Core updates have been popping out from everywhere lately these past few years. Like little hidden land mines, they’ve eliminated quite a number of websites and businesses that haven’t been following guidelines to an exact T.
This year’s very first Google confirmed core update did not fail to very same thing as well.
Various SEO and SEM agencies and companies all over the world, even here in Singapore at this point is now very familiar with all of these kinds of updates.
The start of 2019 was filled with a few mysterious things. February had a couple of deadly fluctuations in search that weren’t confirmed. But now, it seems that all that was just the newest core update being set up behind the scenes.
This new Google core update was rolled out on the 12th of March 2019. This is the first core update that was officially confirmed after last year’s August “Medic Update”. And while that first one had a somewhat cool name, this very recent one had a more creative one. “March 2019 Core Update”.
While its older brother, 2018’s Medic update mainly targeted health, fitness and wellness themed sites, this year’s first official update has been observed to reverse all of these effects like an evil sister.
Well, reversed in to a certain degree. Websites last year that had benefited from the extreme core changes from Google Medic seems to have all dipped in performance this year. And all of the ones that had negative experiences and performance last year seem to be doing better because of this March 2019 update.
One other pattern here that can be seen from March’s update is that it seems to be it, favoring websites that are able to provide the highest level of trust. Most especially the ones that target all of the YMYL related search terms. (“Your money, your life”)
It has been determined by a whole slew sites out there that the main beneficiaries are those sites that has a strong brand profile and a broad focus on topics. This means that the sites and businesses out there that over focus on their niche has fallen in performance.
This is a big thing since, there are still businesses out there that build their notoriety by over focusing themes on the niche their campaigns are in. What most of them do not realize is that the whole campaign starts to look a little bit more unnatural. Having topics that can be a bit broader and can cover a more diverse set of topics are deemed more natural. Which makes sense. This was the whole point from the beginning but, over specialising on these things can be a bit tempting.
This means that if you happen to be currently shopping for agencies out there to help you out with your business online, always look for ones that can offer SEO services that gives you a more natural and broader type of approach.
Google has said that the March 2019 update is worth confirming but it doesn’t mean that this is the biggest update it has done. Which might scare you if you’re doing something to cheat your way up the ranks.
Generally, the only next step is that websites and businesses continue to pool all their efforts on building trust and authority. Producing and sharing content that’s actually valuable and authoritative.
These businesses and websites can also try to update all of the elements on their websites that contribute to good user experience. Imagine a website that has really slow loading speed, or has parts where the pages won’t load. The level of trustworthiness there won’t be too good. Users will instead get the idea that the site is shady or has something bad happening behind the scenes.
It would not matter that much even if you have all of the best and most compelling authoritative content. If you are running a website that performs badly, it would all be a very sad waste.
