As confirmed by Danny Sullivan Google rolled out another core update between June 3rd and June 8th, officially coined “June 2019 Core Update”.
This was following the last core update taking place in March, which had resulted in a hefty blow against websites prominently in the medical sector. Google had modified the quality standards for well-ranking websites according to the concept of E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness) in March.
First Time Google Announces Core Update Before Start
It was the first time that Google announced in advance a major update, relating to the core algorithm. Only the Mobile Speed Update in July 2018 had been made public before it even started.
Tomorrow, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2019 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this tweet for more about that:https://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) 2. Juni 2019
Barry Schwartz pointed out that the fact two updates had been rolled out at the same time made it difficult for the SEO community to allocate the exact causes for changes in the SERPS. Google took three days in June for the parallel Site Diversity Update, running from June 4th to June6th.
Numbers From Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics, well known for analyzing big amounts of data for the SEO community and clients, investigated the numbers.
They found that as in 2018 the number of search engine result pages with video carousels has risen again. Now about 53,6% of all examined keywords display this result module in the SERPS.
Google Core Update Hits Low-Quality News Sites
Impacts were massive for many sites which probably had spoiled their sites with too much low-quality content, at least in the eyes of the world´s biggest search engine.
The Update especially hit news sites with, in the eyes of Google, obviously low-quality content, with dailymail.co.uk and cbs.com being the most prominent victims of the algorithm´ alterations.
Where there are losers, you will find winners. Searchmetrics counts yelp.com and yellowpages.com among them.
Spam Master Mueller remains unspecific
In a webmaster hangout, webmasters bombarded Google´s famous “spam master” John Mueller with questions from obviously concerned companies. Their sites were hit by the algorithm update and they were clueless about the necessary changes they should make on their sites.
According to Roger Montti from Florida Search Engine Journal Mueller couldn´t offer them real relief. On the one hand, he made interesting points about the changing user behaviour over the years and the related changes in Google´s evaluation of good websites. He even gave a hint to an eight years old post. The article suggested questions webmasters should ask themselves about their websites.
But as always many SEOs may say he remained quite vague about the improvements they could practically address. He “related that there aren’t specific things to fix. But he suggested that it may be useful to understand how users see your site, how useful your site is to users.”
