes every page indexed into account when evaluating quality. Make sure your best content is indexed and nuke low quality or thin content. And if you can boost low quality content, that’s a great path as well.

Low quality or thin content and aggressive and disruptive advertising seemed to be the killer combination for this site. And to add insult to injury, the site still hasn’t moved to https.

YMYL – Health

I surfaced close to a thousand pages of low quality or thin content out of just a 10K url crawl. There was a serious lack of E-A-T for YMYL pages. The site’s authors do not have the expertise to write about sensitive medical topics.

In addition, there were many pages that contained just an autoplay video surrounded with ads and no other main content. Popups were used extensively across the site, also in combination with autoplay video ads. This was very annoying and disruptive. Again, not a great combination.

Then there were pages that should contain video, but the page was basically blank with ads surrounding the empty main content area. Sounds familiar, right? Sometimes there was just a placeholder for video and ads were all over the page.

I also saw a major relevance component at play here. Some rankings that dropped didn’t meet user expectations based on query. So, it seemed like the right move from Google’s standpoint to downrank those urls. For example, the site was tangentially covering a topic, but ranking well for the topic head term. I can’t imagine many users were thrilled with the results.

Recipes

I surfaced over 3K thin or low-quality pages out of a crawl of just 10K. And many had autoplay video ads (although without sound). Even though they have no sound, they are still incredibly annoying.

In addition, popups are used as well! So, the combination of autoplay video ads and popups on the same page had me banging my head against my monitor. And on mobile, there are giant ads pushing the content way down the page, so the entire viewport was filled with an ad. Note, I’ve often called Google’s Above The Fold (ATF) algorithm the beast that nobody talks about. Well, having ads that push main content out of the viewport is not a great idea, and it’s horrible for users.

In addition to many thin pages, I also surfaced empty pages that were indexed. And those empty pages contained ads. Again, sound familiar? There were also many pages with affiliate links weaved into the content. And there’s no disclosure on the page about which links were affiliate and which ones weren’t. I found that pretty deceptive from a user standpoint.

Side note about E-A-T, the site is well-known in the niche, has top writers with strong E-A-T. Therefore, it doesn’t seem like E-A-T was a core problem here. I believe it had more to do with the thin or low quality content mixed with poor user experience problems.

YMYL – Health

There were many UX barriers and technical problems across the site. For example, there was a module in the middle of many pages that just hung while hourglassing. Hard to tell if that was main content, supplemental content, or videos, but clearly not good to have on many pages.

There were MANY weaved ads throughout the content. Actually, it was every paragraph or two… I found that extremely disruptive. It’s ok to do that every now and then, but many weaved into a single article is horrible for users.

There were many amazon affiliate links weaved into the content as well. It seems like the site was focusing more on monetization than the user. And that’s always a dangerous situation. I’ve had many affiliate marketers reach out to me after getting smoked and they had that in place.

There were other user interface problems, especially on mobile. For example, some paragraphs did not align well with images. So there were only a few characters for each line on mobile. It was literally impossible to read. Imagine trying to read a paragraph 3 characters at a time…

Also, and this is clearly important on a YMYL site, there was NO author information. That’s possibly a worst-case scenario for a YMYL site writing about medical topics. So the site doesn’t exhibit much E-A-T, but the authors really don’t demonstrate strong E-A-T.

Many smoking guns, not just one
As you can see, even a relatively quick analysis enabled me to see a number of problems across sites that were negatively impacted. That’s why it’s important to thoroughly analyze a site and surface all potential problems. I’m sure if I really dug into those sites, I would surface many issues that could be contributing to their drop. These broad updates are called “broad” for a reason. :)

Follow The “Leader”, Flatliners, And The Danger In Doing Nothing.
When helping companies that have been negatively impacted by major algorithm updates, I often hear similar things. For example, some explain that they are just following what stronger players in the niche are doing and hoping they will surge like they have in the past. But unfortunately, they are following them blindly. For example, they have no idea if those are the right things to do, if those companies are surging in spite of having those things in place, etc.

