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How’s the May Core Update treating ya? Have you lost all hope? Or are you telling your dentist, postman, and your Nan about all the greatness that befalls you?
Well, I can tell you that it has been hitting me pretty negatively.
When comparing the week of 25 May (when the core update was announced) to 1 June and its previous week, traffic has dropped by 16.71%!
Am I panicking? Not really. Am I concerned? Sure.
I don’t know if anyone else was like me, but my leading site had already been slowly declining in May after a significant spike at the start of the month. When May 25th hit, things just got even worse:
Above is a clicks graph from Google Search Console for my leading site. The line draws on the 25th of May.
As you can see, after one of the most significant spikes ever for my site, things started to trickle downward. Which has been strange in itself. Until this, my site was on a clear growth trajectory to 50K sessions!
But alas, Google had different things in mind.
Here’s what I’m noticing from the update so far:
- I have lost many featured snippets for my site. Not all. But plenty of ones that would previously bring in plenty of traffic from being position zero are no longer.
- Most of my top 20 pages are still in the same traffic order, but they have just reduced traffic consistently. Five of those twenty random posts have started to improve in their hits, which were previously difficult to rank for.
- I’ve heard of plenty of reports on Twitter that others have completely lost their featured snippets, seemingly across the entire site.
- Some keywords I previously ranked for or new posts I have published are getting indexed very strangely. Instead of a post being in the SERP, the category archive with the post title listedis being ranked instead. This has never happened to my site before; indexing has always been highly swift and accurate.
- A friend even just reported a whopping 60% traffic decrease week-on-week. ????
So what can conclusions can we get from all this?
The first thing to do is this: nothing.
Based on what I see and the usual nature of Google core updates, the best thing we can do is sit and wait for a while longer. These updates can take 2-4 weeks until the full effect (or reversal) has been implemented.
This means that every loss I, or you, might be suffering right now could completely revert in a few weeks. It’s just going to take a bit of patience.
The next best thing to do is: to keep publishing content.
Maybe we’ll learn more about this update in the coming weeks. I hope some big wig like Matt Diggity puts out a complete analysis with accurate data points. We need an industry-wide survey when these things happen to clarify what commonalities seem to provide a change in people’s sites. That’d be good, hey?
Anyway, what’s happening with YOUR niche sites and the core update? Drop me a reply and let me know.
In the meantime, please make sure you are subscribed to my YouTube channel. I’ll be dropping my income report for May soon, and while you’ve already had a teaser here of what’s going on, there’s plenty more to discuss. I’ll also be live streaming again as soon as my MacBook returns to me!