Google Core Algorithm Update May 2020 – SEO Experts’ Afterthought

Over the last two years, Google has dramatically increased the frequency of their updates. While they will generally confirm whether an update has taken place, the specifics of what each update is focused upon and what sites may be affected is left to interpretation. My personal belief is that Google has become more sophisticated in terms of its ability to interpret quality signals and the core updates are merely a reflection of that. While we may not know the specifics of what Google is looking to achieve with each passing update, the underlying principles which guide Google's hand continue to remain the same. These fundamentals are perhaps best described by the acronym 'E-A-T' which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. E-A-T is mentioned repeatedly in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines - a document published in 2013 to help webmasters understand what Google looks for in a page. E-A-T broadly describes the type of content Google wishes to surface to users and while it's not a direct ranking factor, Google is constantly refining their algorithms to deliver more credible, accurate, and meaningful results. Demonstrating these desirable qualities, along with earning positive engagement signals naturally through user behavior, backlinks, and social clout will endear yourself to Google in the short-term, as well as future-proofing your website against algorithmic changes in the long-term.

My research was around the school and education-related keywords and sites in Germany. My takeaway: - The winners have a more clear structure - Fresh content played a strong role - Most of the top websites have kind of similar backlinks profile - I assume content relevancy had an impact on visibility changes - Some of the websites are still losing visibility even after a month

The most recent update from Google brought the new focus on the website’s quality. It now became a priority in ranking factors. Google published a Core Web Vitals report and it became clear that websites that most suffered from May implementation were those with so-called, thin content. Therefore, Google targets elements like slow loading, poor UX design, amount of pages generated on-site, low domain authority, and sponsored articles. Nothing really surprising but they continue to provide the most valuable content at the top of SERPs.

May 2020 update was one of the less noticeable updates we had seen at the agency. Actually, we had some very good increases in terms of traffic on some sites, and some more than justified decreases on others but nothing that could be related to an update. Confronting me with other colleagues the common idea seems to be that Google has tried to promote the most relevant quality content regardless of the brand. Investigating this lead, I noticed how two of our sites have made an interesting exchange of positions. Site A is the institutional site where you can make lead generation, while site B is an external asset where we are freer to write content with references also to competitors. For a few months the site A had been firmly in the first position for an important informative/transactional key but, with the update in May, there was a total reversal, site B gained and now it stably occupies the first position, while site A has fallen to the second. The strength of B is only in its content (less commercial) and in structured data. Following this lead, I've noticed other similar situations and that's why I'd tend to support the hypothesis that Google is trying to give more value to sites with quality content, even if their authority is not so developed (on both sites there are Link Building activities of high quality but with very different budgets).

Google’s May algorithm update hasn’t seemed to impact most of my clients much, we noticed a decrease on the number of impressions which led to fewer clicks but only for a short period of time (From the 17/05-19/05 & 20/05-24/05) However, I am seeing interesting results for one of the websites I am managing. It is a product site that has a cooking and recipe blog that is the main source of organic traffic for this client. I am noticing <b?changes in the popular keywords of the month. These terms have always been related to the recipes we have in the blog and where we have schema implemented. This site appears most of the time in rich snippets top three, however this month the keywords that drove the majority of organic traffic to the sire belong to other articles of the blog related to well being. I am noticing as well an increase in visibility and average position but a decrease in CTR, which usually leads to a lower average position, loss of keywords on the rankings or visibility. Also, there are new points recommended to be included in the recipe schema mark up that weren´t flagged up before by Search Console, in fact, this platform is detecting one type of schema as two different ones: “Recipe” and “Guided recipe schema”(a new type of mark up included in May), however, no changes were made to any of the codes. The number of keywords that appear on the SEPRS has increased by 4.20% in comparison to last month, however, the number of keywords on the top 3 have decreased by 2.70%. On the other hand, for the rest of my clients who belong to the travel, lifestyle, and insurance industry, Google´s recent core update had a positive impact. There are no new warnings in Search Console despite all of them having schema markup implemented as well (FAQ, article, video among others) or decrease in organic traffic, visibility, or rankings.

When the industry was waiting for the May 2020 update there was a voice that it would aim at the medical industry. It wouldn’t be the first time that updates would affect only particular industries, it happened before of course. However, after the implementation of the May 2020 Core Update, it became clear that it has a wider spectrum of focus. Why? We work with a variety of industries on a daily basis and there wasn’t a clear trend that would indicate the update being focused on any specific industry - it was a more holistic approach. What could be clearly seen, however, is that Google is on the way to provide more quality content and so websites with, for example, many guest posts with included sponsored links did suffer.

I feel like the pandemic situation around the world had, in fact, an impact on May’s 2020 update. After all, as a result of increased medical searches and the need to provide only valuable sources and content Google needed to solve the problem of low-quality websites getting to, maybe not the top, but high positions in SERPs. I think the focus on fighting the ‘thin content’ is clearly visible in the stats now. Sponsored articles lose efficiency. Another effect that I feel May 2020 Core Update brought to Google’s search engine is that it’s now more adjusted to users’ intent. The current situation around the world drove changes in our behavior and so automatically the Google users’ patterns and they had to address it.