The danger, of course, is that you can follow them right off an algorithmic cliff. Here’s a quick example. One of my newer clients always references a certain site with how they follow their lead, implement the same type of functionality, layout, content, etc. Once I started helping them, I explained the danger in doing that. And guess what? That site they follow just got hit pretty hard by the August 1 update. That site has done very well over the past year or so, but just got whacked by the August 1 update. Note, it’s NOT a YMYL site.

And here’s a site that refused to change after getting smoked by the February 7 algorithm update. Not only have they NOT increased at all. They have actually dropped more. Not good.

The QRG Is Important, But Combine It With Traditional SEO Audits
Since 2014, I’ve been explaining the connection between Google’s quality rater guidelines and major algorithm updates. Yes, that’s when medieval Panda roamed the web. I think I’ve mentioned the power of the QRG in almost every blog post about major algorithm updates since then (including Panda, quality updates, the March and April 2018 updates, and more).

The overlap between the QRG and what I see in the field is uncanny. That’s why I highly recommend reading the QRG to see what Google deems high versus low quality, to understand how Google treats YMYL sites, to understand the importance of E-A-T, to understand the impact of aggressive, disruptive, and deceptive ads, and much more.

But it’s not the only thing you should do. I recommend combining the QRG with what you would typically do in a standard audit. Don’t ignore technical SEO, thin content, performance problems, and other things like that. Think about the site holistically and root out all potential problems. That’s the most powerful way to proceed in my opinion.

Google’s Danny Sullivan brought up the QRG when asked about the 8/1 update last week. So yes, definitely read the rater guidelines, internalize it, share it with your team, etc., but don’t forget about all of the other things involved with a site from an SEO standpoint (and how your users interact with your site).

Here’s Danny’s tweet:

Next Steps For Site Owners:
If you’ve been negatively impacted by the August 1 algorithm update, then don’t sit and wait it out. John Mueller has explained in the past that if you’ve been impacted by one of these core updates, then take a step back and review your site overall from a quality perspective. And then try to significantly improve quality over the long-term. Don’t sit and do nothing. That probably won’t end well for you.

Therefore, here are some closing bullets (some might sound familiar if you’ve read my previous post about major algorithm updates):

• Perform a thorough crawl analysis and audit of your site. Surface all potential quality problems and form a plan of attack for fixing them (and improving the site overall).
• Read the Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) and have everyone on your team that’s involved with your site read them too. Then review your site through the lens of the QRG (objectively). Then identify all potential problems and fix them.
• Conduct user studies to understand how real people view your site. I’m not talking about having your mother, spouse, or close friends go through your site. I’m talking about objective third parties that can evaluate your site based on specific actions you want them to take. Identify all problems and barriers and remove them.
• Analyze your Google Search Console (GSC) reporting, including the new index coverage reporting (which is killer). Find all technical SEO problems (combined with your crawl analysis and audit), and then fix them as quickly as possible.
• Continue to publish killer content. Don’t sit and wait while you are fixing problems… Keep pumping out high quality content that users want to read (based on understanding your niche). The more high-quality content you can produce, the more you will exceed user expectations, which will often yield more sharing, which can result in more branded searches for your site and content, while also enabling you to build more (natural) links.
• Keep building E-A-T. Note, you cannot quickly build E-A-T… you will need to do this over time. Remember, Google’s Gary Illyes explained when evaluating E-A-T, Google primarily looks at links and mentions from well-known sources. You cannot quickly build those links and mentions, but you can over the long-term by working hard and doing the right things. And make sure to showcase your expertise on your site and in your linked profiles (like Social). Jennifer Slegg just covered Google’s new creator reputation from the latest quality rater guidelines released in July. I recommend reading her post to get a solid understanding of what Google is doing on that front.

