Several times a year Google will announce significant updates to its algorithm that will affect search rankings – the May 2020 Core Update is one of them. The rollout is expected to take a couple of weeks for all changes to be live. The resulting fluctuation in search ranking results is mostly a reflection of content relevancy.
In Google’s update they mention that pages that receive a lower ranking after the update do not necessarily have anything wrong to fix nor “have neither violated Google Webmaster Guidelines nor undergone any manual or algorithmic action.” They compare it as a top 100 film ranking from 2015 that will change over time. By 2019 new, better deserving films may come in and as such may push others to different ranking results.
A research done by Path Interactive assessed 550 site performance between 4th of May (update release date) to 11th of May 2020.
The most impacted categories were YMYL (your money, your life) websites, such as:
- Fitness
- Nutrition
- Recipes
- Natural medicine
- Music and entertainment
- History
- Banking and Finance, including Cryptocurrencies
- Science and Medical News
- Alcohol. Drugs and rehab
- News
For example, many recipe websites noticed traffic losses that were mainly caused by recipe carousel and rich snippets results.
What This Means for Your Business
If you are in one of the above mentioned industries, your search ranking results and thus the volume of influx traffic will likely be affected. What you should do is to take into account the reason why when analysing your website’s performance and to focus on producing quality content. In our coming blog posts, we will provide advise for that.
