Google Update – A definitive Guide

The term google update is not as popular amongst webmasters as it should be and this is due to the fact that a lot of webmasters are not bothered about this aspect because it sounds less significant.

Whenever one starts a website newly, the focus would be on adding SEO optimized content, getting traffic, displaying ads, and ensuring that the amount of traffic you get is high enough to earn a good amount of money monthly.

Google update is very underrated but the bad news is that a lot of websites that are performing poorly today are suffering from google update.

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Imagine waking up in the morning just to see a huge drop in the number of visitors on your website without any explanation from anyone and this situation continues to persist thereby reducing the ranking of your websites and your site that was always appearing first whenever a keyword that you have a post related to was queried on different search engines.

This has been the predicament of many bloggers and this article would help prospective and existing bloggers to rectify the issue and get their site up and running once more again.

What Is Google Update?

Google update is an algorithm update performed by google within a period of time to affect the results that users see whenever they query a keyword on google.

Google update is divided into two categories the first is the minor update and this one can be done weekly without hugely affecting the traffic of a website while the second one is known as google core update and this update is responsible for dropping several sites and some are yet to recover.

Google Update penalizes those who violate any of the webmaster’s guidelines including new websites and during the process, some lowly ranked site can see a surge in traffic while others can see a drop in traffic and such websites have to rectify the issue and then wait for the next google core update before they can receive a huge amount of traffic again.

TYPES OF GOOGLE UPDATE

It is important to know the types of google update that occurred and the period during which they occurred and we have listed some of them below as gotten from searchenglineland.com:

• Panda Update February 24, 2011
• Penguin Update April 24, 2012
• Humming Bird August 22, 2013
• Mobile Update April 21, 2015.
• Rank Brain Update October 26, 2015
• Medic Update May 4, 2018
• Bert Update October 22, 2019
• Core Updates 2017-present.

There was a core update that took place in December 2020 for the first two weeks of the month.

HOW TO KNOW WHEN GOOGLE UPDATE IS ABOUT TO ROLL OUT?

Below are ways by which you can know when google would roll out an update:

1. Follow Google Search Liaison on Twitter as they would inform you before the update starts rolling out.
2. Follow blogs that talk about Google updates such as search engine land
3. Monitor your website traffic via google analytics and if you see a sudden drop or increase in traffic, then it might mean that an update is currently ongoing.
4. Visit developers.google.com frequently

HOW TO PREPARE FOR GOOGLE UPDATE

The best way to prepare for google update is by ensuring that your websites meet the Google webmasters guidelines which can be found on the developers.google.com website.

Please note that if your website is new then it takes around 6 months or more for it to starts appearing for all the keywords your posts are related to.

Ensure to follow bloggers like Brian dean and Neil Patel amongst others as you might find some clue that may help you prepare for google update Furthermore, ensure that you check your google search console frequently and fix any errors being shown on the search console.

HOW TO RECOVER ONCE HIT BY GOOGLE CORE UPDATE

Getting hit by google update is very painful but not recovering at all is disastrous as that website might become virtually irrelevant.

Once hit by google update, then go through the webmaster’s guidelines and do an honest assessment of your website and find out which rule you violated as google does not release any information concerning the update performed.

Conclusion

One has to pay attention to google update at all times and also ensure that he/she is strict in following the webmaster guidelines because once you are found wanting then you would be punished severely by Google.