Summary – Google’s Mid-summer Classic Was Huge
The core algorithm update that rolled out on August 1, 2018 was massive and many sites across the web were impacted. Although there were a lot of health sites impacted, many others in non-YMYL categories were affected as well. If you have been negatively impacted by the 8/1 update, then it’s important to objectively analyze your site to find ways to improve. And remember, there’s never one smoking gun. There’s usually a battery of them. So go find them now. :)

GG

 

In part one of this series, I covered an overview of the March 7 and April 16 updates, what I think could be going on with relevance and quality, what Google has explained about the update, and more. Now in part two, I’m going to provide examples of specific drops and surges I analyzed based on the April 16 update, including some reversals.

I’m not going to name any of the sites, since my intention is not to out any company impacted by these updates. Instead, I will explain how much they surged or dropped and provide interesting observations about why the drops or surges could have occurred (which in my opinion, includes both relevancy and quality). And then I’ll end with what I believe sites that were impacted can do now.

Remember, you don’t want to just sit there after seeing a major drop in traffic due to one of these updates. I explained more about Google’s comments regarding that in part one of the series and I’ll include more about this later in the blog post.

First, another quick disclaimer:
I do not work for Google, I don’t have access to its core ranking algorithm, I don’t have a hidden camera in the search engineers’ cafeteria, and I haven’t infiltrated Google headquarters like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Note, I have been to Google HQ in both New York and Mountain View, but I didn’t drop from the ceiling with the help of Barry Schwartz. :)

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 a number of sites reach out to me for help after seeing movement from these updates. Again, nobody knows exactly what Google is refining, other than the search engineers themselves.

With that out of the way, let’s begin. In no specific order, let’s run through various examples of impact from the April 16, 2018 Google algorithm update (surges, drops, and some reversals). I think you’ll see why I keep hammering relevance AND quality after reading through the examples.

Examples of impact:

UX, Keyword Stuffing, Doorway Pages, and more
An ecommerce site that’s a key player in its niche saw a search visibility drop of 34% during the April update. Digging into the drop, there were several things that stood out. First, the main content is being pushed down the page based on UI modules at the top that don’t contain primary content (so users have to scroll to get to the main content). There was also a keyword stuffing component near the top (before the main content). Each page’s core keywords were repeated unnaturally and that was clearly for SEO purposes.

Content-wise, the product listings were actually spot-on. There’s no problem with the products being provided per query at all. I would say the products were extremely relevant to a number of the queries I was checking.

And then I opened a door, or several…
Yep, the site was employing doorway-like pages. Slight variations of the queries based on facets yielded indexable pages optimized for all of those query variations. And this was happening across the entire website.

The site was basically trying to rank for every possible keyword variation they could (probably based on a combination of keyword research, queries leading to the site, and actual on-site searches). I’ve seen this before many times over the years with a number of ecommerce sites.

To add insult to injury, the dreaded “stuffed category description at the bottom of the page” was present on all of the variations. Many ecommerce sites still employ this tactic, when John Mueller has clearly stated to not to do this… If you have unique and original content that can help users, why in the world would you stuff it at the bottom of the page? And if you read the content, does it even sound natural? If not, refine it to be helpful or just nuke it.

Here is video of John Mueller explaining this (at 56:30 in the video):

That’s the quality situation based on a top-level look, but there was a relevance sighting as well! And a serious one.

Exporting the queries where the site dropped by at least five positions revealed the relevance situation. Many of the queries I was checking could not be answered well by the page that ranked (the site couldn’t meet or exceed user expectations). Checking the pages that leapfrogged this site revealed they could answer the question much better.

So, Google was originally ranking the site for queries that the site had no right ranking for. I saw some drops of 5-10 positions, while others dropped off a cliff.

As a quick example, the site was ranking for a celebrity name, when that celebrity had a line of products related to the site content. That’s clearly NOT what most people would be looking for when searching just for the person’s name. Most are looking for information about the celebrity, not for the product they created. The site dropped for that query heavily. The top 10 is now filled with sites that provide in-depth celebrity information.

