On 15 March, Google officially announced a new Google Core Update. These updates are also called “fundamental updates”.
Past Core Updates often affected specific industries, such as health, finance or erotica, or specific areas such as backlinks or product reviews. Also, often only individual pages were affected. This does not seem to be the case with this update. So far, it can be seen that the effects refer to the entire domain and do not focus on sectors or areas. There are more losers than winners and losses in visibility of up to 50% are – according to SISTRIX – not uncommon this time.
What characterises a Google Core Update?
Google constantly makes changes and updates to the algorithm without officially announcing them. The aim is to continuously improve the algorithm of the search engines, i.e. to deliver better and better search results. The evaluation and ranking of a website is subject to many factors. In the case of a core update, these changes are much more extensive than in the case of the smaller updates and accordingly also entail greater fluctuations in the rankings and the organic visibility of domains.
Google pursues the mission of making any kind of information universally available. So anyone who takes care to provide helpful content that satisfies the needs of searchers need not fear an algorithm update. In times of ChatGPT, we should be even more careful not to let our content simply be created by an AI.
Google describes in its spam guidelines which content does not comply with the official guidelines:
Text generated by automated processes without consideration of quality or user-friendliness.
Perhaps the next big algorithm update will address this very issue? It remains exciting.
