November was a big month with Google releasing two updates. They first launched a new Spam update geared towards attacking SERPs and excluding content that doesn’t follow their guidelines. This happened on the 3rd of November and was fully rolled out by the 11th.
Later in the month, more precisely the 17th of November, a new update was released, this time a broad core update, to adjust to how they assess content overall. Again, search results experienced some turbulence, as always happens with core updates. By the 30th of November, Google’s Danny Sullivan stated the core update was mostly complete in rolling out.
Why are these November updates important?
When a new major update is released, websites usually experience a drop in rankings and organic traffic from this particular search engine. Therefore, it is important to analyse why your site was hit and what can be improved so your rankings and traffic can be back on track as soon as possible. For these particular November updates, you should be especially attentive and assess your content and link profile. When a website is demoted due to spam reasons (either content or links not following the rules), recovery can be very challenging.
What can webmasters do to overcome these updates?
Google’s advice on what to do after a core update remains the same. The general advice for the November updates is to re-assess the validity of your content for the search queries you are targeting and make sure your content is high quality and satisfies user intent. To do this, check out what type of content is ranking now for your most significant keywords. This will help you determine the changes your pages need for them to deliver better outcomes.
Which industries were affected the most?
Following SEMRush research, most of the impact was felt by the following niches: Health, Pets & Animals, Science, People & Society, Real Estate.
With Real Estate businesses and other related niches like Finance already immersed in a situation where competition levels are at their highest this year (as bidding data from Google Adwords shows), these changes in SERP volatility make SEO Strategies for Real Estate more important than ever for sustained growth.
If your site is experiencing either ranking or traffic losses, or your SEO Strategy is not delivering results consistently, feel free to contact us. Our SEO Consultants will take you through the possible solutions to get your site’s organic traffic & conversions back on track.