As another quick example, the site ranked for a generic keyword, when the page that was ranking was about a very specific aspect of that topic. Again, most people would not be looking for that niche article. The site dropped several pages after ranking at the top of page one for the query. This was clearly a relevance adjustment.

Improving quality over the long-term, enhancing technical SEO, and relevance NOT a big factor
A large-scale site in the food niche in over 35 countries saw nice gains during the April 16 update. And that’s after seeing some drops in certain countries during the March 7 update. This is a site I’ve been helping for a number of months already and it was great to see them surge.

The site has worked hard on increasing quality overall since early 2018. That included surfacing and nuking low-quality and thin content, properly handling an infinite spaces situation, improving the user experience, and more. In total, the site has removed millions of low-quality pages from Google’s index, while improving content quality, user experience, etc. And again, from a technical SEO standpoint, there were many little gremlins running around the site. And when you’re dealing with a large-scale site (30M+ pages indexed), little gremlins can turn into big problems.

The site surged on April 16 in a number of countries. You can see some of the surges below:

Surge of 34% since April 16 update:

Surge of 42% since April 16:

Surge of 165% since April 16 update (but based on lower traffic than the other countries):

In my opinion, this surge had much more to do with quality than relevance. The site fixed so many quality problems since early 2018 that it’s hard to ignore the impact that could have had. Also, checking the competition, the sites being leapfrogged also had relevant content… It’s hard to say that my client’s content was significantly more relevant than the others. If relevance had anything to do with this surge, then it was a minor factor (in my opinion).

And don’t underestimate the power of reeling in an infinite spaces problem. This specific situation was impacting over 10M urls on the site and causing serious index bloat (with low quality or thin content). My client was all over that situation across countries once I surfaced the issue. That was a huge win on several levels (quality, crawlability, quality indexation, performance, etc.)

Large-scale site, B2C Publisher
A key player in its niche saw a reversal from the March 7, 2018 update. It saw an initial drop of 20% on March 7, 2018 and then a surge of 31% on April 16, 2018. It now has greater search visibility then it did prior to 3/7.

This specific situation looked much more about relevancy that quality. For the queries that dropped, and then recovered, the content was indeed relevant. And the site overall is one of the most relevant in its niche. When digging into the queries where the site dropped in positions (and didn’t recover), it was easy to see that the content was clearly not as relevant.

For example, queries where Google has to determine intent (disambiguation) and those queries used to lead to certain pages on the site where only a small percentage of users would find the content helpful. Many of those rankings didn’t return on April 16.

It’s also worth noting that a number of pages that do rank well now, but initially dropped on March 7, are category pages for a topic. Those category pages link to relevant and helpful articles about that topic. For some reason, they got caught in the crosshairs during the first update in March. Either the site is sitting in the gray area… or Google made some adjustment that pulled the site into the white. Just a side note.

Large-scale B2C publisher (YMYL)
The next site I’ll cover is also a behemoth in its niche. It dropped initially during the March update, and then more during the April 16 update (for a total loss of 21% in search visibility). Like several of the others I’m covering, there definitely seemed to be a mix quality and relevance at play.

First, the UX is tough on the site, with ads squeezing the main content. You almost get claustrophobic while browsing the site. There were a number of thin and lower-quality posts ranking for keywords as well.

And many of the topics would fall under “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL). You can read more about YMYL topics in the Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG), but Google holds those sites to a higher standard. That’s because they cover sensitive topics like health, finance, legal, and others that can impact the overall happiness of a user. For a number of sensitive queries, the site dropped off page one, and sometimes much lower. And the sites moving up were some of the most powerful sites in health.

