In a single year, Google can release up to ten updates. The updates may sometimes lead to unnoticeable changes in website ranking or SEO performance. In other cases, it could be significant and may result in a decline or rise in a site's SERP. In other words, Google updates may be core updates or minor updates.
Website owners and marketers often pay more attention to Google core updates as they may necessitate making important changes to the site's SEO and available content on the site. If you are new to the SERP game and ads campaign, you could be doing a lot of injustice to your marketing effort.
However, you can change this by understanding Google updates, why it is necessary to monitor them, and how you can monitor them with ease. Find out everything you need to know below:
What are Google Updates?
These are changes made by Google to its algorithm, especially in retrieving data from the search index and delivering the best possible results to any search query by users. Google's algorithm uses multiple factors in ranking content and websites to be shown to a user after some specific keywords are provided in the search bar. These factors could be changed by any recent updates made to the algorithm by the enterprise.
Some recent updates released by Google include the Product Review Algorithm update (Sept 20, 2022), Core Algorithm Update (Sept 12, 2022), Helpful Content Update (August 25, 2022), and Product Reviews Update (July 27, 2022). Site owners and ecommerce marketers can learn more about them from the Google Search Central documentation. As suggested earlier, some of these updates are more significant than others. In other words, a Google update could be a minor update or a core update.
What's the difference between a minor update and a core update?
A core update may influence the way Google ranks web pages. This implies that a website that ranks high for a group of keywords before update implementation may start to rank lower after implementation with the same keywords and vice versa.
Some recent core updates from Google include Panda, Fred, Hummingbird, Pigeon, BERT, and Penguin. Contrarily, minor updates are usually focused on improving the quality and relevance of search results on the search engine. They usually affect only a few web pages.
Statistically, while core updates may affect up to 10% of every search, the minor update may influence only 1% of the searches. Also, minor updates often come up, while core updates are usually less frequent. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that your site's SERP will be affected. It depends on the niche, contents, and other targeted factors of the update.
Why should you monitor Google updates?
1. Search engine optimization
Usually, core updates affect SEO for Google as it often influences the factors that contribute to Google SEO. SEO plays a crucial role in a site's presence and relevance to every search query. It can determine whether the ranking algorithm of Google will favor it. If any core update changes how the algorithm view your site's SEO, it can cause a drastic change in your traffic rate, conversion and clicks. Thus, you may see a drastic rise or fall in your sales or page guest numbers.
2. Loss of ranking signal
Understandably, you could have just optimized your site. This takes time, resources, and energy. If you don't monitor when the next core update comes up, all the efforts could go to waste. This is because a core update can turn otherwise positive changes into negative ones by impacting your ranking signal. Although the changes are not usually specific to a site, loss of ranking signal may cause a drop to your site and other similar websites.
3. Penalties
Here is one of the greatest fears of marketers and site owners. Core updates may include penalties. Once they are implemented, they can impose penalties on some niches and may influence your site's search ranking negatively. For instance, when the Panda update was released, sites having thin content were penalized automatically.
4. Changes in the SERPs structure
Monitoring Google updates also helps you learn the new structure of SERP and inform you about what to do. This is because core updates may change the SERP of sites by removing, adding, or changing alternative listings in SERPs. For those who are not familiar with alternative listings, it includes non-paid properties such as featured snippets, Knowledge Graph, and People Also Ask sections.
What app can you use to monitor Google updates?
Given the importance of monitoring Google updates, Crystal Ball has created an automation tool for tracking and documenting the changes. As a user, you simply need to register on Crystal Ball, get a plan, and proceed to set the automation for Google updates. It takes only a switch to get it up and running. The automation tool provides a list of confirmed and unconfirmed updates from Google, including both minor and core updates. Users may also choose to monitor only the confirmed, confirmed, or both cases. Feel free to get started with the Crystal Ball extension today.