Last week Google announced, “we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the May 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before.” Google’s main mission is to provide relevant, authoritative content to allow searchers to have the best user experience possible. In order to accomplish this mission, they are continually refining and updating their algorithms. Although many of these revisions happen daily, the majority of them have little to no impact on rankings. Several times a year, however, Google will role out a core update that can have much more noticeable positive or negative influences on website rankings. This will be the second core update for 2020, the first being the January 2020 core update.

Who Will be Affected?

Historically, certain areas of the web tend to see stronger positive and negative effects. After the January 2020 update, SEMRush noted that the most volatile areas were Games, Arts & Entertainment, Online Communities and Finance. An analysis by Sistrix US Visibility Index showed that domains relating to Health and Finance were more likely to be re-evaluated by the algorithm causing more gains and losses in visibility, as a whole. Although it is still early into the new update, a detailed analysis of the Sistrix US Visibility Index shows that Nutrition and recipes, Fitness, News, Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation, Science and medical news, Music and entertainment, Banking and finance, Natural Medicine, and History are the top areas of SERP changes. Fitness, News, Health, and Recipes are currently the industries that are the most negatively impacted. It appears that Local SEPRs are experiencing a major fluctuation at this time, that can have greater positive and negative effects. Thin content, backlinks, and directories appear to be major contributing factors behind these fluctuations.

What to Do if My Website is Negatively Impacted?

According to Google, a negative impact on your site does not mean that there is anything wrong with your pages. It also does not indicate that there are any manual or algorithmic actions being taken against your pages. Google is simply re-evaluating pages to account for new pages, or pages that may have been previously under-rewarded to determine the most relevant pages that will give searchers the most rewarding experience. Based on the analysis, thin content landing pages (landing pages with limited content or content Google does not consider to be authoritative) appear to be having a hard time maintaining their positions. Landing pages with quality content and with a high degree of link acquisitions appear to be winning the most, especially in local SERPs. Understanding why a landing page is being negatively affected, then creating the types of quality content and link acquisitions it takes to recover can be a frustrating and time-consuming process. Thankfully, at SocialSEO, our experts have expertly managed our clients through countless Google core updates. Contact us for a free quote today to see how SocialSEO can help you too.