YMYL information from Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG):

From a quality perspective, there were thinner posts, aggressive advertising, autoplay video, a weird app install popup, and more. And a large portion of the blog contained lower-quality posts. Those blog posts definitely did not match what you would expect to see on a site targeting YMYL topics. Note, the blog contained over 30K blog posts. Remember, Google takes every page indexed into account when evaluating quality. So adding many low-quality posts on the blog is not helping matters…

Here is video of John explaining this (at 10:06 in the video):

From a relevancy standpoint, the site was definitely ranking for some queries it had no right ranking for. In my opinion, only a small percentage of users would be happy with the content based on the query. Instead, most users would be searching for content that’s directly related to the query. And similar to what I covered earlier, the site ranked for some entity names (companies, organizations, and people), when it had no right doing so. Again, users would want thorough information about those entities versus articles about a very specific topic that involved those people or companies.

Same (or similar) content, huge risk, razor-thin differences
The next site I’ll cover is in the entertainment industry and it saw a 34% drop in search visibility during the 4/16 update. There were a number of sites that got hammered during the April 16 update that simply contained the same content as other sites (or very similar information). For situations like this, the difference between your site ranking well, or another, is razor thin. This is why Google has said many times that you need to provide some type of value-add. Don’t simply slap the same content on your pages and expect strong traffic to remain indefinitely.

After checking several of these sites after the April update, there wasn’t a massive difference between the ones surging and dropping quality-wise or relevance-wise. Sure, there were definitely some quality issues and aggressive advertising issues on several sites, but it wasn’t as clear as other examples.

It’s worth noting that John Mueller recently explained that great functionality alone will not suffice from a quality perspective. You still need high-quality content present on your pages and just slapping a cool piece of functionality on the site will not help quality-wise. Well, that fit for this situation, since the content is the same across competitors (and pulled from the same core set of data sources).

Here’s a video of John explaining this (at 25:35 in the video):

E-A-T galore, clean, well-organized, expert authors
The next site I’ll cover is a major health site (YMYL) that surged 37% during the April 16 update. This site has enormous amounts of E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trust). For example, top-notch content written by experts in their niche (with advanced degrees and multiple professional certifications). In addition, the content is reviewed by other experts in the niche, which adds another layer of trust to the equation.

There are also videos from experts in the niche and those videos are prominently displayed on each page (near the top of the main content after a solid introduction to the topic).

From a user experience and advertising perspective, the site does a good job at balancing monetization and user experience. The ads are clearly labeled and do not inhibit the user experience at all. I didn’t see ad deception at all and the site didn’t employ popups, interstitials, autoplay video, or anything like that, which can be extremely frustrating for users.

The site surged for many competitive keywords. You can see a screenshot below with some of the surges:

Low-quality user experience – UX nightmare mixed with aggressive and deceptive ads
Next, I’ll cover another entertainment site that took a 55% hit in total based on both the March and April updates.
The site provides a tough user experience (and aggressive advertising setup).

On desktop, there was a giant video at the top of the page with unrelated content pushing the main content down the page (so users had to scroll to see the primary content). To add insult to injury, the video with unrelated content also had pre-roll ads. So, users might think the video contained information that was directly related to the main content, and they might sit through a thirty second ad, only to find out the video had nothing to do with the main content.

How would you feel if that happened??

In addition, there were affiliate links right under the video. So, the site had unrelated videos first (with pre-roll ads), and then affiliate links closely tied to the video with no disclosure of the relationship between sites. That definitely falls into the deception category to me. And then weaved into the main content were other videos, with some not even playing/working. And when you tried to play some of the videos, you were whisked off the site to third party advertiser sites. I can only imagine there were many frustrated people feeling tricked by elements like that.

On mobile, you are smacked with a popup as soon as you hit the page, then the affiliate links mentioned earlier, double ads that were overlapping (which I hope was a technical glitch), and more. This was a UX nightmare mixed with aggressive and deceptive ads. And the site took a huge hit.

Double ads being displayed (either by accident or for monetization purposes):

Aggressive conversion tactics, doorway pages, false authority signals
The next site saw a 48% drop in search visibility based on both the March 7 and April 16 updates.
This was another site with an initial drop on March 7, and then a bigger drop on April 16. Based on analyzing the site and the drop, I believe quality problems were a much bigger factor than relevancy issues.

