On August 1st 2018, Google officially announced their major ‘broad core algorithm update’. The latest update intends to have huge implications on how search engine ranking works.
Broad core update is not a focused update that addresses particular issue like Penguin or Panda. Rather, the main search algorithm itself has been tweaked to some extent.
The change could be regarding how the ranking factors weigh against each other, how they interact or how they form a connection. Or, it could also be how the main algorithm interprets search queries.
Google did not disclose much about what really changed, but here’s everything you need to know about the latest update:
Impact of Google Broad Core Update
Recently in a Google Webmaster Central Hangout session, John Mueller (Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst) revealed a few things about the update that was confirmed in August. He explained how the main notion behind the latest update is to focus on relevance of the content rather than on keywords.
Google is now wanting to serve users’ intent, so they get relevant content for their targeted search queries. Website owners and webmasters need to work on their content/website and make it more relevant for users’ search queries.
Website that lack high-quality, relevant content is going to be hit the hardest, that’s because search engines will be refining their fundamental to deliver better user experience.
How to cope up with the latest Broad core update?
It’s quite simple and fair means. Now, website owners need to understand what audiences are looking for and provide them with exactly that, instead of stuffing the page with irrelevant content.
Webpages will now be weighed against other webpages for targeted queries. The reason your ranking dropped could be totally different from the reason why some other webpage increased or decreased in its rank.
The answer is different for every website. It all comes down to the relevance for targeted query.
The tactic to appeal the search bots has changed, so webmasters need to recover from the damage with better, comprehensive content. Irrelevant content can greatly affect important metrics of your website including dwell time and bounce rate. Or even worse, it can degrade your search engine ranking permanently.
If your webpage was hit hard by the update, Google officially states that it might not be because your pages are not good. Rather, it’s because other web pages are outranking you in the search engine results as they weren’t reaping benefits from previous algorithm and were under-rewarded. That’s just how the new system works.
Quality Raters Guidelines
On July 20th 2018, Google updated their Quality Rater’s Guidelines where we get to know some beneficial clues.
Quality Raters guidelines are meant to enlighten human raters, so they can score the quality of web pages and their judge relevance for targeted search queries.
These scores don’t have direct connection with Google’s algorithm functioning, but they are still utilized to improve main algorithms.
In short, if you build web pages that comply with these guidelines and receive a high score from human raters, there are higher chances of your page ranking higher for those queries.
Conclusion:
Google might have made several minor changes to the main algorithm that, when combined, makes one site slightly better than the other.
Best advice to keep up with the core update?
Focus on quality content, users’ intent, Google’s Quality Rater guidelines and clean configuration. Adapt to the change in a strategic way!