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Last week, Google launched its first Core Update of 2021. SEOs know that it typically takes days or weeks for web pages to see the effects of these updates – and according to social media posts, the effects are starting to appear.
Core Updates bring forth broad changes to Google’s search algorithms. As a result, many site owners find that their sites begin to perform differently on SERPs – you can expect to see a surge or a drop following a Core Update.
In our initial coverage of the update’s launch, we found that many SEOs didn’t see any immediate morning-after changes to their sites.
Now, though, more and more SEOs are sharing that the update has dramatically affected their search metrics.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz compiled some message board posts from over the weekend – these posts come from site owners who noticed a massive change in either direction. These users owned sites ranging in topic from education and entertainment to finance and business, and even personal blogs.
Some comments indicated confusion following drops:
“I’m seeing another big drop in both ranking and in traffic to my most important pages,” one user wrote. “My home page and my more popular landing pages with the most inbound links all vanished and have had one visit this morning. For the first time ever I am seeing low rank and low traffic interior pages receive more visits than my top ranking pages.”
Others seemed panicked:
“To be honest, I’m pretty panicked seeing the results for my site,” another user wrote. “I’ve done nothing drastic to my site structure for a long time. It’s naturally grown over 20 years. I don’t do anything ‘spammy,’ just concentrate on doing what my clients want with regular updates and improvements to the design every 18 months or so.If these results I’m seeing now stick, it’s game over for me.”
Some users were more fortunate, like one who offered a speculation about the update:
“Massive improvement for the company site I work for,” one user shared. “125% increase in traffic Sunday vs previous week, large ranking increases – hope it sticks!They seemed to test this two weeks ago. My rankings spiked, but it only lasted a few hours and shot straight back down. Rankings seem very similar to then.”
Twitter is also abuzz with reactions from SEOs to the update.
Heads-up. The first major signs of visibility changes are being seen today. Some very big changes for the sites impacted. The update started rolling out on 6/2, but I just started seeing these visibility changes 6/5 into 6/6. Looks more core update-like now… pic.twitter.com/k7D8lfkAqi — Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 6, 2021
Starting to see a ~40% increase in organic traffic to a site we’ve been busting our you-know-whats on for 6+ months. It’s still super early, so hopefully the trend continues. The work was NOT easy. pic.twitter.com/ZQhpyAvris — Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) June 7, 2021
SEOs should hesitate to getting too used to the new results, as Google plans to launch a second Core Update in July. This, plus the upcoming core vitals update, will keep SEOs busy over the next few months.