First, many queries led to pages that were extremely aggressive conversion-wise. There was a giant lead-gen form above the main content requesting user information. The user had to scroll to see the main content on all of the pages. And it was even worse on mobile.

Then there was a doorway page situation (based on city, state). The content was identical, but many pages were optimized for city state combinations. And I mean MANY of them. This included zip code over-optimization as well (an overload of zip codes present on the page).

The site also included the old-school approach of linking to Wikipedia from many pages. There was no reason to link to Wikipedia on these pages other than to send some false signal of authority. John Mueller has covered this several times in his webmaster hangout videos.

Here is video of John explaining this (at 36:52 in the video):

Relevance-wise, there were definitely some adjustments made (and they were the right ones). For example, the site used to rank for a top-level search for an online tool. The page dropped, which makes sense, since the site employed a very specific use-case for the tool. Overall, I would imagine most users would not be happy with the content. That’s just a quick example, but it matches the other relevancy adjustments made on the site.

The same content, previous algorithm update hits, many entity queries dropped, and relevance
The next site saw a search visibility loss of 32% between both the March and April updates. The site dropped during the March update and then dropped more during the April update. The site is in a niche where the differences between sites is razor thin (as covered earlier). Most contain very similar information, which is always risky from an SEO standpoint. Google’s John Mueller has explained many times that if you’re in this situation, then you better provide a serious value-add. Don’t be marginally better than your competition. Blow them out of the water.

From a history standpoint, the site has lived in the gray are of quality for some time. I see surges and drops during medieval Panda updates, with a big surge during Panda 4.1. Then they got smoked by the February 7, 2017 update, which was a huge quality update (one of the biggest we’ve seen actually).

When checking the queries that dropped, many were entity-based and not directly about what the site provides. Therefore, this fell into the relevancy bucket for sure. That’s a tough situation for any site, since they probably shouldn’t have been ranking for the queries to begin with. Now the site has dropped to page two or beyond for many of the keywords.

For the site’s core queries, I did still see them ranking well for a number of important keywords. It’s also worth noting that many of the SERPs for the entity-based queries only contained seven listings. So, the site is working in a tough niche… You are shooting for one of the top seven spots versus ten. So even if you drop a few spots, you could easily be on page two. And we all know what’s on page 2… :)

Misc. other surges and drops:
Due to the size of this post, I’ll provide some additional examples below, but the CliffsNotes version. I have analyzed many sites impacted by these updates and can write a book about the volatility… Here are some additional examples of impact from the 4/16 update:

News site, massive surge
This wasn’t a news publisher, but can definitely be categorized in the news niche. The site clearly provides what most people would be looking for based on the queries that surged. The functionality on the site is strong, including a number of easy to use functions that were extremely valuable for visitors. The site has a very clean interface and no ads at all (it’s a quasi-free site with a subscription-based model for pro accounts). Based on everything I explained, the site has a very strong link profile, with nearly seven million inbound links and many from trusted sources.

Relevance adjustments + Poor UX + Aggressive Ads
Well, that’s not the best combination in the world… You might say it’s a killer recipe from a Google algorithm update standpoint (literally). A site that got hammered during the 4/16 update was ranking for queries when it didn’t have the best content addressing user needs. In addition, there were non-relevant video clips playing above the main content. They weren’t ads, but the videos were only tangentially related to the main content. I covered a similar situation earlier.

In addition, there were many weaved ads in the main content (which is a huge deception problem). Several of the ads didn’t contain ad labels, which could end up driving users downstream to advertiser sites when they had no idea that would be happening. And the situation was even worse on mobile.

Food site, UX issues, blocked main content, quality reviews not indexable
A major player in its niche, this site got hammered by the April 16 update. When checking core pages that dropped during the update, I noticed parts of the main content were actually blocked (not visible on-load and hard for the user to access). There were also a number of UX barriers on the site that inhibited users from traversing content. It’s never good to do that…

In addition, the site has a boatload of quality reviews, but those reviews are blocked from indexing. Google has explained that reviews make up the content on the page, and therefore, can contribute to the quality of the page (and site). If you have well-moderated reviews with strong content, then don’t block the reviews. They can help your site quality-wise. But make sure they are heavily moderated… just like they can help you, they can easily hurt you too.

Powerful site, weaker main content across many pages
Another site, this time in the automotive niche, got hit hard as well. Digging into the drop, the queries, and landing pages revealed main content lacking enough solid information. A number of the top pages were thinner and weaker than competitors. And this is a very competitive niche.

In competitive categories like this, there’s often a fine line between sites surging and dropping. Some of the sites improving had better content and possibly a stronger user experience, but they weren’t head and shoulders above the rest. Just an important side note that SEOs and site owners need to be aware of.

Deception 101
A site that tanked during the 4/16 update contained deceptive ads all over the place. And worse, they were often ads that looked like download buttons with “download now” or “view pdf” calls to action. The ads almost tricked me several times, and I’m neck deep in this stuff!

The quality rater guidelines (QRG) provides a lot of information about deception and how sites employing deceptive ads should be rated low-quality. In addition, the situation was worse on mobile. Ads were shifted up and above the main content so users must scroll to get to that content. After heavily reviewing the site, the aggressive and deceptive advertising issue seemed to be the biggest problem (in my opinion), although there were other content-related issues as well (just not as big of a problem as the deception situation).

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I’ll stop the examples here, since this post is getting too long… After reading through the examples above, I hope you can see why I believe that both relevance and quality played a factor with the March and April updates.

Next, I’ll cover what site owners can do now to either improve their sites, or to bolster their current rankings (if they surged and are doing well after the March and April updates). On that note, just because you surged doesn’t mean you will always stay there. Actually, a number of the sites that dropped during these updates have done very well in the past SEO-wise… Just an important side note.

Google’s advice: There’s no “fix”, but keep building great content.
I covered this in part one of the series, but it’s worth mentioning again. Many have asked me what I believe site owners should do if they experienced a drop during the March or April updates. They explain that Danny Sullivan said to “do nothing”. Well, he actually didn’t say that. Danny just said there’s no “fix”, as in fixing a meta tag and suddenly you’re back. Danny did say to remain focused on building great content. And if you do, then it might be your site that jumps up during the next update.

Just like with any major core ranking update, Google takes many factors into account. There’s never one smoking gun, there’s usually a battery of them. Therefore, I would not sit and wait it out…

Actually, John Mueller has said this a number of times. If you’ve been negatively impacted by a major algorithm update, don’t wait to see how things go. Make changes to improve your site. That could be changes to content, technical SEO, aggressive or disruptive advertising, user experience (UX), and more. That’s what recovery is all about. It’s never about finding one smoking gun that caused your site to tank (which rarely happens). It’s about fixing all quality and engagement issues you can find, fixing them as quickly as possible, and then driving forward.

Here is video of John explaining this (at 30:14 in the video):

Should you roll back recent changes?? No, it wasn’t your last release that caused problems…
It’s also worth noting that Google’s John Mueller said in a recent webmaster hangout video that recent site changes would not be the cause of impact from a major core ranking update. And that’s especially the case with large-scale sites. It can take a lot of time for Google to recrawl, reindex, and then reprocess those changes. So, your release from last week probably did not cause your site to tank. It was probably the months of bad things going on that caused your site to drop. That’s an important point.

Here is video of John explaining this (at 47:47 in the video):

Moving Forward: What site owners can do now:
If you’ve seen a drop due to the March or April updates, then I recommend addressing both quality and relevance. From a quality standpoint, my recommendations are similar to what I’ve recommended for a long time. You need to significantly improve quality over the long-term. Again, significant and long-term are the key phrases here.

You will probably NOT recover in a few weeks, or even in a month or two. Instead, you need to surface and then fix any potential quality problem across your site. Remember, quality can mean many things, including low-quality content, thin content, user experience barriers, aggressive and disruptive advertising, technical SEO problems that can cause quality problems, and more.

Also, it’s important to make the right changes and keep them in place for the long-term. Don’t reverse course three weeks into making changes because you’re not seeing improvement. Remember, Google’s John Mueller has explained several times that Google wants to see significant improvement over the long-term. It can easily take months to see positive movement during subsequent updates, and I’ve seen it take six months or longer. If you revert important changes, you will have no idea if they would help you long-term.

You’ll be in a maddening cycle of making changes, reverting those changes, making more changes, reverting those changes, etc. DON’T DO THAT. Make the right changes from the start and stick with them. Then drive forward by creating high-quality content, naturally building links, and always maintaining the best technical SEO setup you can.

Here’s a quick bulleted list of things you can start on today:

• Crawl Analysis and Audit – Perform a thorough crawl analysis of your site and surface ALL potential quality problems. Root out low-quality content and thin content, technical SEO problems that could be causing quality problems, user experience barriers, aggressive and disruptive advertising, deceptive tactics that can cause user frustration, and more. I have rarely seen collateral damage when it comes to major algorithm updates. So, find the areas of your site to improve, and improve them as quickly as you can.
• Analyzing Queries and Content That Dropped – Check the queries and content that dropped in rankings and objectively review the situation. If you were a user that knew nothing about your site, would the content meet or exceed user expectations? Does the competition have better content, written by people with more experience, does it contain better supporting content, is it more focused on the core topic than your content, etc? Based on what you learn by doing this, you can absolutely make changes to your content (to improve the situation).
• User Testing – Perform real user testing. Don’t simply invite your mother, spouse, children, or best friends from college to review your site. Instead, invest in having a number of people objectively traverse your site with a goal in mind. Listen to their feedback, their concerns, what they liked, what they disliked, and what they absolutely hated. You can learn a lot by listening to real users trying accomplish a task on your site. Then make changes based on their feedback. Don’t just share the results with your team and over-analyze it. Move and make changes.…
• The QRG – Read the Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) several times, and have everyone on your team read it too. I’ve said this a thousand times over the past few years… The QRG contains 160 pages of SEO gold. In the QRG, Google clearly explains what its raters should deem high-quality versus low. You can read about low quality content, aggressive advertising, Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics, E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trust), and much more. I recommend downloading the QRG, sharing it with your team, and having 30-minute sessions at lunch where you go over each section. I can’t tell you how much overlap I’m seeing between what’s contained in the QRG and what I’m seeing in the field.
• GSC’s Index Coverage Report – Don’t forget to heavily analyze Google’s new index coverage reporting. It’s like index status from the old GSC, but on steroids. It contains actionable data based on Google crawling your site. It can help you understand which pages Google is indexing, and which pages it’s not indexing. And keep a close eye on the “Excluded” reporting. That’s where you can often find serious problems. It contains pages that Google has crawled, but decided NOT to index for some reason. For example, you can find canonical problems, robots.txt issues, soft 404s, duplicate content, urls submitted in xml sitemaps with problems, and much more.

 Summary: The March and April Updates Were Big. Relevance AND Quality Stood Out
The March 7 and April 16, 2018 updates were significant core ranking updates from Google. Many sites were impacted on those dates, across categories and countries. Based on my analysis, you could see a number of factors at play, including both quality and relevance. If you have been impacted by these updates, I would not just sit and wait. As Google’s John Mueller has explained several times, you should always be looking to improve your site. Aim to be 10X better than your competition and not just slightly better. That’s the strongest way to make sure you don’t have to worry about updates like this in the future. And if you missed part one in this series, I recommend you read that post as well. Good luck.

GG